The UN Security Council must take quick, decisive action on climate change, argue U.S. Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and George Mason University’s Michael Shank in an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor. “A concerted international strategy, on a par with the seriousness and scope of an UN Security Council resolution, is what’s needed to counter this climate crisis.”

The Environment for Development Initiative, a joint venture by U.S. NGO Resources for the Future and the Environmental Economics Unit at Göteborg University in Sweden, has released a set of discussion papers on environmental management in developing countries around the world. The papers highlight case studies from Kenya, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.

“New Limits to Growth Revive Malthusian Fears,” published earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, examines whether limited quantities of key resources—including arable land, fresh water, and oil—will curb the world’s growing prosperity. “The resource constraints foreseen by the Club of Rome are more evident today than at any time since the 1972 publication of the think tank’s famous book, ‘The Limits of Growth.’ Steady increases in the prices for oil, wheat, copper and other commodities—some of which have set record highs this month—are signs of a lasting shift in demand as yet unmatched by rising supply.”

“Images of overpopulation tend to reinforce racist stereotypes of the world’s poorest people, demonizing those who are the least responsible for global warming” and obscuring important questions about how well family planning and other policies actually combat climate change, argued Hampshire College professor Betsy Hartmann in a lively roundtable discussion on population and climate change hosted by The Bulletin Online.

Because one-third of all pregnancies are unwanted, and because some 200 million women desire family planning services but lack access to them, contributor Frederick A.B. Meyerson, an ecologist at the University of Rhode Island, argued that policies to reduce unwanted pregnancy must be a chief global priority. He called for the international community to “restore the goal of universal access to family planning as a top-tier priority, to protect both the climate and human wellbeing.”

Joseph Chamie, research director for the Center for Migration Studies, called this a “delay tactic” that would do little to slow climate change, and said the international community should instead focus on decreasing consumption in the developed world, noting that the average American creates nearly 20 times as much carbon dioxide as the average Indian. He added that the 200 million women Meyerson mentioned live primarily in regions of Africa and Asia where per capita emissions are so low that changes in fertility will have negligible impact on climate. Increasing access to voluntary family planning services could have greater effects in India or China, he said, where economic development has resulted in continually increasing per capita emissions levels.

John Guillebaud, emeritus professor at University College London, and Martin Desvaux, trustee of the Optimum Population Trust, resisted Chamie’s assertion, writing, “It’s not difficult to understand that one less person born into poverty is one less person who needs to be helped out of poverty—a development process that cannot occur without increased energy consumption and (in the medium term) more carbon-dioxide emissions per person.” They wondered whether the international community would be better off focusing on reducing absolute emissions or providing for a more equitable distribution of emissions by reducing it in more-developed areas and allowing it to increase in less-developed areas as a result of improved standards of living.

Pointing out that some credit smaller landholdings (the result of a growing population) with higher investment in soil conservation and better-managed tree densities in Rwanda, Hartmann highlighted the complexity in forecasting the consequences of population growth. Seemingly counterintuitive findings like this one pepper the debate, encouraging us to carefully analyze the mathematical models and projections we rely on.

According to Minority Rights Group International’s State of the World’s Minorities 2008, not only are ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities and indigenous groups suffering disproportionately from the effects of climate change, they are also less likely to benefit from humanitarian relief and more likely to be harmed by certain efforts to combat climate change. The report draws attention to the fact that the plight of minorities is often neglected in the international community’s discussions of climate change.

Frequently residing on marginal land, minority and indigenous groups also tend to be directly dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods, and therefore are more vulnerable to changes in the environment. Some efforts to mitigate climate change—particularly increasing the production and use of biofuels—have forced minority and indigenous communities off their land. For example, as of 2005, more than 90 percent of the land planted with oil palms in Colombia had belonged to Afro-Columbians.

The report also asserts that certain humanitarian relief efforts have been deliberately discriminatory, noting the slow pace of relief to the Dalits (members of the lowest Hindu caste) after last year’s floods in India. Minority and indigenous communities will continue to be at risk until policymakers seriously address these issues.

“The defining challenge of the 21st century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet,” asserts leading international economist Jeffrey Sachs in his new book, Common Wealth: Economics For A Crowded Planet. Sachs argues that multilateral, multisectoral cooperation is needed to address four critical global challenges: climate change, population growth, poverty, and the ineffectiveness of global institutions. By investing two to three percent of the world’s annual income in combating these problems, he contends in a piece in Slate magazine, “10 million children per year can be saved from death while stabilizing the world’s population growth, ending extreme poverty, curbing climate change, and developing alternative energy sources.”

