Showing posts from category Europe.
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How Did We Arrive at 7 Billion – and Where Do We Go From Here? [Part One]
›October 26, 2011 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenThe United Nations Population Division has estimated world population will reach seven billion on Monday. Which changes in demographic trends led us to this milestone? What do the past and present tell us about how human numbers will change in the future?
The “Day of Seven Billion” was announced this spring following the release of the latest revision of UN population projections. Although the seven billionth person will not be precisely identified, this estimate is based on careful demographic modeling. Every two years, the UN revises its projections to incorporate the latest trend data and modify its assumptions, as seemingly small changes can make a huge difference demographically.The UN estimates that the seven billionth person alive today will be born on October 31. Demographer Elizabeth Leahy Madsen explains how we got to that number, its significance, and where our demographic path might take us from here. Read part two here.
The United Nations Population Division has estimated world population will reach seven billion on Monday. Which changes in demographic trends led us to this milestone? What do the past and present tell us about how human numbers will change in the future?
The “Day of Seven Billion” was announced this spring following the release of the latest revision of UN population projections. Although the seven billionth person will not be precisely identified, this estimate is based on careful demographic modeling. Every two years, the UN revises its projections to incorporate the latest trend data and modify its assumptions, as seemingly small changes can make a huge difference demographically.
Demography Is Driven by Fertility and Population Momentum
Since world population reached three billion in 1959, the rate of growth has increased, peaked, and begun to slow. Each succeeding milestone was reached more quickly than the last: It took 15 years to reach four billion, 13 years to hit five billion, and only 11 years to get to six billion at the end of 1998. The interval leading to seven billion was slightly longer, at 13 years, as the global rate of population growth has slowed.
Although mortality and migration also affect population trends, the factor with the greatest influence by far is fertility – the average number of children born to each woman. The decline in the global fertility rate from an average of nearly 5 children per woman in the early 1960s to 2.5 children today has in turn slowed the pace of world population growth. However, demographic momentum from previous generations of high fertility can drive population growth for decades to come. Even if Nigeria reached replacement-level fertility today, its population would still grow by one-third by 2050 as the number of births continued to exceed the number of deaths.
Assumptions Matter
Population projections consider: 1) current data about fertility and 2) assumptions about the ways fertility will change in the future. These assumptions vary depending on the source, so how much of a difference do they make? As it turns out, quite a lot.
Projections of world population in 2050 range from 8.1 billion (if fertility rates fall to a global average of 1.7 children per woman) to 10.9 billion (if they remain unchanged). The gap of nearly three billion between those possibilities is greater than the combined populations of China and India today.
Estimates vary even more widely for the end of the century, with the UN projecting that by 2100 world population could total anywhere between 6 billion (if total fertility falls to an average of 1.55 children per woman) and 27 billion (if every country’s fertility rates remain constant at today’s levels).
While demographers parse the details of the projections, policymakers would like to know which of these scenarios is more likely. After all, the economic, environmental, and political consequences of a population of 8 or 11 billion two generations hence are not the same, and a world of 27 billion is difficult for anyone to fathom.
If we simply projected past trends into the future at a steady rate, the population estimates on the low end of the fertility spectrum seem more likely. The global fertility rate has fallen from 4.5 children per woman in the early 1970s to 2.5 today, a decline of 43 percent, so the 14 percent decline projected in the medium-fertility variant between now and 2050 seems reasonable at first glance, perhaps even conservative. The medium-fertility variant assumes that all countries’ fertility rates will begin moving towards replacement level, around 2.1 children per woman, regardless of whether they are currently above or below that number.
However, even a 14 percent decline in fertility assumes that areas where fertility rates remain stalled at high levels will soon begin rapid declines, paralleling the past experience of other regions. As Population Reference Bureau demographer Carl Haub writes, “the assumption that the developing world will necessarily follow the path of the industrialized world…is far from a sure bet.”
In the last 40 years, fertility rates in the Caribbean, northern and southern Africa, Latin America, and all of Asia declined by 50 percent or more. The pace of decline in sub-Saharan Africa, while still notable, was much slower, at 23 percent. In order to meet the UN medium-variant projections, the region’s fertility rate would need to fall by nearly 40 percent by mid-century.
Some of the largest, fastest-growing populations in the developing world would need to experience a major acceleration from recent trends. In Nigeria, fertility edged down by 15 percent between 1970 and 2010, but the medium variant projection depends on a decline of 37 percent over the next four decades; Ethiopia’s fertility rate will need to fall by half.
