You Are Invited, March, 20 2012:
Megacities, Global Security, and the Map of the Future
Monday, March 19, 2012
Comparative Urban Studies Project, Environmental Change and Security Program
Tuesday, March 20, 2012, 3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
5th Floor Conference Room
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast
Peter Engelke, Visiting Fellow, Stimson Center
Peter Liotta, Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Scholar, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York; co-author, The Real Population Bomb: Megacities, Global Security, and the Map of the Future
Jaana Remes, Senior Fellow, McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Company
“By 2025, 27 cities will have populations greater than 10 million and over 600 cities will have populations greater than one million. Specific megacities, intimately connected to globalization, are posing huge security challenges – now,” writes Peter Liotta in his recent work, The Real Population Bomb: Megacities, Global Security, and the Map of the Future. Yet, at the same time, cities play an increasingly important political, social, and economic role in the world, attracting investment, ideas, and people in a process amplified by globalization.
Join us in a discussion with three urban experts who approach the topic of urbanization from diverse areas. Peter Liotta will discuss his latest book, which focuses on issues of security heightened by rapid urbanization and megacities. Jaana Remes will discuss the role that cities play in economic growth. Peter Engelke will offer reflections on the two presentations with an eye towards the opportunities inherent in an urbanizing society.
If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.
Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 5th floor conference room. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.
Topics:
You Are Invited
Finding the Link Between Water Stress and Food Prices
Lakis Polycarpou, State of the Planet
Monday, March 19, 2012
Over the past decade, average global food prices have more than doubled, with 2008 and 2010 seeing excruciating price spikes that each had far-reaching economic, geopolitical, and social consequences.
What explains this long-term trend – and why did prices spike so much higher in the years that they did?
For policymakers at all levels, answering that question is of vital importance if there is to be any hope of feeding the world’s growing population in the coming decades, much less maintaining social order.
According to recent research by the New England Complex Systems Institute, spikes in food prices are so closely correlated with social unrest that they were able to identify a particular food-price threshold above which food riots are very likely.
The most obvious cause for high food prices is oil – in fact, charts showing the correspondence between food and oil prices show an eerie overlap, especially in the last half decade. Water scarcity and climate are major players as well, however. According to the just released United Nations World Water Development Report, demand for water will grow by 55 percent in the next 40 years, and farmers will need 19 percent more water by 2050 just to keep up with growing food demands.
Continue reading on State of the Planet.
Sources: Nature, New England Complex Systems Institute, UNESCO.
Photo Credit: “Farmers work on the arid land in Hertela village few kilometers from Mahoba in Bundelkhand, India on September 26, 2008.” Courtesy of flickr user balazsgardi.
John Williams: Helping People and Preserving Biodiversity Hotspots
Friday, March 16, 2012
“Both humans and the number of species in the world are not evenly distributed across the globe,” said John Williams of the University of California, Davis, who recently spoke at the Wilson Center about his contribution to Biodiversity Hotspots: Distribution and Protection of Conservation Priority Areas. “In particular we find that species diversity is concentrated in what’s called the biodiversity ‘hotspots.’”
Largely in the tropics, Mediterranean climates, and along mountain chains, biodiversity hotspots are “where there’s a real concentration in number of species and also unique species – plants and animals that exist nowhere else on Earth,” he said.
“It’s a very complex relationship between biodiversity and human population, because it’s not necessarily [true] that places of high human population are a threat to biodiversity,” said Williams. Many different factors play a role, “like education, like consumption, like economic development, different cultures – how people interface with the natural world – all these things create nuances as far as what that relationship is between biodiversity and where people live.”
“There are some basic things we can do that are going to be good for human welfare, as well as biodiversity,” he continued. A few are addressing lack of education, especially among girls, in areas of high biodiversity; providing basic health services, including family planning, where rural growth rates are highest; and improving physical access to rural areas to promote economic development.
“We see there’s a direct correlation between each additional year of schooling a girl has and their fertility during their lifetime,” Williams said. “As people climb out of poverty, they also choose to have smaller, healthier families.”
From the Wilson Center:
Reflections on Women in the Arab Spring
The Middle East Program
Friday, March 16, 2012
The Arab Spring has fascinating and powerful demographic and gender undercurrents. Last year, demographer Richard Cincotta counseled observers to pay close attention to the demonstrations: if they featured young women – as opposed to being dominated by young men and boys – it’s a sign that democracy may be on its way. To mark the occasion of International Women’s Day last week, the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program gathered observations from a cross-section of regional voices on how women have fared thus far.
