Earlier this week in New Delhi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised an “enlightening” roundtable discussion with India’s minister of environment for opening her eyes to climate change’s links to population and family planning.

“One of the participants pointed out that it’s rather odd to talk about climate change and what we must do to stop and prevent the ill effects without talking about population and family planning. That was an incredibly important point. And yet, we talk about these things in very separate and often unconnected ways,” said Clinton.

Congress is taking steps to tackle this issue. The version of the bill approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee last week links family planning and reproductive health to climate change.

On page 153, $628 million is alloted for “family planning/reproductive health, including in areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species or exacerbates human vulnerability to the effects of climate change.”

In addition, in the report accompanying the bill, the Senate committee “directs USAID to review the relationships between population growth and climate change to determine how experience in implementing population-environment activities applies to climate change adaptation and to efforts to increase the resilience of local communities to climate change.”

These comments certainly increase the volume on this overlooked link. Some background resources that might help those new to the discussion:

• In the latest ECSP Report, Suzanne Petroni of the Summit Foundation proposes some ethical ground rules, calling for “a thoughtful and deliberative dialogue around voluntary family planning’s contribution to mitigating climate change.”
  A recent PAI factsheet points out that “areas of high population growth and high vulnerability to climate change impacts overlap.”
• Another handy factsheet includes a brief description of how community-based programs that integrate population-environment activities can strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to the effects of climate change.
• PAI’s working paper “Projecting Population, Projecting Climate Change” warns that “population growth is not adequately accounted for in the emissions scenarios” used by the IPCC.
• The Center for Global Development’s David Wheeler recently argued that family planning could be a relatively inexpensive part of solving the climate crisis.
• A paper in Global Environmental Change estimates the extra emissions of fossil carbon dioxide that an average individual in the United States causes when he or she chooses to have children.

As the number of contributing factors to (and potential solutions for) climate change grows, one—population growth—is conspicuously absent from most discussions. For obvious reasons: After finally prevailing over climate change “skeptics,” why would U.S. climate advocates court more controversy by adding population, and thus family planning and even abortion, to the mix?

Because it could be an important—perhaps significant—and definitely cheap part of solving the climate crisis, argued David Wheeler of the Center for Global Development (CGD) at an ambitious June 23rd event in the CGD series on “Demographics and Development.” Covering both climate change and population issues, he offered a compelling economic analysis of the effectiveness of family planning and female education programs at addressing climate change. Equally impressive was Wheeler’s engaging style, including graphics and animations that could make Gapminder guru Hans Rosling blush.

Describing Pacala and Socolow’s oft-cited “wedge” theory of stabilizing emissions, Wheeler pointed out that slowing population growth is rarely discussed, compared to the more popular—and more costly—wedges related to reduced deforestation, energy efficiency and conservation, renewable electricity and fuels, and carbon capture and storage.

Wheeler argued that slowing population growth has great potential for reduce emissions at a lower cost. As population increases, so do emissions. As a country develops, its per-capita emissions increase, so population increases in more developed countries are especially important. As the middle class in the BRIC and other large developing nations grows, this sizable group of “New Americans” (to use Thomas Friedman’s term) will contribute more and more emissions.

Two interventions will contribute the most to slowing population growth: family planning and female education, said Wheeler. According to his calculations, a $10 billion increase in female education in the developing world would lead to a change in population growth substantial enough to achieve one of the stabilization wedges. Wheeler found that family planning and female education are among the most cost-effective strategies, as evidenced by their placement on the far left side of slides 22 and 25.

Though an economist by training, Wheeler did not make only financial arguments: He emphasized throughout his presentation that family planning and female education are worthy and necessary programs in their own right. And he pointed out the most glaring injustice of climate change: While people in developed countries have the largest carbon footprints, people in developing countries will disproportionately suffer the impacts. (Suzanne Petroni makes similar points in her ECSP Report 13 article, “An Ethical Approach to Population and Climate Change.”)

