Showing posts from category population.
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Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam on the Population Reference Bureau’s “Women’s Edition” Trip to Ethiopia
›The original version of this article, by Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.My name is Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam, and I’m a freelance journalist, writer, and editor from Pakistan. My passion is writing about human rights with a special focus on gender issues and reproductive health. Blogging is a personal joy to me, as I put my heart into my writing and blogging allows for a more personalized style. Digital journalism is a sign of evolution – one I happily accept. My pet peeve is marginalization on any grounds. I am a mother of a teenage daughter and live in Karachi.
As part of the Population Reference Bureau’s (PRB) group of journalists in Women’s Edition 2010-2012, I recently had the chance to travel to Ethiopia on a visit that was unforgettable. The visit inspired a series of seven brief travel-blogs, based on my seven days there. Women’s Edition is a wonderful opportunity to connect with other like-minded female journalists from developing countries around the world, and learn solutions to the problems from this interaction. The program has reaffirmed my belief that our commonalities are more than the differences.
Read Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam’s posts from her trip to Ethiopia on her blog, Impassioned Ramblings, and view photos from the trip on PRB’s Facebook page.
Photo Credit: PRB. -
Failed States Index 2011
›“The reasons for state weakness and failure are complex, but not unpredictable,” said J.J. Messner, one of the founders of the Fund for Peace’s Failed States Index, at the launch of the 2011 version of report in Washington last month. The Index is an analytical tool that could aid policymakers and governments seeking to prevent and mitigate state collapse by identifying patterns of underlying drivers of state instability.
The Index ranks 177 countries according to 12 primary social, economic, and political indicators based on analysis of “thousands of news and information sources and millions of documents” and distilled into a form that is meant to be “relevant as well as easily digestible and informative,” according to the creators. “By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states,” they write, the Index “makes political risk assessment and early warning of conflict accessible to policymakers and the public at large.”
Common Threats: Demographic and Natural Resource Pressures
The Index reveals that half of the 10-most fragile states are acutely demographically challenged. The composite “Demographic Pressures” category takes into account population density, growth, and distribution; land and resource competition; water scarcity; food security; the impact of natural disasters; and public health prevention and control. Additional population indices are found in “Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs),” and health indicators, including infant mortality, water, and sanitation, are spread across several categories.
Not surprisingly, some of the most conflict-ridden countries show up at the top of the list. The Index highlights some of the lesser known issues that contribute to their misery: demographic and natural resource stresses in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen (a list that would include Palestine, if inclusion in the Index were not contingent on UN membership); the DRC’s conflict minerals; and Somalia and Sudan’s myriad of environmental and migration problems, which play major roles in their continued instability.
Haiti, with its poor health and lack of infrastructure and disaster resilience, was deemed the Index’s “most-worsened” state of 2011. The January 2010 earthquake and its ensuing “chaos and humanitarian catastrophe” demonstrated that a single event can trigger the collapse of virtually every other sector of society, causing what Messner termed the “Humpty Dumpty effect” – while a state can deteriorate quickly, it is much harder to put it back together again.
The inclusion of natural resource governance within the social and economic indicators would render the Index a more complete analytical tool. In a 2009 report, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) found that “since 1990, at least eighteen violent conflicts have been fueled by the exploitation of natural resources,” and that effective natural resource management is a necessary component of conflict prevention and peacebuilding operations.
The Elephant in the Room: Predicting the Arab Spring
Why did the Index fail to predict the Arab Spring sweeping the Middle East and North Africa? Many critics assert that the inconsistent ranking of the states, ranging from Yemen (ranked 13th) to Bahrain (ranked 129th), demonstrates that the Index is a poor indicator of state instability. Particularly, critics argue that many of the countries experiencing revolutions were ranked artificially low.
“Of course, the Failed States Index did not predict the Arab Spring, and nor is it intended to predict such upheavals,” said Messner at the launch event. “But by digging down deeper into the specific indicator analysis, it was possible to observe the growing tensions in those countries.” The Index has consistently highlighted specific troubling indicators for the region, such as severe demographic pressures, migration, group grievance, human rights, state legitimacy, and political elitism.
Blake Hounshell, a correspondent with Foreign Policy (long-time collaborators with the Fund for Peace on the Index), wrote that the Index was never meant to be a “crystal ball” – even the best statistical data cannot truly encapsulate the complex realities that lead to inherently unpredictable events, such as revolutions. “It’s thousands of individual decisions, not rows of statistics, that add up to political upheaval,” Hounshell continued.