Excerpted below is the entry from Moushira Khattab, former Egyptian ambassador to South Africa and the Czech and Slovak Republics, and former minister of family and population:
Excerpted below is the entry from Moushira Khattab, former Egyptian ambassador to South Africa and the Czech and Slovak Republics, and former minister of family and population:
As the global community celebrates International Women’s Day, we must hail the heroic and pivotal role Egyptian women played to make the January 25th Revolution an inspiration for the world. They joined men and took to Tahrir Square calling for freedom, dignity, and social justice. They rallied around the cause of pushing the train of political change. One year later, Egyptian women find that the train of change has not only left them behind, but has in fact turned against them. It is ironic that the revolution that empowered a country, and made every Egyptian realize the power of their voice, stopped short of women’s rights. Sadly, the only march that was kicked out of Tahrir Square was that of women celebrating 2011 International Women’s Day. Women were beaten, subjected to virginity tests, and stripped of their clothes in the very same Tahrir Square.Download the full set of reflections from the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program.
Dormant conservative value systems are being manipulated by a religious discourse that denies women their rights. Calls for purging the sins of the old regime necessitate a reminder of the positive outcomes of laws that, although enacted under that old regime, have liberated and enhanced women’s status, including prohibiting female genital mutilation and child marriage. We also need a reminder that such gains are only a step towards these rights, and are the outcome of collective hard work along generations. Against the background of parliamentary elections, defenders of women’s rights have backed down, while young revolutionaries don’t have women’s rights on their agendas. The most telling indicator is the shameful and meager representation of women in Egypt’s post-revolution parliament. Among a handful of elected female MPs, one declared that her top priority is to repeal the law granting women the right to seek divorce.
With religious parties controlling it, the question becomes: Will this parliament be willing and able to produce a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all Egyptians regardless of gender or religion? Dare we dream that Egyptians in 2012 could have a constitution equal to that put in place by South Africans in 1996?
Topics:
democracy,
demography,
Egypt,
From the Wilson Center,
gender,
Libya,
Middle East,
population,
Tunisia,
Yemen,
youth
Dot-Mom:
Kavita Ramdas: Why Educating Girls Is Not Enough
Thursday, March 15, 2012
“I’m a big proponent of girl’s education. I believe that it’s a very important and a very valuable human rights obligation that all countries should be meeting,” said Kavita Ramdas, executive director for programs on social entrepreneurship at Stanford University, at the Wilson Center. However, “in the past seven to eight years we have found ourselves in a situation where there’s kind of an enchantment with girl’s education, as though it were the new microenterprise magic bullet to solve everything from poverty, to malnourishment, to inequality.”
“The outcomes that we ascribe to girl’s education…are not anything that I would argue with,” she said, yet, this enchantment “has happened simultaneously with a significant drop in both funding and support for strategies that give girls and women access to reproductive health and choices, particularly family planning.”
This is a problem, said Ramdas, because we cannot rely on education alone to do all the heavy lifting required to empower women.
“I think it’s important for us to recognize that there are societies where girls and women have achieved significantly high levels of education in which gender inequality remains,” she said, “for example, places like Japan and Saudi Arabia, where you have high per capita income, high levels of education, and yet…where women and girls are still marginalized and on the edges in terms of decision making.”
“I don’t think we have to wait for one to be able to do the other,” she said. “As we support programs for girls’ education, we also need to demand that those programs be buttressed by strong programs in adolescent health, strong programs in sex education, strong programs that actually provide girls and women with access to family planning and contraception.”
ECSP Seeking Interns for Summer 2012
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Apply today by sending cover letter, resume, and writing sample to ecsp@wilsoncenter.org.
The Environmental Change and Security Program is seeking interns to:
- Write for our award-winning blog
- Network with leading experts in the environment, demography, and security fields
- Work closely with the friendly, dynamic “Green Team” to explore new media while seeking a sustainable future
Assignments may include:
- Drafting posts for New Security Beat and ECSP's website
- Assisting with events and conferences
- Researching environment, demography, and security information
- Assisting the preparation of publications and/or outreach materials
- Updating contact databases
- Performing administrative assignments in support of ECSP activities
Potential interns should be students and/or recent graduates with an interest in, coursework related to, and/or experience working on environmental and human security.
In addition, applicants should:
- Possess strong research, writing, and/or administrative skills
- Be detail-oriented
- Be able to work both independently and as part of a group
- Be enrolled in a degree program, recently graduated (within the last year), and/or have been accepted to enter an advanced degree program within the next year
How to Apply
To apply, please submit a resume, cover letter, and short writing sample (between two and five pages in length). Please indicate in your cover letter whether you are applying for a paid or unpaid internship.
Please submit application via e-mail to ecsp@wilsoncenter.org with “Summer 2012 Internship” in the subject line.
The deadline is rolling. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Due to the high volume of resumes ECSP receives, only those candidates selected for interviews will be contacted.
Reading Radar:
Africa’s Demographic Challenges, Genderizing Food Security and Climate Responses
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Central Asia’s Dam Debacle
Eelke Kraak, ChinaDialogue
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
The Toktogul Dam in Kyrgyzstan is an imposing structure. The dam guards the largest and only multi-annual water reservoir in central Asia. The cascade of five hydroelectric stations downstream produces 90 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s power. Cotton fields thousands of kilometers away in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan depend on the release of water from this dam.
