Showing posts from category population.
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A Forecast of Push and Pull: Climate Change and Global Migration
›March 10, 2010 // By Julien Katchinoff
“As we …talk about the interconnections between climate change and migration we need to look at the interconnections in a way that understands what’s positive about the processes of migration and what’s problematic,” said Susan Martin, Herzberg Professor of International Migration at Georgetown University, during a recent event on climate and migration at the Center for American Progress.
Susan Martin joined Cynthia Brady, senior conflict advisor for the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID and David Waskow, director of the Climate Change Program at Oxfam America, to identify the catalysts for future population flows, offer pragmatic policy solutions, and discuss work to be done on the ground.
While reminding the audience that climate-induced migration will tend to follow already existing patterns, Susan Martin broadly outlined four major intersections between migration and climate change impacts:
“Slow” Migration Pressures:- Drought or desertification resulting in a loss or depreciation of livelihoods.
Result: Push working family members to migrate to domestic or international urban centers. - Rising sea levels damaging fishing and agriculture opportunities.
Result: Migration to inland regions to reduce future risk.
“Rapid” Migration Pressures:- Intensification of natural disasters and damage to infrastructure.
Result: The coping costs increase to the point where they push large numbers of people to leave their homes. Most individuals migrate internally. Of the four intersections, this is currently the most common. - Threats to the availability of food, water, and other natural resources.
Result: Low or high intensity conflict, leading to migrations. The short timeframes and potentially large numbers of migrants involved make this driver the most problematic. Differing degrees of internal political stability are factors that can interfere for better or worse.
Yet these relationships are not without controversy. “Environmentalists have tended to see the issue of migration as a way of getting attention to mitigation and have often talked about migration in very alarmist terms,” Martin said. “Migration experts, on the other hand, have been very skeptical about the interconnection.” Instead, they have argued that other push and pull factors outside of climate are much more significant to the migration calculation.
Operating from the perspective that migration itself is an adaptation failure, David Waskow outlined several strategies that Oxfam deploys to help communities copewith uncertain futures:
- Building climate resilience and developing adaptation strategies: Proactive approaches are essential, as agencies and communities can address future threats with disaster planning and creating early-warning systems.
- Managing risk: The establishment of micro-insurance projects can cushion vulnerable populations against unexpected economic shocks.
- Resettling communities: The movement of rural populations to urban areas could result in tensions over land use and strains on urban governance and carrying capacities. As a result, this approach is left as a last recourse.
Brady, though in agreement with Waskow concerning climate change’s threat to livelihoods and its role as a catalyst for conflict, suggested that there may be positive opportunities for managing climate risks. “The environment can and does provide an essential and effective platform for dialogue, communication, and confidence-building around shared interests,” Brady said. “It may be that certain conflicts actually lend themselves to the use of climate-related collaboration as a mechanism to resolve conflict or reduce tension between parties,” she said.
Climate-related projects at the community-level, from adaptive early-warning systems to mitigating carbon storage schemes, hold the possibility to bring groups together in cooperative projects, build confidence, and defuse existing tensions. Transparent and participatory management of new investments may also increase trust in local and national governments with whom trust was previously lacking. While forestalling crises in the future, adaptation projects also hold the potential to unlock opportunities for peacebuilding and conflict resolution today.
Photo Credits: Photo 1 courtesy Oxfam America. Photo 2 courtesy Center for American Progress. - Drought or desertification resulting in a loss or depreciation of livelihoods.
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World Bank Data Visualization
›Yesterday Google and the World Bank expanded their data-sharing partnership, first initiated last fall, to include a subset of 54 World Development Indicators and enhanced visualization tools. Users can now interact with data—spanning a range of both environmental and population statistics, from forest coverage area to contraceptive prevalence—using line graphs, bar graphs, maps, and xy-plots. Each option also offers users the ability to follow the data changes over time.
An alternative to Google’s Public Data Explorer is the World Bank’s Data Visualizer. Although limiting data output to an xy-plot, the customization options go beyond those offered by the Public Data Explorer and achieve a good balance between flexibility and ease of use. Table colors and groupings are fully customizable, scales are adjustable, and the chart can be quickly printed or exported as a jpeg. -
Urbanization and Deforestation
›The journal Nature Geoscience recently published a study comparing the impacts of rural and urban population growth on deforestation. “Deforestation Driven by Urban Population Growth and Agricultural Trade in the Twenty-First Century” finds deforestation is positively correlated with urban population growth and agricultural exports to international markets. In rural areas, however, the link between deforestation and population growth was absent, indicating that urbanization and agricultural export-oriented economies were the primary drivers for forest loss. The study concludes that, rather than focusing on the activities of rural populations, deforestation reduction efforts should target “industrial-scale, export-oriented agricultural production, concomitant with efforts to increase yields in non-forested lands.” (SUBSCRIPTION ONLY)
“The Population, Agriculture, and Environment Nexus in Latin America: Country-Level Evidence from the Latter Half of the Twentieth Century,” a study published in the journal Population & Environment, examines the relationship between land use and population shifts in Latin America between 1961 and 2001. The paper focuses on deforestation, which was found to be spurred by both Malthusian and Boserupian demographic drivers. It concludes that population growth, urban consumption patterns, and land-use constraints will continue to pose challenges for Latin American policymakers trying to achieve a sustainable equilibrium. (SUBSCRIPTION ONLY) -
Visualizing Natural Resources, Population, and Conflict
›Environmental problems that amplify regional security issues are often multifaceted, especially across national boundaries. Obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the natural resource, energy, and security issues facing a region is not fast or easy.