Demographer Richard Cincotta’s work on Tunisia’s revolution illuminates how the Index’s linear indicators can mask a complex reality. Whereas the Failed States Index simply measures “demographic pressure” as a linear function of how youthful a population is, Cincotta pointed out at a Wilson Center event that it was actually Tunisia’s relative demographic maturity that paved the way for its revolution and gives it a good chance of achieving a liberal democracy. Other countries in the region are much younger than Tunisia (Yemen being the youngest). The Arab Spring demonstrates that static indicators alone often do not have the capacity to predict complex social and political revolutions.
Sources: Foreign Policy, The Fund for Peace, UNEP.
Image Credit: Failed States Index 2011, Foreign Policy. -
Leona D’Agnes on Evaluating PHE Service Delivery in the Philippines
›“By reducing population growth, we are going to have a better chance of sustaining the gains of an environmental conservation project,” said Leona D’Agnes in this interview with ECSP. D’Agnes, a technical advisor to PATH Foundation Philippines, served as lead author on a research article published late last year in Environmental Conservation titled, “Integrated Management of Coastal Resources and Human Health Yields Added Value: A Comparative Study in Palawan (Philippines).” The study provided concrete statistical evidence that integrated development programming incorporating population, health, and the environment (PHE) can be more effective in lowering population growth rates and preserving critical coastal ecosystems than single-sector development interventions.
“What set this research apart from earlier work on integrated programming was the rigorous evaluation design that was applied,” said D’Agnes. “What this design aimed to do is to evaluate the integrated approach itself. Most of the previous evaluations that have been done on integrated programming were impact evaluations — they set out to evaluate the impact of the project.” This most recent research project, on the other hand, sought to evaluate the effectiveness of cross-sectoral interventions based on “whether or not synergies were produced,” said D’Agnes.Although it took her team six years to generate statistically significant findings in Palawan, D’Agnes reports that the synergies of PATH Foundation Philippines’ PHE intervention took the form of reduced income poverty, a decreased average number of children born to women of reproductive age, and the preservation of coastal resources, which helped bolster the region’s food security.
Going forward, D’Agnes said, an integrated approach to environmental conservation should also prove appealing because of its cost effectiveness. “This has huge implications for local governments in the Philippines, where they are struggling to meet the basic needs of their constituents in the face of very small internal revenue allotments that they get from the central government,” she said. “They can really pick up on this example to see that at the local level, if somehow they can do this integrated service delivery that was done in the Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management (IPOPCORM) model, that they’ll be able to achieve the objectives of both their conservation and their health programs in a much more cost-effective way, and, in the process, generate some other [positive] outcomes that perhaps they didn’t anticipate.”
D’Agnes expects the study’s results will prompt a fresh look at cross-sectoral PHE programming. “I hope that this evidence from this study will help to change the thinking in the conservation community about integrated approaches to conservation and development,” she said.
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Life on the Edge: Climate Change and Reproductive Health in the Philippines
›July 18, 2011 // By Hannah MarquseeHigh population growth and population density have placed serious stress on natural resources in the Philippines. No one lives far from the coast in the 7,150-island archipelago, making the population extremely dependent on marine resources and vulnerable to sea-level rise, flooding, and other effects of climate change. The coastal megacity of Manila – one of the most densely populated in the world – is beset by poor urban planning, lack of infrastructure, and a large population living in lowland slums, making it particularly vulnerable to increased flooding and natural disasters. [Video Below]
The Philippines is now home to 93 million people and by 2050 is expected to reach 155 million, according to the UN’s medium fertility variant projections. Development programs in the country have made great strides towards increasing access to family planning and reproductive health services as well as improving management of marine resources, but the underlying trends remain troubling.
The Battle Over Reproductive Health
Since 1970, the government’s Commission on Population has been addressing population growth, reproductive health, and family planning. “The impact of the high rate of population growth is intricately linked to the welfare and sustainable development for a country like the Philippines, where poverty drives millions of people to overexploit their resource base,” wrote the commission. As a result of these efforts and others, total fertility rate has dropped from 6.0 children per woman in 1970, to the present 3.2.
The Philippines has also made great gains towards achieving Millennium Development Goal targets, “particularly in the alleviation of extreme poverty; child mortality; incidences of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria; gender equality in education; household dietary intake; and access to safe drinking water,” according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Yet, “glaring disparities across regions persist,” UNDP states.
One of the poorest regions in the country, the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, is also home to a violent separatist movement. With limited access to health services, fertility and population growth rates are the highest in the country. Women in Mindanao average 4.2 children per woman; one in four married women has an unmet need for contraception; and 45 percent of households live in poverty (compared to 24 percent nationally).