The Toktogul is literally and figuratively the “valve” of the Syr Darya River. But by relying on large-scale engineering projects to control the river, these countries have ignored the fundamentally political nature of water management.
The significance of the Toktogul dam goes beyond its economic benefits. It was the center piece of the Soviet Union’s efforts to conquer nature in its drive to modernize central Asia. When it became fully operational in the late 1980s, the project to control the region’s rivers seemed complete.
But the costs have been high. The Aral Sea, the terminal lake of the main sources of water in central Asia, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, has shrunk to almost nothing. Many areas surrounding what is left of the lake are heavily polluted. Moreover, the now independent Syr Darya riparian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan – disagree on how the Toktogul should be operated.
Continue reading on ChinaDialogue.
Syr Darya River Floodplain, Kazakhstan, courtesy of NASA and the Center for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon.
From the Wilson Center:
Women’s Health: Key to Climate Adaptation Strategies
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Population, Women’s Health, and Adapting to Climate Change
“If we want to have a people-focused understanding of resilience then…reproductive health, women’s ability to choose, and the number and spacing and occurrence of birth is, I think, at the very center of that,” said David Schensul. “There is no such thing as an isolated vulnerability…we have to think about it holistically,” he continued; “governments work in sectors, often UN organizations work in sectors, but people experience their lives from morning to night.”
“[Climate] adaption is absolutely essential… [but] it has not been considered with a perspective that population matters,” Schensul explained. He drew on mapping work by Population Action International to illustrate the collision of population growth, projected declines in agriculture, water stress, and low resilience to climate change in many parts of the world. These links represent a “critical, and in general, forgotten relationship,” he said.
It is important to note, however, that when the climate conversation shifts from vulnerability to emissions, population is in many cases not the most important factor. “Between 1900 and 2000 the U.S. tripled in size,” explained Schensul, “think about the implications of that tripling when you emit 20 tons per year [per capita].” In comparison, “between 1950 and 2000 the Democratic Republic of the Congo quadrupled in population and emits basically zero.”
“Incidentally, the amount [of greenhouse gases] that people emit correlates inversely with their fertility,” Schensul said. “Slowing your population growth rate sometimes means increasing your emissions and consumption and production.” The key, he said, is to integrate population and reproductive rights into climate adaptation responses, while also pursuing ways to turn “the development trajectory from a high-emissions one to a low-emissions one” – the fabled “green economic transition.”
Finding an Entry Point
“Universal access to reproductive health does represent a win-win opportunity for climate change adaptation,” said Kathleen Mogelgaard. But there is a real need to raise awareness about population dynamics and the existing literature on population issues within climate change circles, she said.
Contraception and reproductive health programs produce a triple benefit: many organizations are experienced implementers of these programs, reproductive health services are in demand by women around the world, and they are relatively inexpensive, said Mogelgaard. “To fully meet women’s needs for family planning around the world it would cost an additional $3.6 billion,” she said – a small sum in the world of climate change response. In short, the ways and means exist to use reproductive health programs as a low cost pathway towards increase resilience to environmental and climate related threats.
Literacy can be enhanced through providing better tools and training, such as CARE’s Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook, and by making a concerted effort to include integrated population, health, and environment approaches, including family planning, into programs that seek to address climate change threats and impacts. Such approaches are effective models for action on climate change, said Mogelgaard, but, so far, there are few studies in peer-reviewed literature to support them, she said.
Unfortunately, even when the opportunity is recognized, it is not necessarily translated into action. Mogelgaard presented analysis by PAI’s Karen Hardee and Clive Mutunga on the UN’s National Adaptation Programs of Action assessments that found of the 41 assessments completed at the time of analysis, 37 countries identified population growth as an issue that exacerbated vulnerability. However, only 6 of these 37 placed reproductive health issues as a top priority for action, only two identified priority projects in this sphere, and neither of these projects has been funded.
The Need for a More Open Dialogue
In addition to the practical arguments for including reproductive health in climate strategies, Ramdas pointed to the rights-based argument. Throughout the 1990s, the international community built “a commitment to empowering, educating, and giving women and girls the right to be fully equal citizens in this world,” she said. But today there is a sense that “we have significantly lost ground from a place where there had been really, fairly unanimous global consensus.”
Kavita described family planning and reproductive rights as a “last taboo.” “There is now no comfortable way for people to talk about the relationships between…access to voluntary family planning, and access to contraception, and the implications for our planet,” she said. According to her, this discomfort makes it difficult for the environmental and population communities to come together.
“We are having a conversation…that essentially is completely squeamish about the notion that addressing questions of women’s empowerment is not just about education – girls behind a desk and having libraries,” Ramdas said. “Yes, educated girls and women do have better chances…but it doesn’t happen automatically and it has to happen in concurrence with a thoughtful and active strategy around making contraception available to communities around the globe.”