Tim Wirth, the president of the UN Foundation and the Better World Fund, called for more political and financial support for this link. Funding for family planning has fallen and support for female education is not as high as it should be. Reaching the unmet need of the world’s women would cost about $20 billion, and the U.S. “share” is $1 billion, an amount that many U.S. family planning leaders are advocating.

As CGD’s Rachel Nugent noted in her introduction, demography and climate are classic cases of long-term issues: difficult to understand and address. It is ironic and important, she said, that two such long-term issues are simultaneously at critical moments. The work of David Wheeler on population and climate change, along with that of Leiwen Jiang of Population Action International and Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, may help us find an important and inexpensive piece of an elusive and otherwise expensive pie.

More data is needed to confirm these initial findings. However, the devil may not be in the details but in the debate: convincing weary and wary climate warriors to take on a bit more controversy.

To promote the 20th World Population Day on July 11, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) tied this year’s theme—“Fight Poverty: Educate Girls”—to combating the ongoing financial crisis. It’s a no-brainer that, as UNFPA points out, “women and children in developing countries will bear the brunt of the impact.”

In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement, launched at the climate negotiations this week in Bonn, represents a major step forward in the effort to determine how environmental shocks and stresses precipitated by climate change will compel populations to migrate.

According to Family Planning and Economic Well-Being: New Evidence From Bangladesh, a report from the Population Reference Bureau, “long-term investment in an integrated family planning and maternal and child health (FPMCH) program contributes to improved economic security for families, households, and communities through larger incomes, greater accumulation of wealth, and higher levels of education.”

A YouTube video from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) shows how Darfuri refugees are struggling to manage scarce natural resources in refugee camps in Chad.

Facing Global Environmental Change: Environmental, Human, Energy, Food, Health, and Water Security Concepts, the fourth volume of the Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace, was launched at a side event to the 17th Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development.

The Obama Plan for Energy and Climate Security: Conference Proceedings and Final Recommendations lays out the Center for a New American Security’s recommendations to President Obama for achieving his climate and energy goals.

“Statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society, and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them,” said Gapminder Foundation Director Hans Rosling at a discussion hosted by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program on May 26, 2009. In his spirited and often humorous remarks, Rosling praised the 25-year-old Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by Macro International, Inc., as “public-private partnership at its best.” The DHS program works with countries’ health ministries to collect data on family planning, child and maternal health, disease prevalence, and other health indicators, and makes the data freely available for public use.

The Beauty Behind the Data

Rosling uses Gapminder’s signature “moving bubble” Trendalyzer software—which Google purchased and made available as “Motion Chart”—to graphically demonstrate global health, economic, and environmental trends. Gapminder uses data from several sources, including DHS surveys, to generate its illuminating displays.

“Sweden, during the last hundred years, didn’t achieve [the] Millennium Development Goal rate” for yearly reductions in child mortality, Rosling explained. “We are putting goals for Tanzania, Bangladesh that [were] never…achieved by any country in West Europe or North America.” The remarkable thing, said Rosling, is that many low-income countries are achieving or even surpassing these demanding targets.

Free Access, Unified Formatting Are Top Priorities

Rosling stressed that access to data must be free, and admonished the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and others who charge for their statistics. “They say, ‘No, we can’t give the data to the people because they will make wrong comparisons, and they will make wrong conclusions,’” Rosling continued, “and I say ‘Yes, we call it freedom.’”

Rosling cautioned against “database-hugging disorder,” or statisticians’ tendency to guard their data because of concerns about budgets or misinterpretation. A better approach, he insisted, is to embrace innovations like the Creative Commons license, which encourages sharing information by offering a range of easy-to-understand legal protections and freedoms for creative works, data, and information.

In addition, “we don’t have a unified format for data,” Rosling said, and “that’s why the transaction costs are so enormously high, and that’s why those who put data together in unified format charge for it.” He cited YouTube as an excellent medium for broadening public distribution of data. To the audience’s delight, a live Google search for “sex, money, and health” returned a YouTube clip of one of his own presentations as its top hit.

