Here are some useful links to environment, population, and security work that recently crossed my desk.

• NYU’s Richard Gowan dissects UK development minister Andrew Mitchell’s encouraging speech identifying conflict-affected states as special DFID priorities. Gowan pulls out highlights from the speech and parses NGO reaction to it on Global Dashboard.

• Council on Foreign Relations’ Isobel Coleman provides five practical suggestions for tapping into women as the “new global growth engine,” on Forbes.

• The Aspen Institute announced its Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health this week. Their goal: meeting unmet demand for family planning services by 2015 on the MDG schedule. That is over 200,000,000 women who want services but do not have access.

• I’m heartened to see the U.S. Senate pass the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act. Hoping the House will follow suit. Last time Congress passed legislation on water, sanitation, and health priorities, the 2005 Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support.

• Colby historian Jim Fleming, writing in Slate, puts the increasing fascination with geoengineering as a climate response “option” in some sobering historical context. “Weather as a Weapon: The Troubling History of Geoengineering” is the short read. Tune in to hear Jim present the book length version, Fixing the Sky, at the Wilson Center, October 6th at 10:30 am EST.

Follow Geoff Dabelko (@geoffdabelko) and The New Security Beat (@NewSecurityBeat) on Twitter for more population, health, environment, and security updates.

From 20-22 September 2010, world leaders will meet in New York City to discuss the United Nations’ “We Can End Poverty 2015” Millennium Development Goals, which include food security, maternal and child health, and environmental sustainability as key objectives, but controversially, make no mention of population. Officially, there is only one small “side session,” organized by Vicky Markham of the Center for Environment and Population, devoted to talking about the MDGs in the integrated context of population, health, and environment (PHE).

“If we could do something about unintended pregnancies – which are about 80 million a year – we could dramatically reduce population growth,” and reduce pressure on the environment, says Joseph Speidel in this short analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. Speidel discusses the connections between population, health, and environment issues, and offers solutions for the way forward.

The “Pop Audio” series offers brief clips from ECSP’s conversations with experts around the world, sharing analysis and promoting dialogue on population-related issues. Also available on iTunes.

“There is a knowledge gap between global targets and locally owned goals,” said Sallie Craig Huber, global lead for results management at Management Sciences for Health (MSH). The seventh meeting of the “Advancing Policy Dialogue on Maternal Health” series – cosponsored by the Global Health Council, MSH, and PATH – comes at a critical time as world leaders meet next week at the high-level, plenary UN Summit to review progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Panelists Marge Koblinsky, senior technical advisor, John Snow Inc., Ellen Starbird, deputy director, U.S. Agency for International Development, and Monique Widyono, program officer of PATH, discussed strategies for improving maternal health evaluation methods while balancing the interests of donors and beneficiaries.

Maternal Health Indicators: Contact vs. Context

“Skilled birth attendants [have] become the strategy [for improving maternal mortality rates], but one size does not fit all,” said Koblinsky. The proportion of births attended by skilled birth attendants is a key maternal health indicator; however, it is not sufficient and says little about what the attendants actually did during the birth.

Koblinsky demonstrated how other indicators such as near-miss morbidity, rates of cesarean section, and contraceptive prevalence rates (CPR) are better aligned with maternal mortality outcomes. “CPR is much more closely linked with the outcome we desire as [contraception] reduces pregnancies for those at higher risk and reduces unwanted births and unsafe abortions,” said Koblinsky.

“Are the present benchmarks enough?” asked Koblinsky. “The answer is no….Indicators based on contact with skilled birth attendants focuses attention on contact, not on the quality of care or event context.”

Qualitative Data Is Necessary

“When we talk about monitoring and evaluation, transparency and accountability, it’s really critical to engage [in a discussion] on how we gauge progress,” said Widyono. In the field, “collection of data varies widely and depends on the capacity of those collecting, aggregating, and analyzing the information,” said Widyono. Such inconsistencies demand increased investment in local research capacity and qualitative analysis.

Such engagement also provides an opportunity for feedback. This “qualitative data helps to reinforce, illuminate, and deepen the understanding of what this quantitative data is showing on the ground,” said Widyono. Moving forward, policymakers, donors, and program managers will need to find a balance between these two sets of data and work together to galvanize action.

“There is a lack of attention paid to developing local, sustainable research capacity,” said Widyono. “We have an obligation to build local research capacity and disseminate findings in collaboration with the people who are going to be affected by this data,” she said.

Innovation and Research

“We really need to think about monitoring and evaluation and research and innovation as a continuum,” said Starbird. “They reinforce each other and play different roles in helping us understand what makes programs work or why they are not working.”

“We have a myriad of indicators that we expect people to monitor, collect data for, and report back to headquarters in a way that has not given countries and programs the freedom to be country-specific,” said Starbird. Therefore, “one of the goals is to minimize the reporting burden and better coordinate around indicator definition with other donors,” she said.

In order to strengthen “M&E;” for maternal health, Starbird called for new indicators as well as new ways of thinking about data analysis. “Having a results framework is really important to do good monitoring and evaluation,” she said. Evaluating the relationship between inputs, outputs, outcomes, and impacts requires a wide range of data resources so we can “get under the numbers” and determine what needs to be improved, she said.

“It’s really important to have realistic goals, otherwise it’s difficult to put programs into place and get where we want to go,” said Starbird. She said that MDG 5.B, which calls for universal access to reproductive health, “is great, but there’s never going to be universal access to reproductive health. If we really want to make progress we need to define something that is achievable and is something we can come together around.”

In conclusion, it is necessary to provide “countries with the room to do what needs to be done locally, so we can better understand these concepts rather than imposing indicators on everybody,” said Starbird.

In her recent post on The New Security Beat, Jennifer Sciubba argues that the medium-fertility variant projection published in the UN Population Division’s biennial projections — the source of most future data published in the Population Reference Bureau’s 2010 World Population Data Sheet — forecasts an unrealistically low total fertility rate (TFR) for sub-Saharan Africa in 2050, at a rate of 2.5 lifetime childbirths per woman.

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.

By assuming that sub-Saharan Africa’s total fertility rate will decrease to 2.5 children per woman by 2050, the most recent population projections issued by the Population Reference Bureau likely continue to underestimate fertility for Africa. Though northern Africa has significantly lowered fertility, sub-Saharan Africa’s TFR is still 5 children per woman. Achieving the levels projected by PRB or the United Nations will largely depend on whether the conditions that led to past fertility declines for other states can be established in sub-Saharan Africa.

Demographers have identified numerous factors associated with fertility decline, including increased education for females, shifting from a rural agricultural economy to an industrial one, and introduction of contraceptive technology. Sub-Saharan Africa is only making slow progress in each of these areas.

Excerpted from a summary on the Population Reference Bureau‘s website, by Karina Shreffler and F. Nii-Amoo Dodoo. The original version of this article appeared in Population and Environment 30, no. 3 (2009): 75-92.

Little is known about the role of land inheritance in the link between land availability and fertility. The recent transition from high to lower levels of fertility in some African countries presents an opportunity to clarify the underlying causes of this decline, since the individuals involved in the transitions are still alive.