• woodrow wilson center
  • ecsp

New Security Beat

Subscribe:
  • mail-to
  • Who We Are
  • Topics
    • Population
    • Environment
    • Security
    • Health
    • Development
  • Columns
    • China Environment Forum
    • Choke Point
    • Dot-Mom
    • Navigating the Poles
    • New Security Broadcast
    • Reading Radar
  • Multimedia
    • Water Stories (Podcast Series)
    • Backdraft (Podcast Series)
    • Tracking the Energy Titans (Interactive)
  • Films
    • Water, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Animated Short)
    • Paving the Way (Ethiopia)
    • Broken Landscape (India)
    • Scaling the Mountain (Nepal)
    • Healthy People, Healthy Environment (Tanzania)
  • Publications
  • Events
  • Contact Us

NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • ‘UK Royal Society: Call for Submissions’ “People and the Planet” Study To Examine Population, Environment, Development Links

    August 12, 2010 By Wilson Center Staff
    By Marie Rumsby of the Royal Society’s In Verba blog.

    In the years that followed the Iranian revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran and the country went to war against Iraq, the women of Iran were called upon to provide the next generation of soldiers. Following the war the country’s fertility rate fell from an average of over seven children per woman to around 1.7 children per woman – one of the fastest falls in fertility rates recorded over the last 25 years.

    Iran is an interesting example but every country has its own story to tell when it comes to population levels and rates of change. The global population is rising and is set to hit 9 billion by 2050. And whilst fertility rates in Ethiopia are on the decline, its total population is projected to double from around 80 million today, to 160 million in 2050.

    Earlier this month, the Royal Society announced it is undertaking a new study which will look at the role of global population in sustainable development. “People and the Planet” will investigate how population variables – such as fertility, mortality, ageing, urbanization, and migration – will be affected by economies, environments, societies, and cultures, over the next 40 years and beyond.

    The group informing the study is chaired by Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston FRS, and includes experts from a range of disciplines, from all over the world. With names on the group such as Professor Demissie Habte (President of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences), Professor Alastair Fitter FRS (Professor Environmental Sciences, University of York) and Professor John Cleland FBA (Professor of Medical Demography, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), there’s bound to be some lively discussions.

    Linked to the announcement of the study, the Society held a PolicyLab with Fred Pearce, environmental journalist, and Jonathon Porritt, co-founder of Forum for the Future, to discuss the significance of population in sustainable development.

    Both speakers have been campaigning against over-consumption for many years. Jonathon Porritt has been a keen advocate for fully funded, fully engaged voluntary family planning in every country in the world that wants it.

    “In my opinion, that would allow us to stabilize global population at closer to 8 billion, rather than 9 billion. And if we did it seriously for forty years, that is an achievable goal.” Porritt thinks that stabilizing global population at 8 billion rather than 9 billion would save a large number of women’s lives, and suggests “you cannot ignore the gap between 8 billion and 9 billion if you are thinking seriously about climate change.”

    Fred Pearce acknowledges that population matters, but stresses that it is consumption (and how we produce what we produce) that we need to focus on. He feels it is too convenient for us to focus on population.

    According to Fred, the global average is now 2.6 children per woman – that’s getting close to the global replacement level of 2.3 children per woman.

    “It is no longer human numbers that are the main threat……It’s the world’s consumption patterns that we need to fix, not its reproductive habits,” said Pearce.

    The Society will be taking a long look at some of these issues, assessing the latest scientific evidence and uncertainty around population levels and rates of change. The “People and the Planet” study is due for publication in early 2012, ahead of the Rio+20 UN Earth Summit. The Society is currently seeking evidence to inform this study from a wide-range of stakeholders.

    The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2010. For more information on submissions, please see the Royal Society’s full call for evidence announcement.

    Image Credit: “In Verba” courtesy of the Royal Society.
    Topics: climate change, consumption, demography, development, family planning, Iran, livelihoods, natural resources, PHE, population, UK, urbanization
    • Anonymous

      I get so cross at this: 'Limit population growth OR limit consumption'. IT'S BOTH – or mankind is doomed.

