Released at the National Press Club on November 12, 2008, the UN Population Fund’s State of World Population 2008 encourages policymakers and the development community to embrace culturally aware approaches to achieving human rights such as gender equality and reproductive health. Noting the role local culture plays in these issues, the report makes suggestions for addressing traditional attitudes toward maternal mortality, female genital mutilation, honor killings, and contraceptive use, highlighting the need to develop alliances with local opinion leaders in program design and service delivery.

U.S. Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) urged both policymakers and development professionals to carry out development projects within the context of local cultural norms. According to Maloney, the Obama administration has promised to allocate funds to help implement the report’s recommendations. Azza Karam, senior culture advisor with UNFPA, explained that much development work still does not guarantee women’s rights and argued that State of World Population 2008 includes effective approaches to addressing harmful cultural practices. Karam encouraged the development community to approach culture pragmatically, demonstrating to local community leaders how changes in cultural practices benefit the whole community.

State of World Population 2008 devotes an entire chapter to the need to include women in post-conflict reconstruction, using case studies to demonstrate how gender equality can be incorporated into a variety of different peace interventions. The report pushes policymakers and program managers to endorse gender-sensitive approaches and abandon preconceptions that women lack the expertise to assist in long-term peacebuilding. Increasing women’s participation in post-conflict reconstruction “can help development practitioners mitigate some of the ill effects of conflict, minimize deterioration in gender relations and work with local communities and relevant stakeholders” to ensure women’s rights such as reproductive health and gender equality.

In a recent nationwide Roper Poll commissioned to study the U.S. public’s attitudes toward population, barely 50 percent of respondents believed there is a strong link between global population growth and climate change, reported Thomas Prugh of World Watch magazine at the September 30, 2008, launch of World Watch’s population issue co-sponsored by the Worldwatch Institute and the Environmental Change and Security Program. People need to learn about population growth’s impact on climate change and other indicators of environmental health, said Prugh.

To Grow or To Shrink? That Is the Question

Historically, governments viewed population growth as a sign of a nation’s vitality; some promoted it by offering incentives to have more children. Prugh noted that such pronatalist attitudes are far from obsolete: “Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared September 13^th a national holiday for conceiving children. And couples who delivered a baby nine months later, which not coincidentally would have been on Russia Day, got refrigerators for that accomplishment,” he said. In contrast, many governments are now promoting voluntary family planning rather than population growth. But a lack of political urgency has limited their success. “Support and funding for family planning is actually flat or in decline,” Prugh emphasized.

Empowering Women and Expanding the Discourse

Population has always been an “incredibly gendered issue,” argued Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute, which is one reason for the lack of public discourse on the subject. He called for a broader discussion of population and urged women who work in the sexual and reproductive health and rights fields to actively participate. If you “don’t talk about population from your perspective and from what you know about these issues, others will,” he warned, “and they may not know as much as you do about it.” For Engelman, providing access to family planning and placing population decisions in the hands of women “is natural—this is understandable—and in general, it’s a very good thing.”

The Good, The Bad: Urbanization

“This is the first year, 2008, in which half of us have become city-dwellers,” said Karen Hardee of Population Action International, a development that will have both positive and negative consequences. Urban populations have better access to family planning and education. However, urban growth can outpace local governments’ ability to enforce environmental regulations, treat hazardous and solid waste, and limit air pollution. At the same time, Hardee argues, technological innovation, access to information, efficient land and energy use, and better living conditions—as well as economies of scale—can limit urbanization’s negative environmental impacts. “Urbanization is inevitable, and it’s also accelerating, with most of the growth in the population in developing countries,” she stated.

Population and the Changing Nature of Security

“To be sure, rapid population growth does not have a simple causal relationship with conflict. And to suggest so would fail to take into account additional aggravating factors, such as poverty, poor governance, competition over natural resources, and environmental degradation,” said Sean Peoples of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. But population dynamics can fuel instability and increase the risk of a country falling victim to intrastate violence. According to The Shape of Things to Come, a report by Peoples’ co-author, Elizabeth Leahy, countries with youthful age structures—where 35 percent of the population is younger than 15—have a 150 percent greater chance of seeing conflict erupt than countries with more balanced age structures, due to pervasive joblessness, lack of education, and competition over resources.

Since countries with very young and youthful age structures represent a great challenge to international stability, population should be included in national security discussions. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently said, “We also know that over the next 20 years certain pressures—population, resource, energy, climate, economic, and environmental—could combine with rapid cultural, social, and technological change to produce new sources of deprivation, rage, and instability.” But there is hope of avoiding insecurity: “Progress toward more balanced age structures occurs when health care improves, leading to lower mortality rates and longer life expectancies, and when fertility rates fall, which happens when women and men have access to the services they need to choose their own family size,” said Peoples.

