“Population pressures and diminishing land holdings – due to high fertility rates, war and genocide, and subsequent migration – have caused a rapid decrease in the forested and protected areas and increased soil infertility and food insecurity” in Rwanda, USAID’s Irene Kitzantides told a Wilson Center audience.

Kitzantides, a population, health, and environment advisor and global health fellow, said “the population is projected to reach over 14 million by 2025” – nearly one-third more than today, due to the country’s high fertility rate of nearly 5.5 children per women–which could continue to negatively impact forests and food supplies.

Maternal mortality rates in many low income countries, such as India, are declining, according to a recent study by researchers at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. According to the report, maternal deaths have fallen from 526,000 a year in 1980 to 342,900 in 2008. This news, while welcoming, has caused dissent among some global health activists who fear donors and policymakers will dismiss the issue and call into question the higher maternal mortality rates last reported by the United Nations. While concerns over monitoring and evaluation raise important methodology questions, this news must also serve as catalyst for world leaders and donors to take action and recognize that investing in women pays.

The data reported by IHME only concludes what maternal health advocates already know. “We know how to save women’s lives, we don’t need a cure…this is a political problem and political will is essential,” said Theresa Shaver, director of White Ribbon Alliance, at a Wilson Center event in December 2008. Greater funding for family planning and access to emergency obstetric care and HIV/AIDS services should all be included in a scaling up resources for improved maternal health programs. “Without HIV, annual maternal deaths would have been 281,500 in 2008,” said Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, in last week’s Lancet comments.

Investing in contraception and family planning services through vertical funding mechanisms can reduce maternal mortality rates by addressing all of a woman’s health needs at the time of service. To widen the platform of comprehensive services for women and their families, efforts to link public health services and offer more at one location should be expanded. “Many women have expressed a need for contraception and family planning services…when you offer family planning services on-site with HIV services, you have a huge uptake in family planning use,” shared Michelle Moloney-Kitts, assistant coordinator at the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator at a the Wilson Center in December 2009.

Yet political will remains in short supply. “Despite strong advocacy efforts, political leaders have either ignored the call or failed to make the health of women in pregnancy a priority,” stated Horton. Six countries–Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan–account for over half of all maternal deaths worldwide, and increased investment in these countries will improve maternal health targets, such as Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 seeking to reduce maternal deaths by 75 percent.

Progress is possible and “policymakers are more likely to act on issues that they think they can do something about,” said Jeremy Shiffman, associate professor of public administration at Syracuse University, at the Wilson Center in March 2009. The maternal health community must rally around these positive findings and galvanize support for greater financial contributions. “Two decades of concerted campaigning by those dedicated to maternal health is working,” said Horton.” “[G]reater investment in that work is likely to deliver even greater benefits.”

Calyn Ostrowski is the program associate for the Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative.

Photo Credits: A woman in India safely delivers her baby in the hospital through the Madhya Pradesh Health Sector Reform program. Courtesy Flickr user Department for International Development

“Population, Health and Human Settlements” is the second chapter in the Rwandan government’s Rwanda State of Environment and Outlook. The chapter highlights the Rwandan government’s recognition of the interconnections between population, health, and environment, noting that population “can influence the state of the environment” and pose strains “on available public infrastructure, limited land, and natural resources.” The chapter examines Rwanda’s population growth and distribution, the state of “environmental health” in rural and urban areas, and health indicators relating to child and maternal health and HIV/AIDS. It goes on to describe government strategies to “improve settlements and human welfare.” “As population pressure is one of the key drivers of environmental degradation and poverty,” the chapter’s authors write, “the implementation of the population policy, especially aspects that address high fertility rates, gender and reproductive health, migration and human settlements” is increasingly important.

“Policies that have the effect…of leading to lower fertility and to slower population growth can be considered ‘win-win’ from the climate point of view,” said Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at a recent Wilson Center event on his latest research. Yet while the connection between demographic change and CO2 emissions is implicitly understood among both researchers and policymakers, it “has not really caught on,” he added.