    • http://www.scribd.com/doc/29285612/Population-crises-in-seemingly-empty-environments-ppt rocky xviii

      As a first consideration, we should note that a graph depicting our population growth over the past ten millennia clearly shows that we are skyrocketing straight upward along the y-axis of our graph in a classic display of late-phase exponential conditions (example – http://www.flickr.com/photos/pali_nalu). Our data set also shows that beginning with a world population of two billion in 1930 we will reach seven billion sometime in 2011 (FIVE additional billions in a single human lifetime), with still more billions (numbers eight and nine) on-track to arrive by mid-century. Delayed feedbacks, overshoot, and climb-and-collapse population events all constitute real-world population phenomena, and no other animals in the history of the earth have EVER: (a) supplemented their biological and metabolic wastes with a daily planet-wide avalanche of societal and industrial wastes the way that we do, and (b) used industrialized worldwide mechanisms to inflict the sheer levels of physical damage and ecosystem damage, degradation, and eradication the way that we do.

    • Anonymous

      The issues listed in the CALL FOR EVIDENCE – and – the ideas promulgated by Fred Pearce and Jonathon Porritt regarding over-consumption
      do not recognize how long carrying capacity overshoot has existed. Porritt's thesis that "stabilizing global population at 8 billion rather than 9 billion would save a large number of women’s lives" demonstrates a belief that we can carry on business-as-usual with minor modifications to the global birth rate.

      Here are two essays suggesting that cultivation agriculture is a failed experiment that has been responsible for the ability of human populations to grow exponentially and do serious damage to the very ecosystems upon which they are dependent.

      —————————————–

      THE FIRST IS John Feeney’s (WELL REFERENCED) new article:

      'Agriculture: ending the world as we know it.' Here's the link:

      http://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/html/aug10-20.htm

      – as you will see from Feeney’s short article, and the list of URL REFERENCES that you can click on and read —- there is growing recognition that cultivation agriculture must ULTIMATELY be abandoned.

      John C. Feeney
      http://www.johnfeeney.net/

      +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

      THE SECOND IS MINE

      I invite you to read my treatise on the overshoot of carrying capacity that has been developing for 10,000 years as humans have mined and diminished the very resources upon which they are dependent for their sustenance. I wish I had known about "the quinacrine pellet method of nonsurgical permanent female contraception – QS" when I wrote the article ———————– see: http://www.isafonline.org —– that appears to offer a very efficacious method of fertility control by individuals who are convinced that this is the right thing to do.

      I have been interested in the relationship between agriculture and population growth since about 1969, and I started writing about the necessity to curb population growth BEFORE the new 'green revolution' crop varieties were released by Norman Borlaug and his compatriots. Borlaug himself opined that the new crop wheat and rice varieties, being produced by CYMITT in Mexico and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines in the early 1970s, were only stop gap measures – and that the necessity to constantly increase food production would never end if global population growth was not halted.

      I believe that we are now seeing the ramifications of a global 10,000 year old debt crisis (PONZI SCHEME) characterized by the creation of money that supposedly represented actual wealth. Real wealth is the ability to produce food and fibre for the needs of the Earth's human population. This 10,000 year old 'PONZI SCHEME' has incorrectly assumed that environmental services such as soil fertility and other supposedly renewable natural resources were externalities with infinite capacity that need not be accounted for.

      I have proposed that humanity "overstepped" the long-term sustainable productive capacity of the soils upon which it relies for its sustenance — as soon as cultivation agriculture was adopted.

      My thesis suggests the first and most important resource humans have used non renewably (long before fossil fuel depletion/peak oil) is the arable soil on the planet; soil mining by cultivation agriculture began ~ 10,000 years ago. If my thesis is correct — then the 'population bomb', that continues to make natural resource management problematic, exploded a long, long time ago, see:

      'Long term agricultural overshoot'

      http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6048

      Peter Salonius

      Durham Bridge
      New Brunswick
      E6C 1K5 Canada

      email petersalonius@hotmail.com

    • http://www.panearth.org SESALMONY@aol.com

      Regardless of what we believe because it is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially correct, religiously tolerated and culturally syntonic to do so, whatsoever is is, is it not? Please assist me by examining research of the population dynamics of the human species. The implications of this research appear to be potentially profound. If human population dynamics is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other species, then the unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers in our time could be the proverbial "mother" of the human-induced global challenges looming before the family of humanity. If this global challenge continues to be ignored, the human family could end up winning some Pyrrhic victories over subordinate global challenges but losing the larger struggle for survival itself.

      Please note the following perspective from Sir Fred Hoyle that dates back to 1964, a time prior to the publication of Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” and the Club of Rome’s seminal work, “Limits to Growth.”

      begin—-

      “It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance… and one chance only.”

      end—-

      It appears to me that Sir Fred Hoyle was asking people years ago, when I was still a teenager, to carefully consider and rigorously examine a superordinate situation that was too dangerous to ignore… that dwarfed other already identified global challenges. Rather than seriously scrutinize population dynamics leading to the human overpopulation of the Earth, which would require experts to rivet their attention on the placement of the human species within the natural order of living things, the topic was avoided, just as it is being ignored now. At the beginning of my lifecycle in 1945 there were about 2.8+/- billion human beings on Earth. Only 65 years later 6.8+/- billion people are members of the human community.