Improving Lives With Data

“The worst environmental problem today is that two million children die of diarrhea [each year], and that billions of people drink their neighbors’ lukewarm feces,” said Rosling, and yet “water and sanitation data is very, very weak.” Collecting information from remote areas—often the most impoverished—is difficult. Measuring access to potable water is complicated because it requires community-based calculations, which do not fit into DHS’ household-centric methodology.

Rosling called upon young adults to work to “eradicate unnecessary disease and poverty in the world.” He also advocated improved post-graduate training in statistics, particularly in low-income countries.

Better statistical data will foment more effective solutions to development challenges—provided there are ambassadors like Rosling willing and able to unveil the beauty behind the numbers.

Photo: Hans Rosling. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

MORE

Any veteran of the international development field will be familiar with the disclaimer that no single intervention, no matter how effective, is a “silver bullet.” But in The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, journalist Michelle Goldberg argues forcefully that there is one change that is key to solving environmental degradation, food insecurity, water scarcity, global health challenges, skewed gender ratios, poverty, and both under- and overpopulation: women’s empowerment.

Malthusian Anxieties

As Matthew Connelly documents in his book Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, the family-planning movement sometimes lapsed into questionable moral territory during its early years, when women’s rights were not among its chief motivations. Fortunately, it turns out that family planning is actually more successful when motivated by a larger desire to empower women than when spurred by fears of overpopulation (The Means of Reproduction, pp. 74-76; 84-85). Educated women are more likely to delay marriage, have fewer children, obtain good maternal care, and be less vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, write Caren Grown et al. in a literature review of gender equality and women’s health in The Lancet.

A Birth Dearth—or an Empowerment Dearth?

As Goldberg points out, empowering women is also the solution to slowing the rapid population decline being experienced in many European countries and some wealthy Asian ones. “In contemporary developed societies, birthrates are highest where support for working mothers is greatest, a fact conservatives simply ignore in their doomsday surveys of future European decrepitude,” says Goldberg (p. 204).

Thus, comparatively religious, socially conservative European countries like Italy and Poland have some of the lowest fertility rates on the continent (both 1.3 children per woman), while more secular countries like France and Sweden, with their generous paid parental leave policies, public day care, and after-school programs, have some of the highest (2.0 and 1.9, respectively).

Strong Women, Healthy Families

Women’s empowerment is key to human health. The more education a woman has, the healthier her children are likely to be, explains Goldberg (p. 75). In addition, as Grown et al. point out, “in societies such as Bangladesh, where husbands control most household resources, when women did own assets, household expenditure on children’s clothing and education was higher and the rate of illness among girls was reduced.”

But the connection between empowerment and health also works in the other direction: In sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute 57 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS—a direct result of women’s sexual, social, political, and economic subordination (pp. 224-225). Women often do not have the standing to refuse sex, or to demand that a man wear a condom. They also frequently lack the financial and educational resources needed to leave violent or unfaithful husbands (p. 225).

Bare Branches: Sex Ratios and Security

A preference for sons persists in many parts of the world—especially Asia—and the spread of ultrasound, which can detect the sex of a four-month-old fetus, has made sex-selective abortion hugely popular for couples seeking to have a son. But the growing imbalance between men and women has potentially grave security implications for countries such as China and India, warns Goldberg. As Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer point out, Indian states “with high sex ratios, such as Uttar Pradesh, have much higher violent crime rates than states with more normal sex ratios, such as Kerala.”

As Goldberg puts it, “as long as women lack an identity without a husband or a son, sex-selective abortion will continue to deform India’s—and Asia’s—demographics” (p.194). She isn’t hopeful about quick progress: “Like any democracy, India will probably find it easier to slouch toward disaster than to infuriate the defenders of patriarchy. Ultimately, though, unless the country finds a way to break through the encrustations of centuries of misogyny, its democracy itself could be in danger from an unmanageable excess of men” (p. 198).