In response to critiques of earlier studies looking at demographic change and CO2 emissions—which the climate research community has faulted for their lack of sophistication, use of unfamiliar analytic approaches, and failure to clearly demonstrate the magnitude of the connection—O’Neill is using a novel, more rigorous approach that he hopes will provide a clearer understanding of the links between demography and climate change.

The Population Factor

To generate CO2 emissions scenarios for the next 100 years, O’Neill’s team used the Population-Environment-Technology (PET) Model, originally created by Lawrence H. Goulder and Michael Dalton of Stanford. The PET Model takes its basic assumptions on regional economic growth, technological development, change in population characteristics, and other factors from the IPCC’s A2 and B2 scenarios, but replaces each scenario’s singular population growth curve with high and low alternatives from the United Nations Population Division.

Like other climate models, the PET Model divides the world into nine regions. “You don’t want to treat economies—or the demography, the consumption patterns, the energy system, and so on—of sub-Saharan Africa the same as you do for the U.S. or EU,” he said.

What makes the O’Neill’s approach unique, however, is his attention to the sub-regional level. “Typically in these models…you break the world up into nine regions, but then you treat everyone in sub-Saharan Africa the same, everyone in China the same,” said O’Neill.

By drawing on data from detailed surveys of 800,000 households from 35 countries, O’Neill and his team demonstrated that the distinctions between urban and rural, older and younger, and smaller and larger households hold important implications for carbon emissions. This inclusion of demographic sub-factors allows a deeper degree of analysis than models that treat all households the same. They found that age structure, household size, and urbanization all altered emissions outputs.

Could Bending Population Growth Curves Reduce Emissions?

In the long run, the potential for demographic shifts to reduce CO2 emissions “is a big number,” said O’Neill. In the medium term, for example by the middle of the century, results are less clear. To compare population-related emissions reductions to other carbon-reduction opportunities, he evoked Socolow and Pacala’s “stabilization wedge” framework. The wedge framework posits 15 opportunities, or wedges, to eventually reduce CO2 emissions by 1 billion tons of carbon equivalent per year. They contend that implementing any 7 of the wedges could stabilize CO2 emissions by 2050 and, if followed by additional measures reducing emissions below today’s levels, would stabilize the atmospheric concentration of CO2 at 550 ppm and forestall the worst impacts of climate change.

Would reducing population growth equal a wedge? The full results, currently under review at a scientific journal, will seek to answer this question. “Slower population growth can’t solve the climate problem,” he concluded. “But it can certainly help.”

C-Learn, developed by the coalition group Climate Interactive, is a three-region climate simulator that allows users to input targets for fossil fuels emissions, emissions from deforestation, and reductions from afforestation. The app then outputs the expected results for atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temperature. The simulator is a free, public version of the more complicated C-ROADS, a tool designed to help policymakers compare the predicted effects of particular climate change mitigation policies.

Although interesting, C-Learn notably lacks the option to input assumptions regarding population growth rates, let alone those concerning more nuanced factors such as age structure, urbanization rates, or household size, the importance of which were recently discussed at the Wilson Center by the National Center for Atmospheric Research‘s Brian O’Neill. Population is a significant factor in determining what can be expected as reasonable emission targets and the failure to include space for demographic assumptions is a significant short-coming.

Charles Kenny’s latest article, “Bomb Scare: The World Has a Lot of Problems; an Exploding Population Isn’t One of Them” reminds me of a late-night episode of Seinfeld: a re-run played for those who missed the original broadcast. Kenny does a nice job of filling Julian Simon’s shoes. What’s next? Will Jeffrey Sachs do a Paul Ehrlich impersonation? Oh, Lord, help me; I hope not.

I’ve already seen the finale. Not the one where Jerry, George, and Kramer go to jail — the denouement of the original “Simon and Ehrlich” show. After the public figured out that each successive argument (they never met to debate) over Malthus’s worldview was simply a rehash of the first — a statement of ideology, rather than policy — they flipped the channel.