Gender Matters, Too
The great irony of fertility trends is that gender inequities play an important role at both ends of the scale. In countries with the highest fertility rates, women tend to have less education than men and less autonomy. Their fertility choices may be greatly affected by the preferences of their husbands or other family members. In Niger, which has the highest fertility rate in the world, married men would, on average, like three more children than married women. In Uganda, where women average more than six children each, 60 percent of men report that domestic violence is justified.
By contrast, in countries with the lowest fertility rates, women have achieved equal access to education and the labor market, with more autonomy about how to earn income and what to do with it. Yet cultural expectations that place the burden for child and elder care and housework almost entirely on women can make marriage an unappealing option. In Japan, which is among the 10 lowest fertility countries in the world, more women are choosing to stay single: The marriage rate has fallen by almost half since the 1970s. Japanese women who do marry are waiting until their late 20s and tend not to give birth until they are 30, both of which result in lower average family size.
Even at this end of the demographic spectrum, the assumptions embedded within population projections seem optimistic. Japan’s fertility rate was last above replacement level in the early 1970s; it has fallen steadily to 1.3 children per woman today. The UN projections assume that fertility will immediately reverse track and begin rising to over 1.8 children per woman in 2050, rebounding above two children per woman before the end of the century.
The stalled high fertility rates in much of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, together with unprecedented low fertility in Eastern Europe and parts of East Asia, indicate that we are currently in an era of remarkable demographic diversity, despite the UN’s projection of future convergence.
Continue reading part two here.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and former senior research associate at Population Action International.
Sources: Boling (2008), Haub (2011), Japan Statistics Bureau, Measure DHS, UN Population Division, UN Population Fund, Washington Post.
Image Credit: Chart data from UN Population Division, arranged by Elizabeth Leahy Madsen. -
Beyond Supply Risks: The Conflict Potential of Natural Resources
›While the public debate about resource conflicts focuses on the risk of supply disruptions for developed countries, the potentially more risky types of resource conflict are usually ignored. As part of a two-year research project on behalf of the German Federal Environment Agency, adelphi and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Energy, and Environment have analyzed the risks of international conflict linked to natural resources in a series of reports titled Beyond Supply Risks – The Conflict Potential of Natural Resources.
Resource extraction, transportation, and processing can create considerable crises and increase the risk of conflicts in producing and transit countries. This phenomenon – widely referred to as the “resource curse” – impacts consuming countries only if it leads to shortages and higher prices. However, in the producing and transit countries it can have much wider destabilizing effects – from increasing corruption to large-scale violent conflict. In addition, the extraction, processing, and transportation of resources often create serious environmental risks. Overexploitation, pollution, and the degradation of ecosystems often directly affect the livelihoods of local communities, which can increase the potential for conflict.
The eight reports that comprise Beyond Supply Risks explore plausible scenarios over the next two decades, focusing on four case studies: copper and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the Nabucco natural gas pipeline project across Southern Europe and Turkey; lithium in Bolivia; and rare earth minerals in China.
Lithium in Bolivia
Bolivia possesses the world’s largest known lithium deposits, a potentially important resource for the development of electric vehicles. While the development of Bolivia’s lithium reserves could provide major economic benefits for one of the poorest countries in Latin America, our analysis identifies two main potential risks of conflict.
First, the environmental consequences of developing industrial-scale lithium production might have negative effects on the livelihoods of the local population. The local population in the lithium-rich department of Potosí has shown that it is capable of organizing itself effectively in defense of its interests, and past resource conflicts have turned violent, making a conflict-sensitive approach all the more important.
Second, the Bolivian economy is largely dependent on natural resources, and consequently is susceptible to price shocks. At present, this risk is primarily associated with natural gas. But lithium production, if developed, might be subject to the same dynamics, which could potentially destabilize the political system.
For consuming countries, these conflicts threaten supplies of lithium only if local protests or broader destabilization were produce bottlenecks in the supply chain.
Rare Earths and China
Like lithium, rare earths are likewise essential for some new technologies. China’s well publicized monopoly on 97 percent of the global production spurred a heated debate on the security of supply of strategic minerals. While our case study identifies supply risks for consuming countries, it also outlines some of the conflict risks China might face internally.
First, local populations could protest against the severe ecological impact of rare earth mining and production. In addition, conflicts might arise if those who profit from economic development (entrepreneurs or regional power-holders) undermine the traditional centralized party structures and expand their own influence.
International conflicts over access to Chinese rare earth resources, while they dominate the headlines, do not appear to be the dominant risk. Instead, internal political tensions could result in a weakened China that is not able to exploit its monopoly position for foreign policy gains. Or the government could enter into multilateral agreements and thus avoid a confrontational approach towards consumer nations.