Fortunately, the Environment and Security Initiative (ENVSEC) has created highly informative, easy-to-understand maps depicting environmental, health, population, and security issues in critical regions.
Published with assistance from the United Nations GRID-Arendal, these maps offer policymakers and the public a snapshot of the complex topography of environmental security hotspots in Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and the Southern Caucasus.
Some that caught our eye:• Environmental Issues in the Northern Caspian Sea: Overlaying environmental areas and energy production zones, this map finds hydrocarbon pollution in sturgeon spawning grounds, seal habitats in oil and gas fields, and energy production centers and waste disposal sites in flood zones.• Water Withdrawal and Availability in the Aral Sea Basin: Simple and direct, this combination map and graph contrasts water usage with availability in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan—which stand in stark comparison to the excess water resources of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.• Environment and Security Issues in Belarus: In addition to noting the parts of the country with poor water quality and potassium mining, the map also delineates wildfires that occurred in areas contaminated by the Chernobyl explosion, thus threatening downwind populations.
Maps: Illustrations courtesy of the Environment & Security Initiative. -
Video—Ken Conca: ‘Green Planet Blues: Four Decades of Global Environmental Politics’
›February 19, 2010 // By Julia Griffin“Much of the conversation about the global environment, frankly, is an elite conversation,” says Ken Conca, professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. “But at the same time there are community-level voices, there are voices of indigenous people, there are voices of the powerless, as well as the powerful…. I think it’s important to capture them and not just limit [the conversation] to the most easily accessible voices.”
Conca and co-editor Geoff Dabelko include these oft-muted voices in the newly released 4th edition of Green Planet Blues: Four Decades of Global Environmental Politics. “One of the things we were really trying to achieve was to give people a sense of the history,” said Conca. To fully understand the origins of today’s debates, students must go back to the beginning of the last four decades of international environmental politics.
Three key paradigms—sustainability, environmental security, and ecological justice—frame the debates in Green Planet Blues. “Ideas do matter,” says Conca. “They really do change the world, and one of the premises of our work and of the book is to try to understand what sorts of ideas people bring to the table when they think of global environmental problems.” -
Video—Integrating Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) to Conserve Ethiopian Wetlands
›February 1, 2010 // By Julia GriffinIn our latest video interview about PHE programs in Ethiopia, Zuna–a village elder from the Mettu Woreda region of Ethiopia—describes how an integrated intervention by the Ethio-Wetlands and Natural Resources Association (EWNRA) has benefited her community.
EWNRA aims to raise awareness within Ethiopian communities and governmental organizations of the importance of sustainable wetlands management. The organization also imparts local-level training on resource conservation and wise-use labor techniques.
Zuna recounts how EWNRA provided welcome training in sanitation and housekeeping practices that increased both safety and sustainability within her community. The more efficient, cleaner-burning wood stoves introduced in Mettu Woreda, for example, have improved local air quality while decreasing the frequency of skin burns and amount of harvested fuel required for cooking and other activities.
“We are benefiting from all this and I think the benefits from this intervention are good,” she says through an interpreter. “I want them to keep doing this and hopefully we will improve our activities working with them.” -
Challenges to Covering Population
›“We journalists tend to deal with the immediate crisis,” Tim Wheeler, an environmental reporter with the Baltimore Sun, told an October gathering of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Madison, Wisconsin. Because the effects of population growth largely won’t be felt until the future, the subject is challenging for journalists who, as a whole, “tend not to look down the road too far.”
There are, however, other challenges, ranging from funding to ideology. Falling profits have pushed newspapers into expanding “hyperlocal” coverage at the expense of other stories and editorial boards are reluctant to risk increasingly important readership over a topic that, when brought to its logical conclusion, can enflame sensitivities over immigration and abortion.
On the positive side, Wheeler noted an increase in the number of articles covering intersects of population and the environment. As an example, he pointed to a Baltimore Sun series on the Chesapeake Bay citing growing population as a reason that 25-year efforts to restore the Bay have had a limited impact. Nevertheless, he lamented that the majority of articles covering population were op-ed opinion pieces rather than hard news coverage.
Without knowledge of the population-environment connection, Wheeler says, efforts to reduce our environmental impacts will run into the same problem as those to restore the Chesapeake Bay. “We’re going to wake up . . . after 25 years and say, ‘After all that we’ve done and spent, why haven’t we made greater progress?’” He underscored that, to ensure reductions aren’t outpaced by overall growth in population, issue awareness is essential.2010: Worldwide Year of the Census
›To kick-off the New Year, we’re highlighting CensusInfo 2010—an initiative to help countries distribute their census data in a format that is free, flexible, and customizable to meet diverse public needs. For us, it’s a new tool to access and visualize census data from around the globe.
The CensusInfo software(the program must be downloaded and installed) allows users to create tables, graphs, and color-coded maps depicting indicators such as population density, fertility rate, and sex ratio. The data’s resolution—national, regional, district, or smaller—is up to the user, but limited by the information reported by each country’s census bureau. When older data is available, users can also view trends over time.
The heart of CensusInfo is data presentation. Robust options include: capacity to import new datasets, compatibility with Google Earth and NASA’s World Wind technologies, and the ability to download visualizations as images, “animated flipbooks,” and videos.
Aside from the relatively steep learning curve to master each of its functions, the software is principally limited by the small number of countries in its database: only 10 countries are included in the software’s pre-installed dataset. That number, however, could increase in the near future.
In what CensusInfo 2010 hopes will be a trend, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, as of August 2009, became the first National Office of Statistics to independently incorporate its data into CensusInfo. While a powerful piece of software, CensusInfo’s potential rests on whether others follow suit.
Photo Credit: CensusInfo’s output of population density in India.
