Showing posts from category population.
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Ethiopia: A Holistic Approach to Community Development Blossoms Two Years After Taking Root
›November 12, 2009 // By Sean Peoples
As evening fell upon Yirgalem, Ethiopia, more than 70 participants from a large cross-section of Ethiopia’s NGO community—as well as a few international participants like myself—gathered in a packed conference room in the Furra Institute for the second annual General Assembly of the Consortium for the Integration of Population, Health, and Environment (CIPHE). -
Covering Climate: What’s Population Got to Do With It?
›November 9, 2009 // By Dan Asin“There’s a correlation between CO2 and population. And it’s that we live in a world of more people, more money and more things, and that all distills down to the need for more energy,” said Dennis Dimick, executive editor of National Geographic, at a Wilson Center event on the media’s coverage of climate change and population, co-sponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists and the International Reporting Project.
“Thinking about population and trends in population is a vital reality check for assessing policies you hear about on global warming,” said New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, who joined Dimick and Nation Web Editor Emily Douglas via video conference. “When you start to think about that number—nine billion—a lot of cheery suppositions or assertions you’ve heard about how we’re going to de-carbonize the world without too much effort…[get] challenged in a hurry,” he said.
The Inconvenient Truth of Population
Despite these strong connections, the mainstream media has been reluctant to write about population growth, which Revkin called the “ultimate incremental story.”
“We, I think, are guilty to some extent, in the media, of not paying adequate attention to this part of the whole issue,” he said, partly because there is the perception that “we kind of solved that problem. But, again, just run those numbers: Nine billion people does not solve the climate problem and it has to be considered in every stage of assessing solutions to the climate problem.”
“We need to talk about it so we understand this issue at a level beyond more people means more emissions,” said Douglas. Other factors like levels of consumption, urbanization, and household structure make the population-emissions relationship complex and difficult to explain.
Revkin added that “consumption is even a tougher story to get at in print, because we’re a medium that advertises consumption, among other things.”
The Population-Energy Challenge
One-quarter of the world’s population lacks access to electricity. “We are in this sortof double-vise, trying to constrain our own [energy] demand while also trying to provide the opportunities for people who have little to none,” said Dimick.
With fossil fuels currently providing 80 percent of global energy, and with energy demand estimated to increase dramatically to meet the needs of 2.3 billion more people by 2050, the “scale of the challenge before us . . . is immense,” he said. “To think that we’re somehow simply going to go to solar and wind—I think we’re deluding ourselves.”
Nevertheless, Dimick insisted on the need “to de-carbonize at a tremendous scale.” He proposed sustainably addressing energy needs by improving energy efficiency, expanding mass transit systems, changing land use, and considering nuclear power.
Reproductive Health Is Key
Douglas, who previously edited the RH Reality Check blog, emphasized that population issues go far beyond climate change. “I’m encouraging us to look at population not only from the perspective of the environment, but also from the perspective of individual women and their human rights, their right to determine the number and spacing of their children, and not purely to depress fertility rates in service of mitigating climate change,” she said.According to Douglas, each year 60 million pregnancies—one-third of the global total—are unintended, and 200 million women worldwide have an unmet need for contraception. Family planning programs are “cheap to employ and deploy, and women and societies want them anyway,” said Douglas. A few recent studies have argued that universal access to family planning could be one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
And not just mitigation, but adaptation as well: “Women with access to reproductive health services are healthier and they’re better able to deal with the impacts of climate change,” she said. “Poorer countries are going to need adaptation strategies, and one of those strategies is to allow women to better determine the size of their families.”
However, “many political leaders–not only on the right—don’t like reproductive health programs,” said Douglas. Disagreements over abortion and birth control are part of the problem, as well as past instances of coercive contraceptive methods in some developing countries.
Douglas cited a Population Action International survey that “found that 41 countries identified population growth as a factor that makes them more vulnerable to climate change, but only two of those countries proposed programs that address reproductive health.”