A commitment to family planning and reproductive rights is “a way to achieve our larger goals as a global community around population stability, sustainability, and both economic and environmental development,” said Ramdas. We must be free to ask “how to think about population, development, and women’s rights in the same breath,” she said.
Event ResourcesPhoto Credit: “Mother and Son at the vaccination campaign in Ndolobo,” courtesy of flickr user hdptcar.
Eye On:
Geoff Dabelko on Finding Common Ground Among Conservation, Development, and Security at the 2011 WWF Fuller Symposium
Monday, March 12, 2012
Bridging the divide between the conservation and security communities “requires that we check some stereotypes at the door,” said ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko at the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Forward: Ideas That Work and How Science Can Effect Change symposium. Changes in global climate, as well as environmental threats more local in origin, require us to “find ways to minimize threats [and] maximize opportunities...from the dialogue between these different communities – and get out of our silos to do that,” said Dabelko.
However, this dialogue faces real challenges and concrete trade-offs. “There are big imbalances in terms of the resources that these different communities have,” and this often cuts the conversation short, he said. The conservation and security communities are also orientated towards some very different objectives and toolsets. But “given the levels of stress that our natural systems are under, given the level of dysfunction that are political systems are exhibiting, to me, it suggests that it’s a call for all hands on deck,” asserted Dabelko.
“The relationship between environment, natural resources, and violent conflict” is not the “only part of the story,” he said. Conservation goals can be achieved by preserving biodiversity on military sites and demilitarized zones, and through the Department of Defense’s new focus on reducing energy consumption. In the past, Russian-Norwegian-U.S. cooperation around de-commissioning Soviet-era nuclear submarines protected fragile Arctic habitats, prevented potentially dangerous technology from reaching world markets, and built confidence between recent adversaries. The dual potentials of “peace parks” in fragile and insecure borders across the Middle East have also garnered attention.
Environmental Peacebuilding
“Too often…natural resources are viewed as luxury items – what you worry about once you get rich, democratic, and peaceful,” yet, the environment is an “essential ingredient” for peace, Dabelko said. It is often “key to restoring livelihoods and jump-starting the economy” in conflict affected countries.
“Under a rubric or umbrella that we’re calling ‘environmental peacebuilding’ we have systematic efforts to…break those links with conflict,” he said. The future “concern is that because of environmental change, growth in population, growth in consumption,” and rampant inequities, climate change will act as a “threat multiplier.” “A risk analysis frame” is required to think through not only the risk of failing to act but also the risk of acting in ways that have the potential to create conflict if done poorly.
“We’re talking about changing access to resources and introducing money into uncertain political contexts – who gets it for what. That can be done well and that can be done poorly, and if you are talking to the folks in the conflict community, that’s often an inflection point for when conflict is a potential,” Dabelko said. In the context of potentially troublesome adaptations such as biofuel production, hydropower projects, and REDD+, this means taking seriously the well-worn, but apt, mantra of “do no harm” and working to maximize the “triple bottom line” of development, peace, and climate stability.
A question and answer period, moderated by USAID’s Cynthia Gill, followed the presentation with fellow speakers Anne Salomon of Fraser University, Michael Jenkins of Forest Trends, and Martin Palmer from the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (available below).
Eye On:
Ethiopia Provides Model for Improving Climate, Other Data Services in Africa
International Research Institute for Climate and Society
Monday, March 12, 2012
The original version of this article appeared on the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).
In developed countries, we are accustomed to having access to long and detailed records on weather and climate conditions, demographics, disease incidence, and many other types of data. Decisionmakers use this information for a variety of societal benefits: they spot trends, fine-tune public health systems, and optimize crop yields, for example. Researchers use it to test hypotheses, make forecasts, and tweak projections from computer models. What’s more, much of these data are just a mouse click away, for anyone to access for free (see examples for climate and health).
Across much of Africa, however, it’s a different story. By most measures, Africa is the most “data poor” region in the world. Wars and revolutions, natural and manmade disasters, extreme poverty, and unmaintained infrastructure, have left massive gaps in socioeconomic and environmental data sets. Reliable records of temperature, rainfall, and other climate variables are scarce or nonexistent. If they do exist, they’re usually deemed as proprietary and users must pay to get access. This is not an inconsequential matter. Without readily available, reliable data, policy makers’ ability to make smart, well-informed decisions is hobbled.
The problem of data access persisted even in Ethiopia, regarded as having one of the better meteorological services on the continent. Thanks to the recent efforts of Tufa Dinku, a climate scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the situation has improved considerably.
Continue reading on IRI.
Video Credit: Overview of Ethiopia Climate Maprooms, courtesy of IRI.
In developed countries, we are accustomed to having access to long and detailed records on weather and climate conditions, demographics, disease incidence, and many other types of data. Decisionmakers use this information for a variety of societal benefits: they spot trends, fine-tune public health systems, and optimize crop yields, for example. Researchers use it to test hypotheses, make forecasts, and tweak projections from computer models. What’s more, much of these data are just a mouse click away, for anyone to access for free (see examples for climate and health).