Photo: Thomas Prugh. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

MORE

A recent post on Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog—entitled “Poop is Funny, But It’s Fatal”—highlights a UNICEF World Water Day video about the necessity of destigmatizing human waste. Bacterial infections caused by contact with human waste kill 1.5 million people every year—most of them children. The stakes are high. The film uses kids and humor—two good ingredients for education through entertainment—to explain the importance of sanitation. The film emphasizes that although we may not like talking about feces, urine, toilets, and the like, we need to because the fact that 2.6 billion of us lack adequate sanitation is a fundamental threat to human health, productivity, and dignity. It’s a short film—YouTube friendly—and these are complex links, but they are key to understanding the need to invest in available technologies.

“Over the next twenty years physical pressures – population, resource, energy, climatic, and environmental – could combine with rapid social, cultural, technological, and geopolitical change to create greater uncertainty,” warns the newly released 2008 National Defense Strategy. Demographic trends, resource scarcity, and environmental change all inform the updated strategy, which encourages international cooperation to address these impending challenges.

The “Population Forum” in the September issue of WorldWatch Magazine “reveals that empowering women to make their own family size choices…is the best strategy to tackle population growth” and the environmental and security problems linked to it. A short history of population trends is available online; the website offers free previews of Lori Hunter’s article on PHE and gender, as well as “Population and Security” by Elizabeth Leahy and ECSP’s own Sean Peoples. Bernard Orimbo links population growth and environmental degradation in his native Kenya, and PAI staff discuss urbanization.

Climate change threatens to exaggerate the challenges faced by the billions of people worldwide who depend upon natural resources for their survival. But the competition and, at times, violent conflict that results from increased resource scarcity is not a given; the recently released World Resources Report 2008 finds that “well-designed, community-based enterprises” can ease the environmental burden on natural resources and pave the way for sustainable dependence on the land.

At the 2008 World Expo’s “Water and Conflict Resolution” week, municipal representatives working with Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) presented case studies from its “Good Water Neighbors” programs: cross-border solutions for the Lower Jordan River; the Jordan River Peace Park project; and the town of Auja in the Jordan River Valley. Speaking about these programs the Wilson Center, FOEME’s Gidon Bromberg said that “by working together, not only do we advance the environmental issues…we also advance peace between our peoples.”

Fertility rates worldwide have been on the decline for many years, the result of a steady decrease in desired family size. But more often than not, fertility rates have not fallen as quickly as desired family size, as access to contraceptives has not kept pace with increasing demand. Consequently, more than 75 million pregnancies each year are unintended, finds “Fertility Regulation Behaviors and Their Costs: Contraception and Unintended Pregnancies in Africa and Eastern Europe & Central Asia,” a World Bank discussion paper surveying decades of research from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. One fifth of these pregnancies end in induced abortion, fully half of which are classified as unsafe, meaning they are not attended by a properly trained health care worker or in an environment that conforms to minimum medical standards.

The costs of unsafe abortion are tremendous, financially and in terms of human lives. Approximately 67,000 women die annually from complications resulting from unsafe abortion, leaving more than 200,000 children motherless. Sexual and reproductive health issues constitute 20 percent of the global disease burden, and produce additional “direct and indirect costs to the individual woman, the woman’s household, the country’s health system and society as a whole.”

In Africa, post-abortion care can consume up to half of obstetrics and gynecology department budgets. The cost of this care is often much higher than the patient’s monthly salary. The authors report that “comprehensive family planning services to prevent unwanted pregnancy and reduce unsafe abortion in Nigeria would cost only a quarter of what is being spent in direct costs to treat post-abortion complications.” This point is taken up by author Margaret E. Greene is the latest issue of FOCUS, ECSP’s series of occasional papers featuring Wilson Center speakers. She writes that “[r]obust, compelling evidence linking good reproductive health to poverty reduction,” as is offered in the World Bank report, will “support efforts to include it in country-level poverty reduction strategies and in the allocation of international poverty reduction funding.”

This situation repeats itself across the globe. In Central Asia and Eastern Europe, induced abortion is “the principal method of birth control,” due to the expense of importing Western contraceptives, the medical community’s stigma against oral contraceptives, and the availability of abortion result. In Russia, government concerns about low fertility led the government to dismantle its sex-education curriculum and to carry out widespread layoffs in the government-controlled offices of contraceptive manufacturers.

Without exception, the case studies in this discussion paper find significant financial benefit to increasing modern contraceptive availability. Inadequate access is “an important barrier,” the authors write, discounting the argument that the contraceptives are there and people simply don’t use them. DHS surveys worldwide find that cost has prohibited contraceptive use for fewer than 2 percent of the estimated 137 million women with an unmet need. Women have decided, it seems, that the costs of childbearing far outweigh those of contraceptives.

“It is imperative,” the authors write, “that policies and programs address the need for contraception globally – for all population groups but with special emphasis on those who are most disadvantaged.” Community insurance schemes to reduce out-of-pocket payments can help accomplish this. Other ideas include increased subsidies for basic health services and adjusted user fee policies. The report also urges expanded and improved provision of contraceptive information and services, as well as improved training for health care providers. The problem is not a lack of good ideas and policies, but a lack of political will.