Nationally, “serious challenges and threats remain with regard to targets on maternal health, access to reproductive health services, nutrition, primary education, and environmental sustainability,” according to UNDP–in particular, indicators on maternal health are “disturbing” and of all the MDGs, are labeled “least likely to be achieved.”
Out of three million pregnancies that occur every year, half were unplanned and one-third of these end in abortions, according to a 2006 report of the Allan Guttmacher Institute conducted in the Philippines. Induced abortion was the fourth leading cause of maternal deaths, and young women accounted for 17 percent of induced abortions. Over half of births occurred at home and one-third of them were assisted by traditional birth attendants. Around 75 percent of the poorest quintile did not have access to skilled birth attendants compared to only 20 percent of the richest quintile.
The politically influential Catholic Church recently blocked passage of a reproductive health bill, despite support by President Benigno Aquino and a majority of Filipinos. The bill seeks to provide universal access to contraception and would make sex education required from fifth grade onwards, a provision that has angered Church officials.
Manila Under Water
The Philippines’ combination of high population growth and limited land area (nearly all of which is near the coast) makes the country extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Sixty-five percent of Filipinos live in coastal areas and 49 percent live in urban areas. Paul Hutchcroft, in Climate Change and Natural Security, writes that “even in the best of times, the frequency of typhoons, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions makes the Philippines one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world” (p. 45).
Population growth, climate change, and deforestation will only increase the severity of these disasters, he concludes. Hutchcroft points out that by 2080, projected temperature increases of between 1.2 to 3.9 degrees Celsius could raise sea levels by an estimated 0.19 to 1.04 meters – a scary thought for the 15 million living within a one-meter elevation zone (p. 46).
In 2009, metropolitan Manila, currently home to 11 million people (18,650 per square kilometer) and projected to grow to 19 million by 2050, was hit by tropical storms that caused devastating flooding – at their peak, waters reached nearly seven meters, according to a World Bank report. “More than 80 percent of the city was underwater,” write the authors, “causing immense damage to housing and infrastructure and displacing around 280,000-300,000 people.”
“Even if current flood infrastructure plans are implemented, the area flooded in 2050 will increase by 42 percent in the event of a 1-in-100-year flood,” says the World Bank report. Climate change could also increase the cost of flooding as much as $650 million, or 6 percent of GDP. Only by considering climate-related risks in urban planning can the Philippines hope to mitigate the effects of climate change, the report concludes.
Integrated Development: One Piece of the Puzzle?
Population, health, and environment (PHE) programs that integrate family planning and natural resource management are one way to help the majority of Filipinos that live in densely populated and resource-stressed coastal areas.
In ECSP’s FOCUS Issue 15, “Fishing for Families: Reproductive Health and Integrated Coastal Management in the Philippines,” Joan Castro and Leona D’Agnes explain how Path Foundation Philippines, Inc.’s IPOPCORM project – which ran from 2000 to 2006 – helped “improve reproductive health and coastal resource management more than programs that focused exclusively on reproductive health or the environment – and at a lower total cost.” A recent peer-reviewed study, co-authored by Castro and D’Agnes and published in Environmental Conservation, proved the same point with rigorous analysis.
“When we started IPOPCORM, there was really nothing about integrating population, health, and environment,” said Castro in an interview with ECSP. IPOPCORM provided some of the first evidenced-based results showing there is value added to implementing coastal resource management and family planning in tandem rather than separately. In part due to the success of the IPOPCORM, the Philippines have become one of the major PHE development implementers in the world.
Creating sustainably managed marine sanctuaries while improving access to family planning provides a way forward for many coastal communities. However, the Philippines’ urban woes – 44 percent of urban dwellers live in slums, according to the Population Reference Bureau – internal divisions, and natural vulnerability will likely make it difficult to dodge considerable climate-related effects in the near future. Already the archipelago’s vast biodiversity is in crisis, according to studies over two thirds of native plant and animal species are endemic to the islands and nearly half of them are threatened; only seven percent of its original old-growth less than 10 percent of the islands’ original vegetation remains; and 70 percent of nearly 27,000 square kilometers of coral reefs are in poor condition.
Sources: CIA, Conservation International, Field Museum, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Philippines National Statistics Office, Population Reference Bureau, United Nations, U.S. Census Bureau, World Bank, World Wildlife Fund.
Photo Credit: “Climate Risk and Resilience: Securing the Region’s Future” courtesy of Flickr user Asian Development Bank. -
Michael Kugelman, Foreign Policy
Pakistan’s Demographic Dilemma
›July 15, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Michael Kugelman, appeared on Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel.