Across much of Africa, however, it’s a different story. By most measures, Africa is the most “data poor” region in the world. Wars and revolutions, natural and manmade disasters, extreme poverty, and unmaintained infrastructure, have left massive gaps in socioeconomic and environmental data sets. Reliable records of temperature, rainfall, and other climate variables are scarce or nonexistent. If they do exist, they’re usually deemed as proprietary and users must pay to get access. This is not an inconsequential matter. Without readily available, reliable data, policy makers’ ability to make smart, well-informed decisions is hobbled.
The problem of data access persisted even in Ethiopia, regarded as having one of the better meteorological services on the continent. Thanks to the recent efforts of Tufa Dinku, a climate scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the situation has improved considerably.
Continue reading on IRI.
Video Credit: Overview of Ethiopia Climate Maprooms, courtesy of IRI.
The Missing Links in the Demographic Dividend
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen for the Wilson Center
Friday, March 09, 2012
However, as Lin’s post demonstrates, discussions about the dividend often give rise to two common misconceptions: one, that all youthful age structures open an opportunity for the dividend; and two, that once age structure changes are in place, economic benefits will accrue automatically.
When a Youth Bulge Is Not
Population age structure is the key link between demography and economic development. If countries wish to incur the potential economic benefits of the demographic dividend, their age structure must change. While Lin’s post describes these age structure changes in detail, it completely omits a critical step required for them to happen: fertility reduction.
Lin describes sub-Saharan Africa’s youthful population age structure as having a “youth bulge.” But this is a tricky term.
Most researchers use “youth bulge” to describe large cohorts of young adults (typically ages 15 to 29), regardless of the number of children under 15. But as Sarah Staveteig pointed out in ECSP Report 11, a “bulge” shape is only apparent in a population profile when the number of children is smaller than older age groups. For example, the U.S. age structure in 1980 (see figure below) shows a clear “bulge” of young adults due to the drop in average family size during the 1970s after the baby boom of the 1950s and early 60s. This type of youth bulge can trigger a demographic dividend, provided other sound policies are in place, because dependency ratios (the share of dependent children relative to working-age adults) decline, allowing increased savings, productivity, and investment.
Even though it’s often described as having a youth bulge, a country that simply has many young people (like Iraq in the example below) will not incur the potential economic benefits of the demographic dividend. Whether the under-15 cohort is growing or shrinking is key – and for it to shrink, fertility rates must decline first. Dependency ratios do not decline when a large cohort of youth enters the labor market and those youth are followed by even larger, younger cohorts. In that case, a country’s youthful population is on track to continue unabated into the future.
Unfortunately, Lin conflates these two very different demographic scenarios. “In a country with a youth bulge, as the young adults enter the working age, the country’s dependency ratio – that is, the ratio of the non-working-age population to the working-age population – will decline,” Lin writes. He continues:
If the increase in the number of working-age individuals can be fully employed in productive activities, other things being equal, the level of average income per capita should increase as a result. The youth bulge will become a demographic dividend. However, if a large cohort of young people cannot find employment and earn satisfactory income, the youth bulge will become a demographic bomb, because a large mass of frustrated youth is likely to become a potential source of social and political instability.At first, Lin is writing about populations with a true youth bulge – those where the dependency ratio has declined as fertility has declined. As the post correctly explains, the increase in the proportional size of the labor force, if productively employed, leads to increases in income and savings as families tend to have more workers and fewer dependents.
However, in the second part of the paragraph, Lin describes the potential “bomb” effect of a population with a large share of unemployed and frustrated youth. This is linked to a different kind of age structure, one where fertility rates remain high and the size of the cohorts entering the labor market grows year after year. As Henrik Urdal writes in his seminal study of age structure and conflict, “youth bulges in the context of continued high fertility and high dependency make countries increasingly likely to experience armed conflict.” Once dependency ratios decline – as a consequence of fertility decline – the risk of conflict goes down, even while there is still a large share of young adults.
Dependency Differences: South Korea and the DRC
To illustrate, it’s helpful to compare two different age structures that could be characterized by a “youth bulge” but face quite different development trajectories.
The World Bank post cites the example of South Korea, a frequent case study in the demographic dividend literature. South Korea and the other East Asian “Tigers” experienced annual increases in per capita income on the order of six percent between 1965 and 1990. Fertility in Korea declined over the same period from six children per woman to less than two. Studies indicate that such demographic changes were responsible for between one-fourth and two-fifths of the economic growth in the region.
In contrast, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), young adults ages 15 to 29 comprised 54 percent of the total labor force in 2010, about five percentage points higher than South Korea’s share 30 years ago. The key difference is the size of the dependent younger cohort. Currently, children younger than 15 make up 46 percent of the DRC’s total population. Every 100 working-age adults has to economically support 96 dependents, nearly all of whom are children.