Ultimately, the actual rate of diffusion of environmental technologies and the development of new technologies remain the key factors in determining whether relative shortages in global supply of rare earths will in fact occur. If industrialized nations and emerging economies commit to the same technologies to attain climate policy goals, international resource governance and coordinated promotion of (environmental) technology will also play a role in preventing conflict and crisis over rare earths.
The Way Forward
The series concludes with five recommendations to mitigate the risks of future resource conflicts:- Introduce systematic policy impact assessments to understand how policy goals and strategies, especially in regard to climate and environmental policy, interact with resource conflict risks.
- Increase the transparency of raw material markets and value creation chains to prevent extreme fluctuations in prices and improve information on markets, origins, and individual players.
- Improve the coherence of raw material policy by linking raw material policies with security, environmental, and development policies.
- Demand and promote corporate social responsibility along the whole value chain.
- Increase environmental and social sustainability as a means of strengthening crisis and conflict prevention by systematically taking into account social and conflict-related aspects in the resource sector.
The individual reports from the project can be downloaded here:- Conflict Risks (GERMAN only)
- Supply and demand (GERMAN only)
- Case Study: Nabucco Pipeline (GERMAN only)
- Case Study: Congo
- Case Study: Bolivia
- Case Study: China
- Conflict Resolution Strategies (GERMAN only)
- Summary and Recommendations
Sources: Government Accounting Office.
Photo Credit: “Potosí: miners in darkness,” courtesy of flickr user Olmovich. -
Reducing Health Inequities to Better Weather Climate Change
›In an article appearing in the summer issue of Global Health, Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), brings to light what she calls the starkest statistic in public health: the vast difference in the mortality rates between rich and poor countries. For example, the life expectancy of a girl is doubled if she is born in a developed country rather than in a developing country. Chan writes that efforts to improve health in developing countries now face an additional obstacle: “a climate that has begun to change.”
Climate change’s effect on health has increasingly moved into the spotlight over the past year: DARA’s Climate Vulnerability Monitor measures the toll that climate change took in 2010 on human health, estimating some 350,000 people died last year from diseases related to climate change. The majority of these deaths took place in sub-Saharan Africa, where weak health systems already struggle to deal with the disproportionate disease burden found in the region. The loss of “healthy life years” as a result of global environmental change is predicted to be 500 times greater in poor African populations than in European populations, according to The Lancet.
The majority of these deaths are due to climate change exacerbating already-prominent diseases and conditions, including malaria, diarrhea, and malnutrition. Environmental changes affect disease patterns and people’s access to food, water, sanitation, and shelter. The DARA Climate Vulnerability Monitor predicts that these effects will cause the number of deaths related to climate change to rise to 840,000 per year by 2030.
But few of these will be in developed countries. With strong health systems in place, they are not likely to feel the toll of a changing environment on their health. Reducing these inequities can only be achieved by alleviating poverty, which increases the capacity of individuals, their countries, and entire regions to adapt to climate change. It would be in all of our interests to do just this, writes Chan: “A world that is greatly out of balance is neither stable nor secure.”
Sarah Lindsay is a program assistant at the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health and a Masters candidate at American University.
Sources: DARA, Global Health, The Lancet, World Health Organization.
Image Credit: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the World Health Organization. -
In Rush for Land, Is it All About Water?
›July 26, 2011 // By Christina DaggettOver the past few years, wealthy countries with shrinking stores of natural resources and relatively large populations (such as China, India, South Korea, and the Gulf states) have quietly purchased huge parcels of fertile farmland in Africa, South America, and South Asia to grow food for export to the parent country. With staple food prices shooting up and food security projected to worsen in the decades ahead, it is little wonder that countries are looking abroad to secure future resources. But the question arises: Are these “land grabs” really about the food — or, more accurately, are they “water grabs”?
The Great Water Grab
With growing urban populations, an expanding middle class, and increasingly scarce arable land resources, some governments and investors are snapping up the world’s farmland. Some observers, however, have pointed out that these dealmakers might be more interested in the water than the land.
In an article from The Economist in 2009, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, claimed that “the purchases weren’t about land, but water. For with the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal.”
Consider some of the largest investors in foreign land: China has a history of severe droughts (and recently, increasingly poor water quality); the Gulf nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain are among the world’s most water-stressed countries; and India’s groundwater stocks are rapidly depleting.
A recent report from the World Bank on global land deals highlighted the effect water scarcity is having on food production in China, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, stating that “in contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have large untapped water resources for agriculture.”
Keeping Engaged and Informed
“The water impacts of any investment in any land deal should be made explicit,” said Phil Woodhouse of the University of Manchester during the recent International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, as reported by the New Agriculturist. “Some kind of mechanism is needed to bring existing water users into an engagement on any deals done on water use.”