Pakistan’s 2011 census kicked off in April, but less than three months later, it is embroiled in controversy. Several members of the Sindh Census Monitoring Committee have rejected as “seriously flawed” the recently completed household count. They allege that census workers, directed by an unspecified “ethnic group,” have counted Karachi’s “inns, washrooms, and even electric poles” as households in an effort to dilute the city’s native “Sindhi” presence.
These Census Monitoring Committee members are not the only Pakistani politicians to be concerned about the census. Pakistan is experiencing rapid urbanization; while a third of the country’s people have long been rurally based, at least 50 percent of the population is expected to live in cities by the 2020s. Pakistan’s political leadership draws much of its power from rural landholdings, power that could be greatly reduced if a census confirms this migration toward cities.
This politicization underscores the perils of census-taking in Pakistan. In many other nations, it is a routine process completed regularly. Yet in Pakistan, myriad factors – from catastrophic flooding and insufficient funding to the turbulent security situation and intense political opposition – have conspired to delay it for three consecutive years, making the country census-less since 1998.
Accurate census data enables governments to make decisions about how to best allocate resources and services. In Pakistan, such decisions are critical. Consider that its current population, estimated at about 175 million, is the world’s sixth-largest. It has the highest population growth, birth, and fertility rates in South Asia – one of the last regions, along with sub-Saharan Africa, still experiencing young and rapidly rising populations. Additionally, with a median age of 21, Pakistan’s population is profoundly youthful. Two-thirds are less than 30 years old, and as a percentage of total population, only Yemen has more people under 24.
Continue reading on Foreign Policy.
Michael Kugelman is a program associate for the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center and co-editor of Reaping the Divided: Overcoming Pakistan’s Demographic Challenges.
Sources: UN Population Division.
Photo Credit: “Pakistan Diaster Relief,” courtesy of flickr user DVIDSHUB. -
World Population Day 2011: The Year of Seven Billion
›July 11, 2011 // By Schuyler NullThe UN Population Fund established World Population Day as a day of awareness about global population in 1987. As we approach seven billion just 24 years later, the UN is kicking off their 7 Billion Actions campaign, designed to raise awareness about the resource, health, and environmental challenges raised by our numbers. Population and its more detailed cousin-indicator, demography, impact the world in a great many ways – from contributing to resource scarcity and environmental destruction to creating social imbalances that can lead to civil instability.
Check out a few of New Security Beat’s most recent stories on population to get a sense of why it’s such an important but oft-simplified and misunderstood indicator and where it matters most.
Photo Credit: “World population,” courtesy of flickr user Arenamontanus.- One in Three People Will Live in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2100, Says UN
- Ten Billion: UN Updates Population Projections, Assumptions on Peak Growth Shattered
- Tunisia Predicted: Demography and the Probability of Liberal Democracy in the Greater Middle East
- Watch: Demographic Security 101 With Elizabeth Leahy Madsen
- Yemen Beyond the Headlines: Population, Health, Natural Resources, and Institutions
- Guest Contributor Michael Kugelman: Pakistan’s Population Bomb Defused?
- Dot-Mom: USAID Egypt’s Health and Population Legacy Review
- Watch: Eric Kaufmann on How Demography Is Enhancing Religious Fundamentalism
- Consumption and Global Growth: How Much Does Population Contribute to Carbon Emissions?
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Consumption and Global Growth: How Much Does Population Contribute to Carbon Emissions?
›July 6, 2011 // By Schuyler NullWhen discussing long-term population trends on this blog, we’ve mainly focused on demography’s interaction with social and economic development, the environment, conflict, and general state stability. In the context of climate change, population also plays a major role, but as Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research put it at last year’s Society of Environmental Journalists conference, population is neither a silver bullet nor a red herring in the climate problem. Though it plays a major role, population is not the largest driver of global greenhouse gases emissions – consumption is.
In Prosperity Without Growth, first published by the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission and later by EarthScan as a book, economist Tim Jackson writes that it is “delusional” to rely on capitalism to transition to a “sustainable economy.” Because a capitalist economy is so reliant on consumption and constant growth, he concludes that it is not possible for it to limit greenhouse gas emissions to only 450 parts per million by 2050.
It’s worth noting that the UN has updated its population projections since Jackson’s original article. The medium variant projection for average annual population growth between now and 2050 is now about 0.75 percent (up from 0.70). The high variant projection bumps that growth rate up to 1.08 percent and the low down to 0.40 percent.