Including the dependency ratio in any discussion of age structure reveals there is little comparison between South Korea 30 years ago and the DRC and many other youthful countries in sub-Saharan Africa today. Women in the DRC have had an average of six children each since 1950, and as long as that fertility rate remains constant, the ratio of dependents to working-age adults will remain essentially equal.
As only six percent of married women in the DRC are using an effective contraceptive method, it is very unlikely that fertility will decline. More than one-quarter of women have an unmet need for family planning, meaning that they have expressed a desire to avoid pregnancy but are not using any contraception. Unless this need is met, fertility will not decline, the dependency ratio will stay high, and the DRC will not have a chance to enjoy the benefits of the demographic dividend. But this caveat is absent from Lin’s post.
More Than Age Structure
The second key misconception about the demographic dividend is that once age structure changes are in place, economic benefits will accrue automatically. Lin thoroughly summarizes the major socioeconomic investments that governments wishing to capitalize on the dividend must make, such as educating young people beyond primary school, improving the health of the population, generating jobs for youth entering the labor market, and shifting employment from agriculture towards manufacturing and service industries.
Other scholars have reviewed the importance of trade openness, flexible labor markets, and stable financial systems that encourage savings and investment – factors that were lacking in Latin America, for example, as its countries achieved a lower dependency ratio in the 1980s and 90s.
As promising as the potential benefits of the demographic dividend may be, they will not be realized without several prerequisites. Before making investments in human capital and other areas of economic development, policymakers must establish policies and programs that promote age structure changes, such as education for girls and the provision of family planning.
In sub-Saharan Africa in particular, the preeminent scholars of the demographic dividend, David Bloom et al, said it best: “If policymakers can urgently place much more emphasis on educating and empowering African girls, who ultimately represent one of the continent’s most important sources of economic and social progress, they can expect their countries to reap corollary rewards.”
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group.
Sources: Bloom, Canning, and Sevilla (2003), Cincotta (2008-09), Gender Action (2011), Goldstone (2008-09), Lin (2012), MEASURE DHS, Staveteig (2005), Tsui and Hebert (2011), UN Population Division, Urdal (2006), World Bank.
Chart Credit: South Korean age structure, 1950, 2010, 2050 (medium variant estimate), data from UN Population Division; Panel A and B, Staveteig (2005); Figures 2 and 3 arranged by Sean Peoples, data from UN Population Division.
Topics:
Africa,
demography,
development,
DRC,
economics,
family planning,
Iraq,
Korea,
population,
U.S.,
World Bank,
youth
More People, Less Biodiversity? The Complex Connections Between Population Dynamics and Species Loss
Laurie Mazur for the Wilson Center
Thursday, March 08, 2012
~ Thomas Jefferson, 1799
This much is clear: As human numbers have grown, the number of species with whom we share the planet has declined dramatically. While it took about 200,000 years for humanity to reach one billion people around 1800, world population has grown sevenfold since then, surpassing seven billion last year.
At the same time, we are witnessing the greatest mass extinction of plant and animal life in the history of human civilization; every year, some 30,000 species become extinct, about three per hour.
The relationship between these two phenomena is not simple. Human impact on the environment is mediated by a host of factors, including culture, technology, institutions, and market forces. And inequitable socioeconomic systems mean that some human beings have far greater impact than others.
But some generalizations can be made. We live on a planet dominated and transformed by human activity. As we have become more numerous, we have also become more adept at altering ecosystems for human use, replacing species-rich natural landscapes with simpler monocultures.
In the last 200 years, human activity has greatly accelerated the rate of species loss. Duke University’s Stuart Pimm and his colleagues calculate that current extinction rates are between 100 and 1,000 times greater than in pre-human times (though more recent studies question whether those numbers are inflated).
Loss of Biodiversity Risks Health of Ecosystems, Economies
That loss of biological diversity (biodiversity, for short) has profound implications for the future of life on Earth. Johan Rockström and his colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre have estimated “planetary boundaries” that humanity cannot cross without massive risks to ecosystem health. They conclude that the boundary for biodiversity loss has already been transgressed, and as a result, many ecosystems have lost the resilience conferred by diversity and are at heightened risk of collapse.
Biodiversity also provides essential – if uncalculated – economic benefits. One study by Conservation International measured the economic value of ecosystem services to poor communities in priority areas for conservation. The authors found that keeping habitats intact was worth three times as much as exploiting them for short-term gain. The UN’s report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) measured the value of intact ecosystems for the poorest people: In India, 47 percent of the income of the poorest comes directly from ecosystems; in Brazil, that figure rises to 89 percent.
Often, the value of biodiversity becomes apparent only when it is lost. For example, with the global decline of honeybee populations, growers can now calculate the monetary value of pollination services that were once provided for free by nature. “Bee pollination is worth $190 billion,” said Pavan Sukhdev, a Yale environmental economist, in an interview with Bloomberg. “But when did a bee ever send you an invoice?”
Population Dynamics Are Significant, But Not Singular, Driver
While the broad association between biodiversity loss and the growth of the human enterprise seems clear enough, the loss of any given species or habitat results from a combination of interlocking demographic, social, political, and economic factors.
