Showing posts from category population.
-
The Greening of Population
›July 19, 2007 // By Karima TawfikClimate change, biodiversity, air pollution, deforestation, water scarcity, and other environmental issues share a common denominator that lies quietly beneath the higher priorities of the environmental movement: population pressure.Recently, several experts, including Nafis Sadik, the former director of the UN Population Fund, have said that the lack of attention to population, as evidenced by drops in donor support for family planning since 1995, will have negative consequences for the welfare of future generations. Despite the UN’s 2006 prediction that the population will grow to 9.2 billion by 2050, environmentalists have largely ignored the issue of human population growth, focusing instead on reducing the quantity of resources each person uses and other issues that are often exacerbated by an increasingly crowded Earth.
While scaling down each person’s environmental footprint is indeed important, demands for land and resources will increase in tandem with population growth. This is one reason why the Optimum Population Trust’s (OPT) recently-published report Youthquake: Population, fertility, and environment in the 21st century advocates for wider access to family planning and the promotion of voluntary population policies as part of a comprehensive environmental protection strategy. Discourse on population management is always controversial, but OPT believes that it is critical to achieving environmental sustainability. -
A Word of Caution on Climate Change and “Refugees”
›July 18, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoScholars, policy analysts, and even military officers are breaking down climate change’s impacts into what they hope are more manageable topics for examination. The migration that climate change could cause is one such topic. For instance, the Center for American Progress recently posted a piece entitled “Climate Refugees: Global Warming will Spur Migration.” The International Peace Academy analyzed “Climate Change and Conflict: The Migration Link” in a May 2007 Coping With Crisis working paper. Climate change-induced migration also figured prominently in the security perspective offered by the CNA Corporation’s Military Advisory Board in its “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.”
-
PODCAST – Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth
›July 10, 2007 // By Sean PeoplesNext year, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population will live in cities. This urban growth is inevitable, says a new United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report. Although cities are sometimes thought of as synonymous with poverty and large ecological footprints, the report, entitled State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, describes the unprecedented urbanization as an opportunity. Lead author George Martine discusses the misconceptions surrounding urbanization and the ways in which policymakers can maximize the benefits of urban growth.
-
PODCAST – The Role of Gender in Population, Health, and Environment Programs
›June 21, 2007 // By Sean PeoplesGender is an oft-debated topic in the development community, usually focusing on ways to build equity and equality for women. So what are the appropriate roles of women and men? Who should take on responsibilities such as environmental management? What about family planning and reproductive health?
In the following podcast, experts Karen Hardee, senior adviser in reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and monitoring and evaluation at John Snow, Inc.; and Elin Torell, coastal resources specialist at the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Center, address these questions, and specifically discuss the role of gender in field-based projects that incorporate population, health, and environment components. -
Not Just Outside the Box, But Without a Box: World Bank’s Marketplace Finalists
›May 22, 2007 // By Gib ClarkeThe finalists of the World Bank‘s annual Development Marketplace competition are presenting their winning projects this week in Washington, DC. Overall, 2,500 proposals were submitted on population, health, and nutrition, and the final 104 projects—hailing from 42 countries around the world—will be on display for all to see on May 22 and 23.
The Development Marketplace is sort of a micro-version of the Gates Foundation-sponsored Grand Challenge Initiative, in that it provides funding to non-traditional projects that would otherwise not be funded because they fall outside the development community’s comfort level. Innovative projects are something of a double-edged sword—funders tend to be turned off by their uniqueness; yet if successful, these projects could serve as useful models in other development settings.
The finalists’ projects range from selling soap to buy medicine in the
I was thrilled to participate as a judge in this competition. It was exciting to see so many novel ideas, from creative recycling of garbage to board games used to teach reproductive health. Choosing certain projects to advance to the next round was difficult, given the wide array of problems they were addressing. In the end, the projects that made it to this last round share a few characteristics – creativity, small-scale, and potential for replication in a variety of settings. Hopefully these new, small, non-traditional projects will help us solve the old, large, traditional problems.
World Bank staff have created their own blog for the Development Marketplace. Judges, attendees, contestants—and interested readers—are encouraged to comment. They will be updating the blog with stories about the projects throughout the two day competition. -
Saving the World
›What’s wrong with the world today? A whole lot. War in Iraq, poverty in rural America, malaria in Africa, global warming…the list is endless. But the editors of Foreign Policy think they have a way to solve these problems and more. The magazine’s new cover story, “21 Ways to Save the World,” is a collection of short essays on a wide range of global issues by some of the world’s leading thinkers.
Besides the interesting topics and the authors’ engaging styles, I like this series because it forces journalists and scholars—both of whom usually write about problems—to write about solutions. This shift is important because policymakers often get stumped when they hear that issues like high fertility and pollution are concerns of national security—what can they do about these seemingly insurmountable problems?
Most of the dilemmas and solutions presented in the article will be familiar to the informed reader. Amy Myers Jaffe extols the virtues of electricity. Seth Berkeley is optimistic about an AIDS vaccine. Jeffrey Sachs calls for malaria intervention. But some of the proposed solutions will be a tough sell for the policy audience.
