A new tool from the Center for Global Development, Forest Monitoring for Action (FORMA) tool, uses satellite data to monitor tropical deforestation on a monthly basis. Using publicly available feeds from NASA and other sources, FORMA detects the spread of deforestation in areas as small as 1 square kilometer. The video above uses FORMA to animate the rapidly growing damage in Indonesia over the last four years.

In a meeting with business leaders in Lahore in late October, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pointedly warned of the potential economic impacts of Pakistan’s rapidly growing population: “There has to be…in any plan for your own economic future, a hard look at where you’re going to get the resources to meet these needs. You do have somewhere between 170 and 180 million people. Your population is projected to be about 300 million as the current birth rates, which are among the highest in the world, continue,” she said.

Pakistan is ranked 141 (out of 182 countries) in the Human Development Index. High rates of unemployment are compounded by low levels of education and human capital. Clinton noted that Pakistani women are more vulnerable to poverty; only 40 percent are literate, compared to 68 percent of men.

The Secretary’s emphasis on the need to provide adequate education, jobs, and resources to motivate economic growth and improve well-being is welcome. But demography also has important political consequences. U.S. policymakers and the Pakistani government should consider the impact of population dynamics on the country’s intensifying instability.

As Pakistan’s population grows rapidly, it is maintaining a very young age structure: in 2005, two-thirds of its population was younger than age 30. Research by Population Action International has shown that countries with very young age structures are three times as likely to experience outbreaks of civil conflict than those with a more balanced age distribution.

The members of a “youth bulge” are not inherently dangerous, but when governments are unable to foster employment opportunities or the prospects of stability, a young age structure can serve to exacerbate the risks of conflict, as recently noted by John O. Brennan, assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, in a speech on “A New Approach to Safeguarding Americans.”

As Secretary Clinton and her colleagues consider the complex barriers to achieving peace and stability for Pakistan’s people, their humanitarian and development strategies should include demographic issues. When couples are able to choose the number and timing of their children, very young age structures like Pakistan’s, can change.

Family planning and reproductive health services are fundamental human rights, but remain out of reach for many in Pakistan, where one-quarter of all married women (and 31 percent of the poorest) have an unmet need for family planning.

Greater access to family planning would lower fertility rates and increase the share of working-age adults in the population. In this transition, countries can harness the “demographic dividend”—a change that could turn Pakistan’s age structure into an economic opportunity.

However, funding from the United States—the world’s largest single donor for international family planning—has declined by one-third over the past 15 years. The foreign assistance funding priorities of the Obama administration should reflect this recognition of the linkages between population, development, and stability.

By addressing the high unmet need for family planning and reproductive health services of women in countries like Pakistan, the United States could help to create a more balanced age structure in future generations—and promote stability at the same time.

Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a research associate at Population Action International (PAI). She is the primary author of the 2007 PAI report The Shape of Things to Come: Why Age Structure Matters to a Safer, More Equitable World..

Right now, Rich Cincotta is live on “PRB Discuss Online,” answering the question, “Does a Young Age Structure Thwart Democratic Governments?” He is responding to reader questions like “Do Democratic governments being overcome by poverty and high unemployment rates have a chance to succeed” and “Why do you think the mainstream demography community is so slow or unwilling to pick up the research questions you have pursued?” Read the transcript and Cincotta’s recent article on this topic, “Half a Chance: Youth Bulges and Transitions to Liberal Democracy.”

A new World Bank working paper, “Breaking the Waves? Does Education Mediate the Relationship Between Youth Bulges and Political Violence?” by Bilal Barakat and Henrik Urdal finds “evidence that large, young male population bulges are more likely to increase the risk of conflict in societies where male secondary education is low”–particularly in low and middle-income countries. Mardy Shualy of Foreign Policy’s blog suggests policymakers do the math to compare the costs of secondary education to the economic toll of war and civil conflict.

Today’s episode of NPR’s “To the Point” with Warren Olney will focus on “Global Warming and the Geo-Political Map,” seeking to answer the question, “What are the risks to natural resources, immigration, and political stability worldwide?”

As one of the four panelists, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko will draw on his recent article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and ECSP’s climate-security resources.

Climate security has been heating up the media for the last few months, although most news coverage has been rather thin. That’s understandable, given the complexity of the drivers involved, and the crushing constraints on environmental reporters’ time and budgets these days. But climate security is a politically powerful argument, one which advocates from all over the political spectrum have increasingly adopting, and it deserves a more thorough, thoughtful treatment.

