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Friday Podcasts
Joan Castro on Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management in the Southern Philippines
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In the southern Philippines, the innovative IPOPCORM program “worked in areas where there is high…marine biodiversity, high population, and high population momentum, which means…about 40 percent of the population are 15 years and below,” Joan Castro told ECSP in this interview. Castro, the executive vice president of PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc., recently spoke at the Wilson Center on the state of integrated development efforts in her country and elsewhere.
From 2000-2006, IPOPCORM (which stands for “integrated population and coastal resource management”) sought to integrate population, health, and environment (PHE) development efforts in Philippine communities. They had four primary objectives, said Castro: 1) improve the reproductive health of the community members; 2) improve management of the coastal resources; 3) increase knowledge of the linkages between population, health, and the environment; and 4) increase the capacity of community leaders to advocate for these links.
“The aspect of livelihoods was very essential,” said Castro, especially for empowering women in the communities. Through family planning services and micro-credit finance initiatives, women were able to better space their pregnancies and contribute to household incomes, she said. In addition, by establishing locally managed, marine protected areas, IPOPCORM increased the protection of high biodiversity zones and improved the likelihood that there will be enough fish to feed future generations.
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Friday Podcasts
Eliya Zulu on Population Growth, Family Planning, and Urbanization in Africa
MORE“The whole push for population control or to stabilize populations in Africa in the ’70s and the ’80s mostly came out of the West,” said Eliya Zulu of the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP) in this interview with ECSP. Then new research brought to light the fact that many women in Africa actually wanted to control their fertility themselves, but they didn’t have access to family planning.
“It kind of put the African leaders who really didn’t want to talk anything about fertility control and so on in a fix,” Zulu said. “Because all of sudden now it was the African women themselves who are saying we need these services – it was not an imposition from the West.”
Based in Nairobi, Kenya, Zulu said that part of what he does at AFIDEP is “try to get African countries to think about the future.” Current economic growth in parts of Africa simply can’t match population growth, but improving access to family planning and child/maternal health infrastructure can greatly reduce fertility rates – and quickly.
“The question for Africa is: Are we going to be ready? And we need to prepare,” said Zulu. “For that to happen it’s not just about saying ‘let’s have fewer children.’ I think we also need to do this from a social developmental perspective where we also look at ways in which we can improve the quality of the population, empower women, invest in education, and so on.”
Four Factors of Success
There are several factors that are critical for successful family planning and child/maternal health efforts, said Zulu: strong political leadership, sustained commitment over time, financial investment (research has shown that over 90 percent of women in sub-Saharan Africa cannot afford contraceptives), and strong accountability mechanisms for monitoring performance of programs and use of resources.
“There are a number of countries that have shown that, even with the limited resources that Africa has, that with all the problems that Africa has, if you really emphasize those four factors that I mentioned, you can actually achieve very, very positive results,” Zulu said.
Rapid Urbanization and the Growth of Urban Poverty
Rapid urbanization is one of Africa’s biggest challenges, said Zulu. “Africa is the least urbanized region of the world now, but it’s growing at the highest rate.” If you look at historical examples from the West and Asia, “urbanization is supposed to be a good thing; urbanization has been a driver of economic development,” he said, but “the major characteristic of urbanization in Africa has been the rapid growth of urban poverty.”
“If the economies are not going to develop the capacity to absorb this population and create enough jobs for them, there’s going to be chaos, because you can’t have all these young people without having jobs for them,” said Zulu. “The challenge for many African governments is how to have sustainable urbanization and how to transform our cities into agents of development.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.Topics: Africa, demography, development, economics, family planning, Friday Podcasts, gender, global health, podcast, poverty, urbanization -
Friday Podcasts
Elizabeth Malone on Climate Change and Glacial Melt in High Asia
MORE“There’s nothing more iconic, I think, about the climate change issue than glaciers,” says Elizabeth Malone, senior research scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Malone served as the technical lead on “Changing Glaciers and Hydrology in Asia: Addressing Vulnerability to Glacier Melt Impacts,” a USAID report released in late 2010 that explores the linkages between climate change, demographic change, and glacier melt in the Himalayas and other nearby mountain systems.
Describing glaciers as “transboundary in the largest sense,” Malone points out that meltwater from High Asian glaciers feeds many of the region’s largest rivers, including the Indus, Ganges, Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, and Mekong. While glacial melt does not necessarily constitute a large percentage of those rivers’ downstream flow volume, concern persists that continued rapid glacial melt induced by climate change could eventually impact water availability and food security in densely populated areas of South and East Asia.