But population dynamics do play a significant role, according to Jason Bremner, program director for population, health, and the environment at the Population Reference Bureau. Throughout the Amazon, small-scale farmers initially clear the forest, in hopes of selling the land to consolidators or speculators, Bremner said in an interview. Those smallholders are often migrants attracted to frontiers of the Amazon in search of land and a livelihood because of inequitable land distribution and unsustainable population density in their home regions.
According to a meta-analysis of case studies conducted by Helmut Geist and Eric Lambin in 2001, such population dynamics constitute an “underlying cause” of 61 percent of tropical deforestation. But they warn against a reductive focus on any single factor, such as population or poverty: “the interplay of several proximate as well as underlying factors drive deforestation in a synergetic way,” they write. And, because the interplay of factors is highly contextual, there is no “universal policy” for preventing the loss of habitat and biodiversity.
At a fundamental level though, said University of California-Santa Barbara geographer David López-Carr in an email, “population is an underlying cause of all human-induced forest conversion. It is axiomatic: without people, there is no human driver of deforestation.”
What are the implications for policymakers and practitioners then? Efforts to protect biodiversity must be attuned to local context and take a holistic approach. For example, locally managed marine areas in Fiji halted the decline of marine species and boosted villagers’ incomes by combining traditional resource management practices with modern scientific monitoring. And well-managed “ecotourism” can preserve biodiversity and reduce poverty, according to a study by Craig Leisher of The Nature Conservancy.
Protecting Biodiversity and Empowering Women in the DRC
The best policies, therefore, harness positive synergies among demographic, economic, and social factors. The Population-Health-Environment (PHE) Alliance Project, implemented by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) from 2008 to 2011 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a useful case study. The project combined women’s empowerment, family planning, and basic health interventions with site-based conservation and livelihood efforts in the Monkoto Corridor, which borders Salonga National Park.
Salonga is a critical habitat for a number of endemic and endangered species, including the bonobo, humans’ closest primate relative. The Monkoto corridor separates two halves of the park and serves as a vital pathway for wildlife. It is also home to a population of more than 100,000 people who must survive on the resources available in the corridor, not the park.
When the project began, rates of childhood vaccination in the Monkoto corridor were among the lowest in the country, while rates of malnutrition were among the highest, according to a WWF report. Because the area’s people rely heavily on bush meat for food and income, and lack comparable alternative livelihoods, poaching poses a serious threat to wildlife in Salonga.
In response, WWF helped the Monkoto communities put in place legally binding land zoning plans and promote better land use management. The partners paid special attention to women farmers.
“Women are natural allies for conservation,” said Cara Honzak, a senior technical advisor to the Alliance Project, in an interview. Because women have an intense interest in sustaining natural resources to keep their children healthy, said Honzak, it is important to increase their capacity to make informed decisions about nutrition and involve them in land-use planning and governance.
The project made significant progress toward those ends. For example, it was able to dramatically increase women’s participation in local committees charged with establishing land use plans. At the project’s inception, there were only three women involved in that process; by 2011, women comprised 1,118 of the committees’ 2,580 members.
WWF also provided women and their families with reproductive health services. At the start of the project, Monkoto’s citizens had virtually no access to modern contraception. But a WWF survey found that 56 percent of Monkoto’s women would use contraception if it were available. By 2011, the project consistently saw 300 new family planning users each month.
According to Honzak, this kind of integrated effort can serve as an example for conservation efforts around other at-risk ecosystems. It had a positive impact on the livelihoods of Mokoto’s people, particularly women and children’s health. And in turn, enabling women to choose the size of their families and the spacing of their births helps ensure a more sustainable growth rate and reduce direct pressure on surrounding habitats.
There is no single “magic bullet” to prevent species loss. But as Bremner said, in these frontier areas, “enabling women to achieve their reproductive desires has important benefits for them – and for biodiversity.”
Laurie Mazur is a consultant on population and the environment for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and director of the Population Justice Project.
Sources: AAAS, BioScience, Bloomberg, Gesit and Lambin (2001), Monticello.org, National Geographic, Nature, The Nature Conservancy, Science, TEEB, UNEP, World Bank, World Resources Institute, World Wildlife Fund.
Image Credit: Deforestation for cattle in Brazil, courtesy of flickr user leoffreitas (Leonardo F. Freitas); biodiversity hotspots and human population density map, courtesy of John Williams and Springer.
From the Wilson Center:
Reaching Out to Environmentalists About Population Growth and Family Planning
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Drawing on research by Brian O’Neill (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and others Lovell explained that meeting the unmet need for family planning around the world could provide up to 16 to 29 percent of the emissions reductions required by 2050 in order to avoid more than two degrees of warming (the target set by nations to prevent the most damaging effects of climate change).