Douglas decried the “significant gap between political leaders’ understanding that population growth makes it more difficult for them to respond to climate change, and political leaders being able to muster the political will that will empower women to better control their own fertility.”
Close-Up on the Most Vulnerable
“We also can’t talk about this as though all people added to the world population produce greenhouse gases in equal measure,” said Douglas. “The world’s richest half billion people, that’s 7 percent of the global population, are responsible for 50 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions.”
Revkin urged reporters to use a “close-up lens” when examining population trends impact on climate—especially in “areas of the world where there are significant risks that could be amplified by human-driven climate change, like urban severe flooding and severe rains, like we saw in Manila recently.”
With rapid urbanization in the developing world, “you have to look at places where you have hugely increased numbers of people moving essentially into harm’s way—or being born in harm’s way, if you’re talking about sub-Saharan Africa,” said Revkin.
A Thought Experiment
“What if the whole world were equal in emissions?” Revkin asked. Suppose advanced industrial countries, such as the United States, reduce their annual emissions intensity from 20 tons of CO2 per person to 10 tons. At the same time, suppose rapidly developing countries, such as India, reach the same emissions intensity. In a world with nine billion people that equates to 90 billion tons—“three times today’s current annual emissions of CO2,” he said.
“Probably the single most concrete and substantive thing a young American could to do to lower a carbon footprint is not turning of the lights or driving a Prius, but having fewer children,” said Revkin. “Eventually, should you get credit—if we’re going to become carbon-centric—for having a one child family when you could’ve had two or three? Obviously it’s just a thought experiment, but it raises some interesting questions.”
Drafted by Daniel Asin and Meaghan Parker
Edited by Meaghan Parker -
VIDEO: José G. Rimon on Key Trends in Funding Family Planning
›October 29, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“The downward trend, in terms of donor funding for international family planning, since the middle of the 1990s to around 2006 has been reversed,” José Rimon II, senior program officer for global health policy and advocacy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, told ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko following a discussion on the future of family planning at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
“There is a lot of scientific evidence that if we don’t revitalize the family planning/ reproductive health agenda, it will be very difficult to achieve the health Millennium Development Goals, especially in the area of reducing maternal mortality,” said Rimon. “Just by addressing the unmet need [for contraceptives] and the unintended pregnancies which result from it, you can reduce maternal mortality by 31 percent.”
Rimon said the Gates Foundation is working closely with donors and partner organizations to exchange information on strategy and funding priorities, which, he says, is “not happening in other issues, but it’s happening in the family planning and reproductive field.” -
Video: Laurie Mazur on Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge
›October 21, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“It’s fairly well known that we’re at a pivotal moment environmentally . . . but I think it’s less well known that we’re also at a pivotal moment demographically,” Laurie Mazur, director of the Population Justice Project, tells ECSP’s Gib Clarke.
“Half the population, some three billion people, are under the age of 25,” Mazur says. “Their choices about childbearing will determine whether world population grows from 6.8 billion to as many as 8 or even almost 11 billion by the middle of the century.”
Mazur’s new book, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge, launches at the Woodrow Wilson Center on October 27. Mazur will be joined by contributors John Bongaarts of the Population Council, Jacqueline Nolley Echegaray of the Moriah Fund, and Roger-Mark De Souza of the Sierra Club.
“These issues, population growth and the environment, are connected in ways that are very complex,” says Mazur.
“Population growth is not the sole cause of the environmental problems we face today, but it does magnify the impact of unsustainable resource consumption, harmful technologies, and inequitable social arrangements. It’s a piece of the pie. Slowing population growth is part of what we need to do to ensure a sustainable future.” -
If It Bleeds It Leads: Pop-Climate Hits the Blogosphere
›Population and climate change get short shrift in the media—that is, until Rush Limbaugh urges you to commit suicide. It’s a disturbing sign that this extremely complex topic only gets play when the knives come out. And as this summer’s health care circus demonstrates, the blogosphere is often more interested in covering the shouting than the issues at hand.