For example, as he does elsewhere, Nicholas Eberstadt draws attention to the astonishingly high mortality of Russians—males in particular. He argues that if the United States intervenes, the benefits would be two-fold: humanitarian gains through Russian lives saved, and also political dividends in the form of a strengthened Russian democracy. But increased foreign aid for Russia’s health crisis will likely be a bitter pill for American politicians to swallow for a couple of reasons: First, there are still too many people occupying important government posts who got their first taste of power during the Cold War. For these folks, Russia is still the big bad bear and they may not be too keen on taking action to strengthen the Russian state. And for policymakers who are more humanitarian-minded, Eberstadt’s argument is still a hard sell because there’s simply no room for another needy state. Thanks to relentless campaigning by celebrities like Bono and philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates, the U.S. government is finally attempting to gain traction in Africa and see the deplorable conditions there as both a humanitarian and security concern (AFRICOM is the most recent example of the United States trying to get ahead of the problem). Now they have to save Russia, too?
This gets at the larger issue with the collection of essays. While the editors of FP are noble in their aim to tackle all of the world’s troubles, I fear that policymakers will just continue to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of problems and the multitude of solutions—the deer-in-headlights response. Thomas Homer-Dixon is correct when he writes that problems are complex, systems are complex, and solutions must be complex. With so many problems of equal importance—in an environment where everyone has their issue—and so many solutions of equal viability, how are policymakers ever to choose?
Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, and a consultant to Policy Planning in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the U.S. Department of Defense. -
The New York Times Sees “The Shape of Things to Come” in Very Young Populations
›April 11, 2007 // By Gib ClarkeReporting on Population Action International’s latest report, The Shape of Things to Come, The New York Times’ Celia W. Dugger calls the link between young age structures and conflict “no simple coincidence,” observing that Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo all suffer from bad governance, violent conflict, and young populations. Retired Army Major General William L. Nash sets the scene with military efficiency:You’ve got a lot of young men. You’ve got a lot of poverty. You’ve got a lot of bad governance, and often you’ve got greed with extractive industries. You put all that together, and you’ve got the makings of trouble.
Shape concludes that youthful populations (countries where up to two-thirds of the population is below 30 years old) are most likely to present hurdles to political stability, governance, and, in some cases, economic development. For example, between 1970 and 1999, 80 percent of civil conflicts (those with 25 deaths or more) occurred in countries where 60 percent of the population was under 30 years old. In contrast, countries with an older age structure had only a 5 percent chance of civil conflict in the 1990s. Increased access to family planning and reproductive health, as well as improved rights for women—legal, educational, and economic—can help countries avoid demographic problems, the report says.
While Dugger’s explanation of the link between youthful populations and conflict is strong and succinct, she does not delve into the nuances of demography that are not so simple, but yet just as illuminating. Shape also focuses on other countries along the “demographic transition”— a population’s shift from high to low rates of birth and death—including “youthful” South Korea, “mature” Germany, and “transitional” Mexico and Tunisia. Some countries are impossible to classify strictly by age structures, including the United Arab Emirates, where large numbers of young men are immigrating for work; and sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV/AIDS is killing adults and children alike.
This report, as well as the PAI’s 2003 The Security Demographic, was released in a political environment increasingly concerned with the negative economic consequences of low fertility—the “birth dearth”—in developed countries, which has led Russia, France, and Iran to offer financial rewards for women that have more children. In addition, other recent reports have focused on the “demographic dividend” that developing countries could harness by taking advantage of the ingenuity and additional labor of youthful age structures. Many developed countries, concerned about below-replacement fertility rates, are thus not noticing or remain unconcerned that the population of the developing world continues to grow—and some even consider family planning to have been “accomplished.”
Despite the shifting political landscape, the fundamental arguments for female empowerment and family planning remain the same. Provision of reproductive health information and access to family planning goods and services are development imperatives, and the only way to ensure that women and couples can choose the size of their families. Furthermore, lowering birth rates still has positive economic benefits. The NYT article, while limited in its focus, will help bolster support for such programs, because as PAI’s Tod J. Preston tells Dugger:The budget realities are such that unless you can show how your programs help achieve larger ends—security, development, poverty reduction, democracy—traditional rationales for humanitarian assistance aren’t enough.
-
Pop Goes the Environment: Op-Eds Break the P-E Silence
›April 11, 2007 // By Meaghan ParkerThe population-environment connection is riding the climate change bandwagon into the Op-Ed columns—at least overseas. The Observer’s Juliette Jowit lays out four reasons why “No one is willing to address the accelerating growth in the world’s population” including:“[T]he uncomfortable suspicion that environmentalism is a soft cover for more objectionable population agendas to stop or reduce immigration or growth in developing countries. Sometimes it might be. But that doesn’t take away the underlying fact: that more people use more resources and create more pollution.”
But, she concludes, this is no reason to “to ignore one half of the world’s biggest problem: the population effect on climate change.” The lively comment board takes sides on this sometimes-controversial linkage with gusto.
London-based journalist Gwynne Dyer argues in the New Zealand Herald that despite some progress, the “Population bomb [is] still ticking away” in many developing countries. Like Jowitt, he bemoans population’s perceived political incorrectness, which means it “scarcely gets a mention even in discussions on climate change.”
But not talking about population growth is a “failure of government”—especially when the consequences include not only poverty, but war, he says:“Often, however, the growing pressure of people on the land leads indirectly to catastrophic wars: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Somalia, Congo, Angola, and Burundi have all been devastated by chronic, many-sided civil wars, and all seven appear in the top 10 birth-rate list. Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, which have suffered similar ordeals, are just out of the top 10.”
Aside from the rough correlation he draws between fertility rate and civil conflict, Dyer doesn’t cite any reasons or research supporting this indirect link. Experts writing in the ECSP Report’s “Population and Conflict” series provide a more nuanced look at this relationship.