Toward Nine Billion Hot, Hungry, Thirsty People

Goldberg’s take on the links among population, the environment, and security is admirably nuanced—although I would have appreciated a more extensive discussion of demographic security and population-environment links. She acknowledges that the food riots of 2008, combined with growing concern about water scarcity and climate change, may have generated more attention for family planning and reproductive health.

But she reminds us that the main population-related response to these problems—a commitment to decrease fertility in the developing world—misinterprets the causes. The food shortages were largely the result of growing consumption by middle-income people, combined with continued high consumption in the rich world. Climate change will undoubtedly become much worse if all people in the developing world start to live the high-carbon lifestyles we do in the West, but to date, climate change has been caused almost entirely by industrialized countries.

The Micro and the Macro

Goldberg’s storytelling skills are superb, making The Means of Reproduction both an exciting and enlightening read. She illustrates her broader arguments about women’s rights with compelling stories about individual women and men. She demands that we respect these people’s experiences while arguing powerfully against succumbing to the temptations of political correctness and relativism:

“In thinking about the situation of women in vastly different contexts, there are a number of dangers. One is assuming that Western ways are self-evidently superior and that all women would choose them, if only they could. But another is assuming that women in other cultures are so different from us that situations we would find intolerable—bearing child after child into grinding poverty; being utterly at the mercy of fathers, husbands, and brothers; having one’s clitoris sliced off with a razor—do not also cause them great pain” (p. 9).

Goldberg has pulled off an impressive feat: The Means of Reproduction is accessible enough to serve as an introduction to the debates around population and family planning, but complex enough to inform readers about the latest controversies and battlegrounds in the field. Goldberg does have an opinion, but it’s based on reams of research. Here’s hoping The Means of Reproduction finds a place in the canon.

Photo: Women and children at the health post at Sam Ouandja refugee camp in the Central African Republic. Courtesy of Pierre Holtz/UNICEF and Flickr user hdptcar.

MORE

Assumptions about human behavior drive our knowledge of future global population trends. Demographers analyze population and other survey data in order to forecast trends, but uncertainty colors these projections.

In the 2008 Revision of World Population Prospects, the UN Population Division projects that our planet will grow to 9.15 billion people by 2050. Yet this medium-variant projection is just one of several possible scenarios released in this latest round of number crunching. The low- and high-variant projections—7.96 billion and 10.5 billion, respectively—could instead become reality, given slight shifts in fertility rates in developing countries, where growth rates remain higher than in more developed nations. Although both developing and developed nations are susceptible to shifts in fertility rates, uncertainties are greater in the developing world due to factors such as inconsistent data collection, weak health system infrastructure, and low government capacity.

Elizabeth Leahy and I investigate the underlying assumptions behind population projections in an article in the May/June edition of World Watch magazine. By comparing three of the leading population-forecasting institutions, we find that small variations in assumptions can lead to significant differences in projections.

Uganda’s demographic outlook is a prime example. Between 1960 and 2005, Uganda’s population grew by 22 million people, while the country’s fertility rate fell by less than 3 percent. The UN medium-variant population projection assumes the country will buck precedent and experience a 61 percent fertility rate decline between 2005 and 2050, resulting in a population of 91 million people. The U.S. Census Bureau, on the other hand, assumes a less drastic fertility decline and projects a population of 128 million people by 2050. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an Austrian institution that projects population on a regional basis, recently revised its population projections to reflect greater growth in sub-Saharan Africa due to stalling fertility decline and stagnant educational-attainment rates.

Fertility rates rarely decline when governments have not made the proper investments in health and education. The UN medium-variant projection is commonly cited as an inevitable scenario; few people know that one of its underlying assumptions is that access to modern contraception will continue to expand. Without real-world development investments to match these assumptions, a very different scenario could easily materialize. By empowering women, bolstering access to education, and providing comprehensive family-planning services to citizens, governments and policymakers can translate these assumptions into reality.

A micro-economist friend of mine likes to say that macro-economists have correctly predicted nine of the last five recessions. In “The World’s New Numbers,” in the Spring 2009 Wilson Quarterly, Wilson Center Senior Scholar Martin Walker argues that demographers should be so lucky.