So what happened? At the Wilson Center last week, the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin (via Skype) mentioned a thought experiment he had put forward in a recent post on his blog: “Should you get credit — if we’re going to become carbon-centric — for having a one-child family when you could have had two or three. And obviously it’s just a thought experiment, but it raises some interesting questions about all this.”
Limbaugh, picking up on a post on CNS.com, a conservative online news outlet, said Revkin and “militant environmentalists, these wackos, have so much in common with the jihad guys.” The furor was reported by a number of news blogs, including NYT’s Paul Krugman, the Guardian, and Politico.
An earlier and more substantial account by Miller-McCune’s Emily Badger deftly hits the highlights, including some historical context from The Nation’s Emily Douglas. While earlier projections assumed population growth would decline following the dissemination of birth control in the West, “that assumption turned out to be false,” said Douglas, because women in developing countries have not received similar access to contraceptives.
Indeed, as Worldwatch Institute’s blog post on the event points out, “an estimated 200 million women who want to avoid pregnancy are risking it anyway because they have inadequate access to contraception and related reproductive health services.”
I’m disheartened that this kerfluffle follows a recent uptick in thoughtful coverage of the population-climate connection. At a standing-room-only panel (audio) on covering population and environment at the most recent SEJ conference, Baltimore Sun reporter Tim Wheeler (video) said that population “has those challenges of so, what do you do about it, how do you deal with it.” But he said it was reporters’ “constant challenge to continue to wrestle with these issues.”
Moving the wrestling match into the center ring is bringing a new focus to the debate, which could be useful, as Suzanne Petroni writes in the ECSP Report: “A careful discussion of the ways in which voluntary family planning can further individual rights, community development, and, to some extent, climate change mitigation, could increase awareness not only of the outsized contribution of developed nations to global emissions, but also of their appropriate role in the global community.”
As Revkin says at the end of his response to Limbaugh: “And of course there’s the reality that explosive population growth in certain places, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, could be blunted without a single draconian measure, many experts say, simply by providing access to family planning for millions of women who already want it, but can’t get it – whether or not someone gets a carbon credit in the process.”
Family planning advocates—who have long been wary of linking contraception to climate mitigation—would mostly agree with that statement, although they would phrase it a little differently. Better reproductive health care is “an end in itself,” with climate mitigation being the “side effect,” rather than the primary goal, Barbara Crossette writes in The Nation.
Population experts cautiously agree there is a link, but warn that quantifying it is not so simple. At a major conference of demographers in Marrakesh, researchers previewed forthcoming research described the potential for emissions “savings” brought by decreases in fertility.
In the near term, it doesn’t look likely that all this attention will lead to policy action at Copenhagen. Population Action International reports that while almost all of the least developed countries’ adaptation plans mention population as a factor which increases their vulnerability to climate change, only a few state that investing in family planning should part of their strategy.
I encourage you to watch the webcast of the event and add your own (thoughtful) comments to the dialogue below. No suicide threats, please. -
Population’s Links to Climate Change
›“Covering Climate: What’s Population Got to Do With It?”—webcast live from the Wilson Center—will analyze the challenges facing science and environmental reporters as they prepare to cover what New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin calls “the story of our time.” Cosponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists and the International Reporting Project, the panel—including Dennis Dimick of National Geographic and the Nation’s Emily Douglas—will discuss the significant barriers to nuanced reporting, including stovepiped beats, the shrinking news hole, and old-fashioned squeamishness.
However, in the past month, there’s been a veritable baby boom of news coverage on climate change and population. Spurred by three high-profile reports—the study commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust, research in the Bulletin of the WHO, and an editorial in the Lancet—the mainstream media and some key bloggers finally got some condoms in their climate change.