At the same conference, Shalmali Guttal of Focus on the Global South cautioned, “Those who are taking the land will also take the water resources, the forests, wetlands, all the wild indigenous plants and biodiversity. Many communities want investments but none of them sign up for losing their ecosystems.”
With demand for water expected to outstrip supply by 40 percent within the next 20 years, water as the primary motivation behind the rush for foreign farmland is a factor worth further exploration.
Global Farming
According to a report from the Oakland Institute, nearly 60 million hectares (ha) of African farmland – roughly the size of France – were purchased or leased in 2009. With these massive land deals come promises of jobs, technology, infrastructure, and increased tax revenue.
In 2008 South Korean industrial giant Daewoo Logistics negotiated one of the biggest African farmland deals with a 99-year lease on 1.3 million ha of farmland in Madagascar for palm oil and corn production. The deal amounted to nearly half of Madagascar’s arable land – an especially staggering figure given that nearly a third of Madagascar’s GDP comes from agriculture and more than 70 percent of its population lives below the poverty line. When details of the deal came to light, massive protests ensued and it was eventually scrapped after president Marc Ravalomanana was ousted from power in a 2009 coup.
While perhaps an extreme example, the Daewoo/Madagascar deal nonetheless demonstrates the conflict potential of these massive land deals, which are taking place in some of the poorest and hungriest countries in the world. In 2009, while Saudi Arabia was receiving its first shipment of rice grown on farmland it owned in Ethiopia, the World Food Program provided food aid to five million Ethiopians.
Other notable deals include China’s recent acquisition of 320,000 ha in Argentina for soybean and corn cultivation – a project which is expected to bring in $20 million in irrigation infrastructure, the Guardian reports – and a Saudi Arabian company which has plans to invest $2.5 billion and employ 10,000 people in Ethiopia by 2020, according to Gambella Star News.
But governments in search of cheap food aren’t the only ones interested in obtaining a piece of the world’s breadbasket: Individual investors are also heavily involved, and the Guardian reports that U.S. universities and European pension funds are buying and leasing land in Africa as well.
The Future of Land and Water
Whatever the benefits or pitfalls, large-scale land deals around the world look set to continue. The world is projected to have 7 billion mouths to feed by the end of this year and possibly 10 billion plus by the end of the century.
Currently, agriculture uses 11 percent of the world’s land surface and 70 percent of the world’s freshwater resources, according to UNESCO. If and when the going gets tough, how will the global agricultural system respond? Whose needs come first – the host countries’ or the investing nations’?
Christina Daggett is a program associate with the Population Institute and a former ECSP intern.
Photo Credit: Number of signed or implemented overseas land investment deals for agricultural production 2006-May 2009, courtesy of GRAIN and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
Sources: BBC News, Canadian Water Network, Christian Science Monitor, Circle of Blue, The Economist, Gambella Star News, Guardian, Maplecroft, New Agriculturalist, Oakland Institute, State Department, Time, UNFPA, UNESCO, World Bank, World Food Program. -
Watch: Eric Kaufmann on How Demography Is Enhancing Religious Fundamentalism
›May 24, 2011 // By Schuyler Null“There’s a belief, often amongst political scientists and social scientists, that demography is somehow passive and that it doesn’t really matter,” said Eric Kaufmann, author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth: Demography and Politics in the 21st Century and professor at Birkbeck College, University of London in this interview with ECSP. “Part of the message of this book is that demography can lead to social and political change.”
“In this case what I’m looking at is the way that demography can change the religious landscape,” Kaufmann said. “It can actually enhance the power of religion, especially religious fundamentalism in societies throughout the world.”
“Purely secular people, who have no religious affiliation, they are leading the move towards very low levels of fertility, even down to the level of one child per woman,” Kaufmann said. On the other hand, fundamentalists are reacting to this trend and deliberately deciding not to make the demographic transition, he said. “In doing so, the gap between secular and religious widens” and is actually more pronounced in places where the two groups collide.
“You can see this in the Muslim world,” said Kaufmann. “If you look at urban areas such as the Nile Delta and Cairo, in those urban cities, women are who are most in favor of Shariah have twice the family size of women who are most opposed to Shariah, whereas in the Egyptian countryside, the difference is much less because they haven’t been exposed to the same modernizing pressures.”
These dynamics affect the Western world as well, especially when you factor in migration, said Kaufmann: “The fact that almost all the world’s population growth is occurring in the developing world, which is largely religious, means that a lot of people are moving from religious parts of the world to secular parts of the world,” he said. “That effects, for example, countries like the United States or in Western Europe, which are receiving immigrants, and it means in the case of Western Europe – which is a very secular environment – that immigrants bring not only ethnic change but on the back of that, religious change; they make their societies more religious.”