Rapid demographic change has potentially factored into accelerated glacial melt, even though the connection may not be a direct one, Malone adds.
Atmospheric pollution generated by growing populations contributes to global warming, while black carbon emissions from cooking and home heating can eventually settle on glacial ice fields, accelerating melt rates. Given such cause-and-effect relationships, Malone says that rapid population growth and the continued retreat of High Asian glaciers are “two problems that seem distant,” yet “are indeed very related.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Friday Podcasts
Peter Gleick on Peak Water
MORE“The purpose of the whole debate about peak water is to help raise awareness about the nature of the world’s water problems and to help drive toward solutions,” says the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick. But Gleick asserts that in the same way certain countries have been contending with “peak oil” concerns in recent years, they may soon also have to deal with “peak water” as well.
Unlike oil, water is largely a renewable resource, but countries in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere are pumping groundwater faster than aquifers can replenish naturally. Gleick explains “there will be a peak of production in many of those places and eventually the food that we grow with that water or the widgets that we make from the factories that use that water will be nonsustainable and production will have to drop.”
The world’s surface and groundwater resources can be used sustainably even in the face of continued global population growth, says Gleick, but only “if we are careful about the ecological consequences and the efficiency with which we use it.” However, to date, he says, “those issues have not adequately been brought into the discussion about water policy.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Friday Podcasts
Judith Bruce on Empowering Adolescent Girls in Post-Earthquake Haiti
MORE“The most striking thing about post-conflict and post-disaster environments is that what lurks there is also this extraordinary opportunity,” said Judith Bruce, a senior associate and policy analyst with the Population Council’s Poverty, Gender, and Youth program. Bruce has spent time this year working with the Haiti Adolescent Girls Network (HAGN), a coalition of humanitarian groups conducting workshops focused on the educational, health, and security needs of the country’s vulnerable female youth population.
Gender-based violence has long been an issue in Haiti, but the problem became even more pronounced in the wake of the January earthquake. HAGN has sought to address the problem by concentrating its community-based programming on “high priority” groups, including girls who are disabled, serve as de facto heads of households, or are aged 10-14.
Bruce asserted that protecting and empowering young girls is critical because upon reaching puberty, “their access to a safe world shrinks dramatically.” With the post-disaster environment adding another layer of challenge, she said “there could be no ambiguity in anyone’s mind that we have to create dedicated spaces for girls who, at least for a few hours a week, feel secure to be themselves and to plan for their long-term safety as well as their development.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.Topics: demography, disaster relief, education, Friday Podcasts, gender, global health, Haiti, livelihoods, population, youth -
The Number Left Out: Bringing Population Into the Climate Conversation
December 9, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffMORENumbers swirl around climate change.
So many parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So many gigatons of carbon dioxide emitted. So many degrees Celsius of temperature rise that we hope won’t happen. Yet one number rarely comes into play when experts or negotiators talk about the changing atmosphere and the warming of the planet: the number of humans putting heat-trapping gases into the air.
The original version of this article, by Robert Engelman, appeared on the Worldwatch Institute’s Transforming Cultures blog.The UK Met Office’s data set for September 2009 of more than 1,600,000 temperature readings from 1,700+ stations.
Numbers swirl around climate change.
So many parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So many gigatons of carbon dioxide emitted. So many degrees Celsius of temperature rise that we hope won’t happen. Yet one number rarely comes into play when experts or negotiators talk about the changing atmosphere and the warming of the planet: the number of humans putting heat-trapping gases into the air.
The relative silence isn’t hard to understand. Population is almost always awkward to talk about. It’s fraught with sensitivity about who has how many children and whether that is anyone else’s business. It’s freighted with sexuality, contraception, abortion, immigration, gender bias, and other buttons too hot to press into conversation. Yet two aspects of population’s connection to climate change cry out for greater attention – and conversation.
One is that population – especially its growth, but other changes as well – matters importantly to the future of climate change, a statement that as far as I can tell is not challenged scientifically. (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, accepts the accuracy of the so-called Kaya identity, which names population among the four factors that determine emissions growth from decade to decade.) And, two, addressing population in climate-friendly ways is also fundamentally people-friendly, in that it involves no “population control,” but rather the giving up of control – especially control of women’s bodies by people other than themselves.A new Worldwatch Institute report, which I authored, offers details, findings, and recommendations on both the importance of population in climate change and how to address it. The report looks at some of the history of the population-climate link – in particular, interesting work by William Ruddiman, who hypothesizes that the agricultural revolution contributed to global warming thousands of years ago. And it addresses the common objection that population growth can’t be that important in greenhouse gas emissions growth because countries with high per capita emissions tend to have smaller families than low-emitting countries.