It’s gratifying to finally see this issue pop up in the media, almost a year to the day after the 2008 SEJ conference panel on population and climate change moderated by Constance Holden of Science that attracted a respectable (but not remarkable) audience of 40. The panelists decried the media’s relative silence on the impact of population growth and other demographic dynamics on environmental issues.
NPR’s Steve Curwood pointed out that while it’s “something we don’t talk about at all in America,” U.S. population growth increases emissions faster than developing-country population growth, due to our larger per capita consumption. A lone AP article, “Population growth contributes to emissions growth,” reported on the discussion.
In contrast, a population-climate panel at last week’s SEJ conference drew an overflow crowd of more than 100 people. Former SEJ President Tim Wheeler read off recent headlines demonstrating that the media does mention population. However, he noted that “most of the instances I cited are op-ed opinion pieces, not news coverage or feature stories.” In recent climate coverage, he said, “population gets mentioned as an undercurrent and afterthought; our attention intends to be on the immediate. And it has those challenges of so, what do you do about it, how do you deal with it.” But it is “our constant challenge to continue to wrestle with these issues.”
Here’s a short list of recent coverage:
Associated Press: “Birth control could help combat climate change”
Reuters: “Contraception vital in climate change fight -expert”
Bloomberg: “African Condom Shortage Said to Worsen Climate Impact”
Matt Yglesias: “Population and Climate Change”
The Nation: “Factoring People Into Climate Change”
Inter Press Service: “POPULATION: Where’s Family Planning on Climate Change Radar? Zofeen Ebrahim interviews noted social demographer KAREN HARDEE”
The New Republic’s The Vine: “Abortion: The Third Rail of Climate Policy?”
Treehugger.com: Contraception Five Times Less Expensive Than Low-Carbon Technology in Combating Climate Change
Washington Post: “When It Comes to Pollution, Less (Kids) May Be More”
Inter Press Service: “CLIMATE CHANGE: Rising Seas Demand Better Family Planning”
LA Times Booster Shots blog: “Can condoms combat climate change?”
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Teaching Demographic Security: Jennifer Sciubba on Explaining Population’s Conflict Links to Undergrads
›October 7, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffFor students, looking at national security through the lens of demography can be challenging and frustrating, says Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, a Mellon Environmental Fellow and professor at Rhodes College. “You really have to start at the beginning and explain the fundamentals of, ‘What is population in the first place?’” she told ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko of her undergraduate courses on population-environment and population-security connections.
However, Sciubba says her students seem equally interested in the courses’ demographic themes, including migration, youth, the demographic dividend, ageing, and urbanization. To her surprise, one of the most popular topics was population age structure.
Military audiences are quicker to understand the connections between population, peace, and conflict, says Sciubba. “You can assume a level of knowledge about demography that the undergraduates have not had,” she explains. -
VIDEO: Nicholas Kristof On Comprehensive Approaches to Family Planning
›October 2, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“Poor countries can’t begin to deal with food issues, with economic pressures, with conflict and shortages of water and grassland that may lead to social conflict, unless they begin to deal with population problems,” journalist Nicholas Kristof tells ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko in a video interview.
But “the single most effective contraceptive isn’t any kind of device,” Kristof says, “it’s girl’s education. And that has the most extraordinary impact on birthrates.” Unfortunately, this approach to family planning has “been neglected in the last 20 years.”
Empowering women and girls may be our best strategy for fighting poverty, claim Kristof and WuDunn in their new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which was launched at the Wilson Center.
Half the Sky tells the transformational stories of women and girls who are the “face of statistics” on four appalling realities: maternal mortality, sexual violence, and lack of education and economic opportunities.
As evening fell upon Yirgalem, Ethiopia, more than 70 participants from a large cross-section of Ethiopia’s NGO community—as well as a few international participants like myself—gathered in a packed conference room in the 
of double-vise, trying to constrain our own [energy] demand while also trying to provide the opportunities for people who have little to none,” said Dimick.
According to Douglas, each year 60 million pregnancies—one-third of the global total—are unintended, and 