      So much time has been wasted recently by the brighest and best of my generation. The implications of such an unfortunate failure of nerve appear to be far-reaching. We cannot address problems, the root cause of which we refuse to acknowledge.

      Representative democracies led by human beings with feet of clay could readily become a force too formidable to ignore with remarkable speed, I believe, but first humankind needs to be helped to see why a force too formidable to ignore is necessary as well as to understand more adequately the nature of the primary human-induced global challenge that presents itself to the family of humanity in our time; that takes its shape in the form of a colossal looming threat to future human wellbeing, environmental health and the integrity of Earth as a fit place for human habitation.

      Steven Earl Salmony
      AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
      established 2001
      1834 North Lakeshore Drive
      Chapel Hill, NC 27514-6733
      http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
      http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
      http://www.panearth.org/

    • http://www.panearth.org SESALMONY@aol.com

      Recent research by Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel appears to indicate with remarkable simplicity that human population dynamics are essentially similar to the population dynamics of other species.

      Since many too many population experts remain silent about this research and blogmeisters associated with the mass media refuse to discuss the peer-reviewed evidence, perhaps you could take a look at it, make your comments, and encourage by your example others to do the same. You can find the article, Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply, by Hopfenberg and Pimentel on the worldwide web or at the following link, . Other articles and a slideshow presentation on human population dynamics and human overpopulation can also be found at this link.

      Thank you,

      Steven Earl Salmony

    • http://www.panearth.org/ SESALMONY@aol.com

      Dear Professor John Cleland, Dr. Joel Cohen, Sir Partha Dasgupta, Professor Malcolm Potts, Professor Jules Pretty and Professor Zheng Xaioying:

      Thanks for all you are doing.

      For the first 50 years of my life, matters of greatest interest to you and and members of the Royal Society's Working Group of Experts were outside my awareness. I have come quite late in life to the field of action where the fully expected impacts of billions of human beings upon Earth’s finite resources and frangible ecosystem services are being acknowledged and addressed, thanks to scientists who have maintained their fidelity to science and humanity. For too many years I lived in a dream world, the profane one devised by the self-proclaimed masters of the universe among us. Until late in life I had not adequate awareness that a single generation would elect sponsors of arrogant, foolhardy, greed-mongering economic powerbrokers who would formulate policies and implement business plans that irreversibly degrade Earth's environs, recklessly dissipate its limited resources, relentlessly diminish its biodiversity, destabilize its climate and threaten the very future of children everywhere. My failures include not communicating well enough that I and my greedy generation have been ravaging the Earth and effectively behaving in a way that could lead to the destruction of our sacred home as a fit place for habitation by the children (let alone coming generations). Even though it is discomforting and difficult to responsibly perform our duties to science and humanity, at least we can speak out loudly, clearly and often about these unfortunate circumstances and in the process educate one another as best we can to the "rules of the house" in our planetary home. Unfortunately I do not have answers to forbidding questions related to the patently unsustainable 'trajectory' of human civilization in its present, colossally expansive and ultimately destructive form.

      As problematic is the ruinous determination of many too many experts who collude regularly in order to consciously obstruct honest discussion of the best available scientific evidence of what could somehow be real. If what could be real about the human condition and the Earth we inhabit is not confronted with intellectual honesty, the best available science, moral courage and careful action, how is it possible for the family of humanity to respond ably to challenges before us? What mistake in human history could be greater than the ones made in our time by so-called leaders who direct the human species down the primrose path we are taking. What if this leadership causes humankind to precipitate inadvertently the demise of life as we know it in our time?

      By reporting what is true to you regarding human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth, perhaps this Working Group can help the rest of us awaken collectively to the human-driven ecological challenges that appear to loom before humankind, threaten life as we know it and put at risk the future of children everywhere.

      Sincerely,

      Steve Salmony

    • http://www.panearth.org/ SESALMONY@aol.com

      One day soon I trust a collective awakening will occur, but likely not before the Royal Society's Working Group of Experts on Population Growth and other courageous and knowledgeable people with “acquired sight” choose to speak loudly and clearly with one voice, too formidable to ignore, of what is obvious and true to them. Each human being with feet of clay has this responsibility to assume, this duty to perform, I believe.

      Silence is a mortal enemy of everything that matters, I suppose.