Humanity has successfully achieved several significant collective goals, says Sachs—for instance, the almost complete eradication of polio in the last half-century, and a 90 percent decline in the prevalence of measles over the past seven years. Yet nations continue to direct massive amounts of funding toward military responses to security problems, while failing to fund far less expensive ways of preventing violent conflict.

As Sachs opines in Slate, “Today’s impoverished drylands continue to combust in a tinderbox of violence…We send armies when we should send engineers and doctors. Violence is spreading. In seven brief years, we will have squandered more in the so-called ‘war on terror’ than all the world has ever given in all of its aid to all of Africa for all time.” Sachs says his book is an attempt to galvanize world leaders to take quick and decisive collective action to address these long-term security issues.

A European Union (EU) report released ahead of a major EU summit on March 13-14 warns that climate change is likely to create or worsen a host of local, regional, and global security challenges. “Climate change is best viewed as a threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability,” says the report.

Migration and Climate Change, a new report prepared by Oli Brown for the International Organization for Migration, examines current and future migration due to climate change; explores climate change-related migration’s implications for development; and recommends policy responses.

The rapid recovery of nature tourism in Kenya is central to stabilizing the fragile nation, bolstering its economy, and protecting its biodiversity, said UN Environment Programme Director Achim Steiner.

Two articles from Reuters highlight the intertwined environmental, demographic, and political challenges Yemen faces. “Yemen’s painful struggle to build a modern state may be overwhelmed by rampant population growth, dwindling resources, corruption and internal conflicts,” writes special correspondent Alistair Lyon. One of Yemen’s greatest challenges is water scarcity, which is only becoming more acute as the population booms.

“Many argue that demographic trends can interact with other factors such as poverty, poor governance, competition for natural resources, and environmental degradation to exacerbate tensions and contribute to conflict….Family planning will not end conflict, of course, but slowing the rate of population growth can help stabilize a country in turmoil,” writes ECSP’s Gib Clarke on the RH Reality Check blog.

Papers and presentations from “Population, Health, and Environment: Integrated Development for East Africa,” a November 2007 conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, that the Environmental Change and Security Program helped organize, are now available online.

In “An End to One-Child Families in China?,” a recent post on his blog, Dot Earth, New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin comments on reports that China is considering ending its one-child policy. But a few of Revkin’s assumptions about population and its relationship to climate change are a tad oversimplified:

1. Revkin writes, “Demographers I consulted today said this [relaxing of the one-child policy] could overturn predictions of an imminent end to global population growth.”

Who’s predicting an imminent end to population growth? The latest UN mid-range projections predict the global population will continue to grow over the next several decades—to 9.2 billion by 2050. Furthermore, even without China abandoning its one-child policy, many already consider the UN mid-range projections optimistically low, since they assume that funding for family planning will continue to increase and the total fertility rate will continue to fall (neither of which is guaranteed). If fertility rates remain the same as they are today, the world population will be 11.9 billion in 2050.

2. Revkin also writes, “Urbanization is likely to help [reduce human impact on the environment] more than hurt.”

But according to Brian O’Neill, a scientist who studies the relationships between demographic variables and climate change at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Institute for the Study of Society and Environment, preliminary projections of future urbanization in China show higher levels of urbanization correlating with an increase, not a decrease, in carbon emissions. (For more on O’Neill’s findings, click here.) 2008 will mark the first time in history more people have lived in urban areas than in rural ones, and the UN Population Division estimates that by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will reside in cities. Given that the vast majority of future population growth—including urban population growth—will be in developing countries, energy-efficient and environmentally friendly design in developing country cities will be crucial in the coming decades.

Uncovering the numerous variables that can influence global climate change can be daunting. Brian O’Neill and his colleagues are improving our understanding of some of these factors by modeling how demographic shifts—such as aging or urbanization—could impact climate change. O’Neill is a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Institute for the Study of Society and Environment in Boulder, Colorado, and also leads the Population and Climate Change (PCC) Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. Researching population-environment interactions and the science and policy of global climate change led to O’Neill’s recent work as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s Fourth Assessment Report. In this podcast, O’Neill describes how shifting demographic patterns could influence a changing climate.