For environmentalists and those concerned with climate change, “sometimes the idea has been that population is toxic, that we can’t talk about population growth,” said Nancy Belden of Belden Russonello and Stewart Consulting, but the results of a recent survey and several focus groups conducted in association with Americans for UNFPA demonstrate that there is great potential for engaging the environmental community in such a discussion.
Belden and Lovell were joined by Kate Sheppard from Mother Jones to discuss how the population and environment communities can come together in the lead-up to the Rio+20 UN sustainable development conference.
Besides providing a basic health commodity, empowering women through access to family planning also improves adaptation outcomes, said Lovell. “Climate change is already happening and women and families around the world are suffering from the effects of water scarcity [and] of erratic weather patterns,” she said. But “when women have the ability to plan their family size and have more choices about their families and about their reproductive health and rights, that makes it easier to adapt to those climate change effects that are already taking place.”
Resonating With Environmental Priorities
“The people who really care about the environment are generally the same people who care about access to contraception and birth control and family planning…they’re a ready audience to hear about these connections and they’re a ready audience to take action about them,” said Kate Sheppard. Reproductive rights issues are something that people can really connect with, she said; “most women, most men too…understand why it’s an important issue and they’ve understood it in their own life and they have [a] very strong response to it.”
When we approach the linkages between environment and population, said Sheppard, it is important to recognize the role of empowering language – language about access to services, education, and resources for women.
The aim of the Americans for UNFPA survey was to find out whether environmentalists can be engaged in discussions of population issues such as family planning and international voluntary contraception, and if so, how?
The results show that “environmentalists are ready to talk about population, they’re ready to listen – it’s not toxic,” said Belden. She outlined three key findings:
First, environmentalists prioritize the environment but they also give a high priority to empowering women, said Belden. “Population pressures are seen as an environmental problem…they don’t dismiss it,” yet the “strongest framework that we could come up with…for engaging people on the issues around voluntary family planning and contraception focuses on women.”
Second, the environmental community is relatively optimistic about the potential outcomes of family planning programs and of foreign aid in general. When queried, half of the environmentalists strongly supported the idea of U.S. contributions to UN programs that provide voluntary access to contraception in developing countries, said Belden.
When asked to mark their top priority among a list of possible outcomes of providing voluntary access to contraception, 47 percent of the environmentalists selected either “improving living conditions for women and their families” or “ensuring women have options and can make reproductive decisions” as their top priority. While a significant number are also concerned about stalling population growth, this integrative focus on improving the lives of women and their families is heartening, said Belden.
In the Run-Up to Rio+20, More Than Pop
One point that all three speakers stressed is the need to integrate consumption into the integrated population message. In her survey work, Belden found that “if you don’t talk about consumption in the same breath, [environmentalists] start wanting to put it in there because otherwise…this is someone blaming others.”
Lovell similarly highlighted that “if we’re working to ensure a sustainable planet for future generations to come, we have to think about consumption and population.” For instance, “the United States makes up five percent of the world’s population but consumes 25 percent of the world’s resources,” she said.
Said Sheppard: “It’s not simply a problem that the numbers of people here on the Earth are going up, it’s a problem of how people, especially here in the U.S., live.”
It is imperative – especially from a sustainable development standpoint – that while working towards integrating environment and population we remain focused on a message that includes “using less but still having a high quality of life” here at home, said Sheppard.
Event ResourcesSources: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Photo Credit: “Timorese Traditional Home,” courtesy of United Nations Photo.
How a Gold Mining Boom Is Killing Children in Nigeria
Elizabeth Grossman, Yale Environment 360
Monday, March 05, 2012
In early 2010, while working in the impoverished rural region of Zamfara in northwestern Nigeria, the group Médecins Sans Frontières – Doctors Without Borders – encountered many young children suffering from fevers, seizures, and convulsions. An unusually high number of very young children, many under age five, were dying, and there were many fresh graves.
The doctors initially suspected malaria, meningitis, or typhoid, all common in the region. But when the sick children didn’t respond to anti-malarial drugs or other antibiotics, one of the physicians began to wonder if local mining activity might be implicated. Historically an agricultural area, Zamfara had been experiencing a small-scale gold rush, thanks to rapidly rising gold prices that encouraged the pursuit of even the most marginal sources of ore. Mining work was taking place in and around the villages and within many of the mud-walled compounds where families were using flour mills to pulverize lead-laden rocks to extract gold.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) doctors sent children’s blood samples for testing and the results revealed acute lead poisoning. Many of the children had blood lead levels dozens, even hundreds, of times higher than international safety standards. Within a week, an emergency medical and environmental remediation team arrived and began to grapple with an epidemic of childhood lead poisoning that is being called unprecedented in modern times. In the past two years, more than 400 children have died in Zamfara, more than 2,000 have been treated with chelation therapy, and thousands more have been – and continue to be – severely poisoned by exposure to pervasive lead dust.
Continue reading on Yale Environment 360.
Photo Credit: “Conflict minerals 1,” courtesy of the ENOUGH Project/Sasha Lezhnev.
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