“Come to Attention,” a panel at this year’s SEJ annual conference (audio) moderated by ClimateWire’s Lisa Friedman, delved into some of the finer points of this often oversimplified connection. As part of the panel, Dabelko outlined seven cautions to keep in mind and suggestions for improving coverage of the difficult link.

While Grist’s Robert McClure jokingly called the session “doom and gloom without the sense of humor,” Dabelko ended on a positive note, pointing out that by coming together to battle climate change, countries may build bridges to peace, rather than war–particularly if the militaries cooperate in the fight.

In a recent op-ed, Dabelko and the U.S. Army War College’s Kent Butts argue that climate could be one of the most productive avenues for improving military relations with China, suggesting that “U.S. and Chinese militaries should jointly assess the security implications of climate change that concern both sides: rising sea levels, changing precipitation patterns, uncertain migration scenarios, and instability in resource-rich regions.”

“To the Point” airs live online at 3 PM EST. In the Washington, DC, area listen to it at 10 PM EST tonight on WAMU 88.5.

Population and climate change get short shrift in the media—that is, until Rush Limbaugh urges you to commit suicide. It’s a disturbing sign that this extremely complex topic only gets play when the knives come out. And as this summer’s health care circus demonstrates, the blogosphere is often more interested in covering the shouting than the issues at hand.

“Covering Climate: What’s Population Got to Do With It?”—webcast live from the Wilson Center—will analyze the challenges facing science and environmental reporters as they prepare to cover what New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin calls “the story of our time.” Cosponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists and the International Reporting Project, the panel—including Dennis Dimick of National Geographic and the Nation’s Emily Douglas—will discuss the significant barriers to nuanced reporting, including stovepiped beats, the shrinking news hole, and old-fashioned squeamishness.

However, in the past month, there’s been a veritable baby boom of news coverage on climate change and population. Spurred by three high-profile reports—the study commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust, research in the Bulletin of the WHO, and an editorial in the Lancet—the mainstream media and some key bloggers finally got some condoms in their climate change.

It’s gratifying to finally see this issue pop up in the media, almost a year to the day after the 2008 SEJ conference panel on population and climate change moderated by Constance Holden of Science that attracted a respectable (but not remarkable) audience of 40. The panelists decried the media’s relative silence on the impact of population growth and other demographic dynamics on environmental issues.

NPR’s Steve Curwood pointed out that while it’s “something we don’t talk about at all in America,” U.S. population growth increases emissions faster than developing-country population growth, due to our larger per capita consumption. A lone AP article, “Population growth contributes to emissions growth,” reported on the discussion.

In contrast, a population-climate panel at last week’s SEJ conference drew an overflow crowd of more than 100 people. Former SEJ President Tim Wheeler read off recent headlines demonstrating that the media does mention population. However, he noted that “most of the instances I cited are op-ed opinion pieces, not news coverage or feature stories.” In recent climate coverage, he said, “population gets mentioned as an undercurrent and afterthought; our attention intends to be on the immediate. And it has those challenges of so, what do you do about it, how do you deal with it.” But it is “our constant challenge to continue to wrestle with these issues.”




Here’s a short list of recent coverage:

Associated Press: “Birth control could help combat climate change”
Reuters: “Contraception vital in climate change fight -expert”

Bloomberg: “African Condom Shortage Said to Worsen Climate Impact”

Matt Yglesias: “Population and Climate Change”

The Nation: “Factoring People Into Climate Change”

Inter Press Service: “POPULATION: Where’s Family Planning on Climate Change Radar? Zofeen Ebrahim interviews noted social demographer KAREN HARDEE”

The New Republic’s The Vine: “Abortion: The Third Rail of Climate Policy?”

Treehugger.com: Contraception Five Times Less Expensive Than Low-Carbon Technology in Combating Climate Change

Washington Post: “When It Comes to Pollution, Less (Kids) May Be More”

Inter Press Service: “CLIMATE CHANGE: Rising Seas Demand Better Family Planning”

LA Times Booster Shots blog: “Can condoms combat climate change?”

“Although a half million women die each year, that doesn’t get attention, because the victims invariably have three strikes against them: They are poor, they are rural, and they are female,” journalist Nicholas Kristof says in a video interview about his new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

“If men had uteruses and were dying at this rate, every country would have a minister of paternal mortality, the security council would be meeting, this would be a real international priority,” he says.

Climate change is “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century,” says the final report of a year-long commission held by The Lancet and University College London. A Lancet editorial, “Sexual and reproductive health and climate change,” says that rapid population growth “increases the scale of vulnerability to the consequences of climate change” and that meeting the unmet need for contraception “could slow high rates of population growth, thereby reducing demographic pressure on the environment.”