Equity in per capita emissions, I argue, is an essential goal – and without it, no global effort to shrink emissions can succeed. The imperative of an equal sharing of atmospheric carbon space is among the most powerful arguments for a smaller world population. When greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide – such as methane and “black carbon” – are considered, per capita emissions gaps are not as wide as many writers believe. And the amount of all these gases that equal emitters can contribute without altering the atmosphere shrinks in direct proportion to population’s growth.
Arguments about population’s role in climate change are unnecessarily heated, however. Even if the growth of human numbers played only a minor role in emissions growth, it would be worth discussing – not because addressing population will somehow resolve our climate predicament, but because ultimately no other strategy on its own will either. We need the widest possible range of strategies – economic, political, technological, and behavioral – that are both feasible and consistent with shared human values.
On population, the most effective way to slow growth is to support women’s aspirations. Almost all women aspire to gain an education, to stand in equality with men, and to make decisions for themselves – including whether and when to give birth. Policies and programs to help women achieve these aspirations exist in many places. But they don’t get the attention, support and funding they deserve. And they are rarely seen as climate-change strategies.
As societies, we have the ability to end the ongoing growth of human numbers – soon, and based on human rights and women’s intentions. This makes it easy to speak of women, population, and climate change in a single breath.
Robert Engelman is vice president for programs at the Worldwatch Institute and the author of “Population, Climate Change, and Women’s Lives.” Please contact him if you are interested in a copy of the report.
Sources: UK Met Office, World Resources Institute.
Image Credit: Adapted from “Met Office Climate Data – Month by Month (September),” courtesy of flickr user blprnt_van, and report cover, courtesy of the Worldwatch Institute. -
Friday Podcasts
From Cancun: Roger-Mark De Souza on Women and Integrated Climate Adaptation Strategies
MORE“When you look at the negative impacts of climate change, the impacts on the poor and the vulnerable – particularly women – increase, so investing in programs that put women at the center is critical,” said Roger-Mark De Souza, vice president of research and director of the climate program at Population Action International (PAI), speaking to ECSP from the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico. “There are a number of missed opportunities here in Cancun and in climate change deliberations overall that are not including women and are missing an opportunity to have a bigger bang for the buck, or power for the peso, as we say in Mexico.”
PAI hosted a side session with five panelists from Denmark, Ethiopia, Kenya, Suriname, and Uganda on “Healthy Women, Healthy Planet: Women’s Empowerment, Family Planning, and Resilience.” The session attracted more than 100 attendees and prompted incisive, informative questions, said De Souza.
“There was a call for additional research that is policy relevant that identifies some of the key entry points and added benefits at a country level,” said De Souza. “And there is a very strong call for youth partnerships from a number of youth advocates who are looking at medical and public health interventions and are desirous of including reproductive health programming as part of that.”
“One concrete next step for Cancun is to work with other civil society partners who are here who are tracking how gender is being integrated into the negotiating language, particularly with regard to financing mechanisms,” De Souza said.
Besides financing and the need for more research, De Souza said the key issues that emerged from the panel were: the importance of linking programs of different scales; ensuring women’s empowerment and ownership; and recognizing and replicating effective partnerships.
For more from Roger-Mark De Souza, see ECSP Focus Issue 19, “The Integration Imperative: How to Improve Development Programs by Linking Population, Health, and Environment.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Friday Podcasts
Robert Walker on Family Planning Promotion and Global Population Growth
MORE“Expanding voluntary family planning access and ensuring that all women have access to reproductive health services is, to me at least, a no brainer,” said the Population Institute’s Robert Walker in this interview with ECSP. “I think it’s a win for women, for their health, for their welfare, the welfare of their families, for their communities, for the environment, and for the planet at large.”
While China and India dominate much of the global headlines about population growth, other parts of South Asia – namely Afghanistan and Pakistan – and sub-Saharan Africa receive comparatively little attention. For Walker, a renewed global effort to boost the quality and quantity of reproductive healthcare tools and services in these areas of the developing world is essential.
“This is very, very doable. We face a lot of really incredible challenges in the world today, particularly with respect to food, energy, water, and poverty. But if we can increase what we spend on international family planning assistance by three or four billion dollars a year, we can literally change the world,” Walker said. “And I think we desperately need to.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.
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