Either way, though population may play a major role in the development of certain regions, it plays a much smaller role in global CO2 emissions. In a fairly exhaustive post, Andrew Pendleton from Political Climate breaks down the math of Jackson’s most interesting conclusions and questions, including the role of population. He writes that the larger question is what will happen with consumption levels and technological advances:The argument goes like this. Growth (or decline) in emissions depend by definition on the product of three things: population growth (numbers of people), growth in income per person ($/person), and on the carbon intensity of economic activity (kgCO2/$). This last measure depends crucially on technology, and shows how far growth has been “decoupled” from carbon emissions. If population growth and economic growth are both positive, then carbon intensity must shrink at a faster rate than the other two if we are to slash emissions sufficiently.
Pendleton also brings up the prickly question of global inequity and how that impacts Jackson’s long-term assumptions:
Jackson calculates that to reach the 450 ppm stabilization target, carbon emissions would have to fall from today’s levels at an average rate of 4.9 percent a year every year to 2050. So overall, carbon intensity has to fall enough to get emissions down by that amount and offset population and income growth. Between now and 2050, population is expected to grow at an average of 0.7 percent and Jackson first considers an extrapolation of the rate of global economic growth since 1990 – 1.4 percent a year – into the future. Thus, to reach the target, carbon intensity will have to fall at an average rate of 4.9 + 0.7 + 1.4 = 7.0 percent a year every year between now and 2050. This is about 10 times the historic rate since 1990.
Pause at this stage, and take note that if there were no further economic growth, carbon intensity would still have to fall at a rate of 4.9 + 0.7 = 5.6 percent, or about eight times the rate over the last 20 years. To his credit, Jackson acknowledges this – as he puts it, decoupling is vital, with or without growth. Decoupling will require both huge innovation and investment in energy efficiency and low-carbon energy technologies. One question, to which we’ll return later, is whether and how you can get this if there is no economic growth.But Jackson doesn’t stop there. He goes on to point out that taking historical economic growth as a basis for the future means you accept a very unequal world. If we are serious about fairness, and poor countries catching up with rich countries, then the challenge is much, much bigger. In a scenario where all countries enjoy an income comparable with the European Union average by 2050 (taking into account 2.0 percent annual growth in that average between now and 2050 as well), then the numbers for the required rate of decoupling look like this: 4.9 percent a year cut in carbon emissions + 0.7 percent a year to offset population growth + 5.6 percent a year to offset economic growth = 11.2 percent per year, or about 15 times the historical rate.
To further complicate how population figures into all this, Brian O’Neill’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article, “Global Demographic Trends and Future Carbon Emissions,” shows that urbanization and aging trends will have differential – and potentially offsetting – impacts on carbon emissions. Aging, particularly in industrialized countries, will reduce carbon emissions by up to 20 percent in the long term. On the other hand, urbanization, particularly in developing countries, could increase emissions by 25 percent.
What do you think? Is infinite growth possible? If so, how do you reconcile that with its effects on “spaceship Earth?” Do you rely on technology to improve efficiency? Do you call it a loss and hope the benefits of growth are worth it?
Sources: Political Climate, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Prosperity Without Growth (Jackson). -
Nepal to East Africa: Population, Health, and Environment Programs Compared
›“Practice, Harvest and Exchange: Exploring and Mapping the Global, Health, Environment (PHE) Network of Practice,” by the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Institute and the USAID-supported BALANCED Project, explores the successes and challenges of their global population, health, and environment (PHE) network (with a heavy presence in East Africa). In order to increase support of the nascent PHE approach, the network seeks to shorten the “collaborative distance” between “PHE champions,” so they can develop a stronger body of evidence for the links between population, health, and the environment. In their analysis, the authors write that the network has facilitated the development of independent, information-sharing relationships between “champions.” However, they also observed shortfalls in the network, such as its limited reach into less technologically advanced yet more biodiverse regions, its bias toward BALANCED meet-up event participants, and its exclusion of those experts unlikely to be included in published works.In “Linking Population, Health, and the Environment: An Overview of Integrated Programs and a Case Study in Nepal” from the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine, Sigrid Hahn, Natasha Anandaraja, and Leona D’Agnes provide both a broad survey of the structure and content of programs using the PHE method and an in-depth case study of a successful initiative in Nepal. Hahn et al. praise the Nepalese program for simultaneously addressing deforestation from fuel-wood harvesting, indoor air pollution from wood fires, acute respiratory infections related to smoke inhalation, as well as family planning in Nepal’s densely populated forest corridors. “The population, health, and environment approach can be an effective method for achieving sustainable development and meeting both conservation and health objectives,” the authors conclude. In particular, one benefit of cross-sectoral natural resource and development programs is the inclusion of men and adolescent boys typically overlooked by strictly family planning programs.