Women “are the most likely to bear the heaviest burdens when natural disasters strike,” says a new report from the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), “Gender, Climate Change and Human Security: Lessons from Bangladesh, Ghana and Senegal.” The report also encourages governments to allow women to play larger roles as agents of preparedness, mitigation, and adaptation.

Climate change, the report says, “forms a major threat to human security at national and livelihood levels.” Because 70 percent of people living below the poverty line are women, their livelihoods are threatened most acutely by climate change and the natural disasters it is likely to make increasingly frequent and severe. In addition, women are often responsible for “tasks such as food collection and energy supply for the household as well as many care-giving tasks, such as caring for the children, sick, elderly, the home and assets.” In the wake of a natural disaster, these activities can become nearly impossible, and being responsible for them can prevent women from migrating from disaster zones, despite the burden of living where disaster has struck. This migration, the authors write, has significant impacts on those who stay as well as those who leave, as “the relocation of people has severe impacts on social support networks and family ties—mechanisms that have a crucial value for women.”

Losing over half a million citizens to natural disasters between 1970 and 2005 has given Bangladesh the highest disaster mortality rate in the world, and gender-neutral data collection makes it difficult to determine gender-specific outcomes. From the data that does exist, the report notes that following the cyclone and flood disasters of 1991, for example, the death rate among adult women (20-44 years of age) was 71 per 1000, almost five times higher than the rate of 15 per 1000 for adult men.

There is consensus that South Asia is among the regions most affected by climate change, the report says, and that Bangladesh is the most vulnerable country in the region. For the 80 percent of Bangladeshi women who live in rural areas and are solely responsible for water and firewood collection, food preparation, and family health care, the future appears increasingly imperiled.

A study published last year in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers confirmed that natural disasters decrease the life expectancy of women much more dramatically than men; that the more intense the disaster, the stronger this effect; and that the wealthier the women, the less they are affected by this phenomenon.

Even as women suffer disproportionately from climate change and natural disasters, the report says, “women are more often overlooked as potential contributors to climate change solutions,” and their ability to contribute to preparation, mitigation, and rehabilitation efforts is undervalued. The report recommends that countries develop National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) that involve women as contributors to adaptation processes and work toward “improving human security in the context of climate change from a gender perspective.”

“Women are key to the development challenge,” says Strategies for Promoting Gender Equity in Developing Countries, but “gender mainstreaming has been associated with more failures than gains.” Detailing findings from an April 2007 conference co-sponsored by the Wilson Center and the Inter-American Foundation, the report calls for a redesigned approach operating on multiple fronts. Blogging about the report, About.com’s Linda Lowen dubs the gap between women and men in developing countries a “Grand Canyon-like divide” compared to the “crack in the sidewalk” faced by Western women.

A Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder on Angola—now Africa’s leading oil producer—tackles the familiar paradox of extreme poverty in resource-rich countries. Burdened by “an opaque financial system rife with corruption,” Angola’s leaky coffers are filling up with Chinese currency. As Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos put it, “China needs natural resources, and Angola wants development.” FastCompany.com’s “Special Report: China In Africa” criticizes the overwhelming Chinese presence in Africa: “The sub-Sahara is now the scene of one of the most sweeping, bare-knuckled, and ingenious resource grabs the world has ever seen.”

In Scientific American’s “Facing the Freshwater Crisis,” Peter Rogers writes that the demands of increasing population, along with increasingly frequent droughts due to climate change, signal rough waters ahead, and calls for major infrastructure investments to prevent catastrophe. Closer to home, Circle of Blue reports on a new era of water scarcity in the United States, and director Jim Thebaut’s documentary “Running Dry: The American Southwest” takes a look at the hard-hit region.

Pastoralists are socially marginalized in many countries, making them highly vulnerable to climate change despite their well-developed ability to adapt to changing conditions, reports the International Institute for Environment and Development in “Browsing on fences: Pastoral land rights, livelihoods and adaptation to climate change.” The paper notes that the “high rate of development intervention failure” has worsened the situation, and calls for giving pastoralists “a wider range of resources, agro-ecological as well as socio-economic,” to protect them.

An alert from USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network warns that despite generally good rains, “conflict, livestock disease, and high prices for cereals and other essential goods have minimized the extent to which pastoralists can benefit from these rains, undermining their recovery from drought and elevating their food insecurity, which is evidenced by alarming rates of child malnutrition in several areas.”

The UN Security Council held a special session on gender-based violence this week, and the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof applauded the Council’s (belated) attention to the issue. ECSP recently sponsored an event on gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict situations.

East Timor’s citizens are demanding that the government revoke an MOU signed with an Indonesian company that would grant the company 100,000 hectares of land to plant sugarcane.