    • http://www.panearth.org/ SESALMONY@aol.com

      Dear Esteemed Colleagues,

      No amount of rationalization or excuse will pass muster when the issue is the conscious denial of science.

      The abject failure of every major legitimate scientific group to respond to the exceptionally strong evidence of human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth from Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel is simply inexcusable. All have been effectively ignoring research from outstanding scientists who have devoted their lives to actually observing data and trying to interpret it in an intellectually honest manner.

      The willful avoidance of the open discussion of science, especially the scientific research of human population dynamics, is as unconscionable as it is destructive. Experts who have remained silent need to be stood up to and directed to assume their responsibilities to science and their duties to humanity. Is there a reasonable justification for elective mutism in response to carefully collected and honestly analyzed data?

      The tasks at hand for scientists are to freely acknowledge, critique and interpret evidence, I suppose, and to encourage that evidence to be examined from different viewpoints. It is irresponsible and pernicious for scientists to remain silent because they are slowing the development of momentum for necessary change in population policy and programming, I believe.

      Sincerely,

      Steve

    • http://www.panearth.org SESALMONY@aol.com

      There is an urgent need to examine the science of human population dynamics. The topic of human population dynamics has not been and is not now being openly discussed.

      Let us imagine for a moment that the growth of the human population today is the “mother” of human-driven global challenges looming before humankind and knowledgeable people willfully refuse to speak about it. How can that behavior be construed as correct? On what authority is silence in response to science condoned? Who has the right to deny the existence of knowledge of something that threatens all of us? Is there no one who has determined that experts have a “duty to warn” humanity in such dire circumstances as exist when the very future of children everywhere could be put at risk soon?

      Before I started the AWAREness Campaign in 2001, I fully anticipated that the publication of peer-reviewed scientific evidence regarding human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth would be rigorously scrutinized, carefully examined and objectively reported by appropriately trained and educated experts. To my astonishment that did not occur. The experts remained mute. The evidence was neither sensibly refuted nor affirmed. There was only a deafening silence. After some months passed, I concluded that experts must not believe the evidence regarding the human population but could not rebutt it either. So the AWAREness Campaign began. Even now, years later, I believe the silence of so many indicates that the research is virtually irrefutable on the one hand and unbelievable on the other. It appears that we are in need of a transformed scientific imagination by means of which scientists with appropriate expertise are freed from inadequate thought and time-honored theory…freed to carefully examine and skillfully report new, unforeseen and unfortunately unwelcome scientific research regarding the human population.

      So here we are in 2010. With the rare exception of a handful of pre-eminent scientists who are willing to speak truth-as-he-sees-it to the powerful, elective mutism is effectively vanquishing science with regard to extant evidence of human population numbers.

      If the research to which I have unsuccessfully tried to draw attention for so long is fatally flawed and completely wrong, then I trust the Royal Society will accept my invitation to expose me for the fool that I surely am. On the other hand, if the scientific evidence is somehow on the correct track, then there is plenty of work for everyone in the human community to begin doing in earnest. It appears to me that there is just enough space-time for us to transform human consciousness, adopt sustainable lifestyles and right-size business enterprises, but we need to get started now.

    • Pingback: Google()

Join the Conversation

  • RSS
  • subscribe
  • facebook
  • G+
  • twitter
  • iTunes
  • podomatic
  • youtube
Tweets by NewSecurityBeat

Trending Stories

  • unfccclogo1
  • Pop at COP: Population and Family Planning at the UN Climate Negotiations

Featured Media

Backdraft Podcast

play Backdraft
Podcasts

More »

What You're Saying

  • 49890944808_c7d6dfef74_c Why Feminism Is Good for Your Health
    Melinda Cadwallader: "Feminism materializes through investment in human capital and caregiving sectors of the economy...
  • 49890944808_c7d6dfef74_c Why Feminism Is Good for Your Health
    Melinda Cadwallader: People who refuse to acknowledge patriarchy are often the ones who benefit from it. So please, say...
  • Water desalination pipes A Tale of Two Coastlines: Desalination in China and California
    Dr S Sundaramoorthy: It is all fine as theory. What about the energy cost? Arabian Gulf has the money from its own oil....

Related Stories

No related stories.

  • woodrow
  • ecsp
  • RSS Feed
  • YouTube
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • Publications
  • Events
  • Wilson Center
  • Contact Us
  • Print Friendly Page

© Copyright 2007-2023. Environmental Change and Security Program.

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. All rights reserved.

Developed by Vico Rock Media

Environmental Change and Security Program

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center

  • One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
  • 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
  • Washington, DC 20004-3027

T 202-691-4000