Foreign Policy could avoid recycling this weary and irrelevant 200-year-old debate by instead exploring food security from the state-centric perspective with which policymakers are accustomed. While economists might hope for a seamless global grain production and food distribution system, it exists only on their graphs.

Cropland, water, farms, and markets are still part and parcel of the political economy of the nations in which they reside. Therefore they are subject to each state’s strategic interests, political considerations, local and regional economic forces, and historical and institutional inefficiencies.

From this realistic perspective, it is much less important that world population will soon surpass 7 billion people, and more relevant that nearly two dozen countries have dropped below established benchmarks of agricultural resource scarcity (less than 0.07 hectares of cropland per person, and/or less than 1000 cubic meters of renewable fresh water per person).

Today, 21 countries—with some 600 million people—have lost, for the foreseeable future (and perhaps forever), the potential to sustainably nourish most of their citizens using their own agricultural resources and reasonably affordable technological and energy inputs. Instead, these states must rely on trade with–and food aid from–a dwindling handful of surplus grain producers.

By 2025, another 15 countries will have joined their ranks as a result of population growth alone (according to the UN medium variant projection). By then, about 1.4 billion people will live in those 36 states—with or without climate change.

For the foreseeable future, poor countries will be dependent on an international grain market that has recently experienced unprecedented swings in volume and speculation-driven price volatility; or the incentive-numbing effects of food aid. As demand rises, the poorest states spend down foreign currency reserves to import staples, instead of using it to import technology and expertise to support their own economic development.

Meanwhile, wealthier countries finding themselves short of water and land either heavily subsidize local agriculture (e.g., Japan, Israel, and much of Europe) or invest in cropland elsewhere (e.g., China, India, and Saudi Arabia). And some grain exporters—like Thailand—decided it might be safer to hold onto some of their own grain to shield themselves from a future downturn in their own harvest. All of this is quite a bit more complex than either Malthus could have imagined or Kenny cares to relate.

It hardly matters why food prices spiked and remained relatively high—whether it is failed harvests, growing demand for grain-fed meat, biofuels, profit-taking by speculators, or climate change. Like it or not, each has become an input into those wiggly lines called grain price trends, and neither individual states nor the international system appears able or willing to do much about any of them.

From the state-centric perspective, hunger is sustained by:

1. The state’s inability or lack of desire to maintain a secure environment for production and commerce within its borders;
2. Its incapacity to provide an economic and trade policy environment that keeps farming profitable, food markets adequately stocked and prices reasonably affordable (whether produce comes from domestic or foreign sources); and
3. Its unwillingness or inability to supplement the diets of its poor.

In some countries, aspects of population age structure or population density could possibly affect all three. In others, population may have little effect at all.

What bugs me most about Kenny’s re-run is its disconnect with current state-centric food policy concerns, research, and debates (even as the U.S. administration and Congress are focusing on food security, with a specific emphasis on improving the lives of women.—Ed.).

Another critique of Malthus’s 200-year-old thesis hardly informs serious policy discussions. Isn’t Foreign Policy supposed to be about today’s foreign policy?

Richard Cincotta is a consultant with the Environmental Change and Security Program and the demographer-in-residence at the H.L. Stimson Center in Washington, DC.

Photo Credit “The Bombay Armada” courtesy of Flickr user lecercle.

It was a bit of a shock to hear population-environment connections being discussed on television, including the Most Trusted Name in News (aka Jon Stewart’s Daily Show), as well as CNN’s Amanpour, late last month.

“The MAHB, the Culture Gap, and Some Really Inconvenient Truths,” authored by Paul Ehrlich and appearing in the most recent edition of PLoS Biology, is a call for greater participation in the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB). MAHB was created, he writes, because societies understand the magnitude of environmental challenges, yet often still fail to act. “The urgent need now is clearly not for more natural science…but rather for better understanding of human behaviors and how they can be altered to direct Homo sapiens onto a course toward a sustainable society.” MAHB aims to create an inclusive global discussion of “the human predicament, what people desire, and what goals are possible to achieve in a sustainable society” in the hopes of encouraging a “rapid modification” in human behavior.