Showing posts from category population.
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Developed World’s Dominance Declines with Age, Say Demographers
›February 5, 2009 // By Will Rogers
“The whole world is aging, and the developed countries are leading the way,” said Neil Howe of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at a January 27, 2009, Wilson Center discussion of his latest report, The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century. Demography is as close as social science comes to predicting the future, Howe explained, presenting the geopolitical consequences of demographic trends over the next 50 years. Howe and co-author Richard Jackson, also of CSIS, were joined by Jennifer Sciubba of Rhodes College, who urged them and other demographers to explore how population trends interact with additional variables, such as environmental degradation, economic recession, and conflict.
Danger: Demographic Decline Approaching
“Populations in most developed countries will not only age, but stagnate or decline,” due to falling fertility and rising longevity, said Howe. Without “sizable immigration,” he warned, the populations of countries like the United States, France, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and Japan will decline. As developed countries’ populations shrink, they will lose military might, savings and investment, entrepreneurship, and cultural influence. “Voltaire once said that God is on the side of biggest battalions,” Howe reminded the audience.
Developing Toward Greater PeaceJackson explained that the developing world is in the midst of the “demographic transition”—the drops in mortality and fertility that generally accompany economic and social development. Since 1970, the developing world’s overall fertility rate has declined from 5.1 to 2.9 children per woman, and its overall population growth rate has dropped from 2.2 percent to 1.3 percent per year, according to Jackson. Additionally, the median age has risen from 20 to 26 years old, “a cause for hope and optimism about the future,” Jackson argued, as countries with more balanced population age structures tend to be more democratic, prosperous, and peaceful than countries with extremely young ones.
But despite the long-term possibility of a world transitioning toward greater peace and prosperity, the developing world will still experience near-term shocks. The timing and pace of the demographic transition varies widely by country and region, with some countries transitioning too fast or too far, said Jackson. These trends could push developing countries toward social collapse by acting “as a kind of multiplier on all the stresses of development,” explained Jackson—for instance, causing China “to lurch even more toward neo-authoritarianism.”
Crisis of the 2020s
Global demographic trends will converge in the 2020s to make that decade “very challenging,” said Howe. The developed world will undergo hyper-aging, population decline, and flattening GDP growth, along with rising pension and health care costs, Jackson noted. The Muslim world will experience a decade of temporary youth bulges, as the large generation that was born between 1990 and 2000 has children. The populations of Russia and Eastern Europe will implode, and Russia’s geopolitical strength and influence will wane. Meanwhile, China will experience a decade of “premature aging”; due to its one-child policy, it will become “gray” before it achieves the per capita GDP of most aging countries.
Demography and Public PolicySciubba praised the report’s comprehensive, policy-friendly approach to demography, but urged the authors to remain true to the nuances of their topic, even in their conclusions and recommendations. “Policymakers like to know what we don’t know and what we do know. And with population aging and national security, often there’s a lot more of what we don’t know than what we do know,” she said. “Going into the future, we need more of an emphasis on places where policymakers can make a difference,” said Sciubba. “Opportunities matter just as much as challenges.”Photos: Neil Howe, Richard Jackson, and Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.
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Weekly Reading
›The Feeding of the Nine Billion: Global Food Security for the 21st Century, a report from Chatham House, puts forth 10 proposals designed to make the global food system more resilient, sustainable, and equitable.
Strategic Implications of Global Health, a recent report from the National Intelligence Council, builds on a 2000 National Intelligence Estimate analyzing the links between global health and U.S. national security, but places more emphasis on non-infectious issues like maternal mortality, malnutrition, and chronic diseases.
Bill Gates’ first annual letter about his work at the Gates Foundation includes a chart showing that better overall health is linked to smaller families.
“How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change,” a discussion paper from Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, examines coverage of the economic debate over the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008.
Population Connection’s February 2009 Reporter features stories on Ghana’s slow progress on reproductive health and Thomas Friedman’s book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, among others.
The Economist examines the connections between failed states and conflict, terrorism, poverty, and disease. Failed states were a major concern of the recent U.S. National Defense Strategy. -
VIDEO: Christian Leuprecht on Demography, Conflict, and National Security
›January 29, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“Demographics are going to be to the 21st century what class cleavages were to the 19th century,” says Christian Leuprecht in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. In this video, Leuprecht, an assistant professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, makes the case for the importance of demographic dynamics and their connections to conflict and security. -
Reading Radar– A Weekly Roundup
›January 23, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“As long as we continue to subsidize Gaza’s extreme demographic armament, young Palestinians will likely continue killing their brothers or neighbors. And yet, despite claiming that it wants to bring peace to the region, the West continues to make the population explosion in Gaza worse every year. By generously supporting UNRWA’s budget, the West assists a rate of population increase that is 10 times higher than in their own countries,” argues the University of Bremen’s Gunnar Heinsohn in the Wall Street Journal.
In an article for the Huffington Post, Water Advocates’ John Sauer argues that we should group together waterborne diseases like diarrhea, typhoid, and cholera under the name “No-Plumbing Disease,” to help water and sanitation get the attention they deserve.
It takes a strong editor to push for stories on development issues like poverty and public health, but there is often surprisingly high interest in these stories, writes Richard Kavuma for the Guardian.Yale Environment 360 sums up President Obama’s statements on the environment in his inaugural address.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has cancelled nearly 60 percent of its logging contracts in an attempt to end corrupt and environmentally destructive logging, report the BBC and Reuters.
“Could the crises of food, fuel and finance that we experienced in 2008 simply be three canaries in the coalmine? What if these are just the early-warning signals that our current economic system is not sustainable at a much deeper level?” asks Dominic Waughray, head of environmental initiatives at the World Economic Forum.
“A flurry of scientific field work and environmental reports have linked the spread of oil palm plantations in Indonesia to the decimation of rain forests, increased conflict between logging and oil palm interests and rural and indigenous people, and massive CO2 emissions through logging, burning, and the draining of carbon-rich peat lands,” writes Tom Knudson on Yale Environment 360.
A nickel mine in Madagascar is likely to harm biodiversity in one of the world’s most biologically unique places, reports mongabay.com.
“It is high time that India and Pakistan consider the primacy of ecological cooperation as a means of lasting conflict resolution,” argues Saleem Ali in Pakistan’s Daily Times. -
In Rio de Janeiro, an Opportunity to Break Barriers
›January 23, 2009 // By Will RogersThe city of Rio de Janeiro’s plan to erect a 650-meter long, three-meter high concrete wall between the 7,500 residents of the Dona Marta slum and the surrounding rainforest signals the government’s reluctance to address the underlying causes of environmental degradation. Although it is heralded by authorities as an “eco-barrier” that will protect the rainforest and “improve living standards and protect slum residents from the armed gangs that control many of Rio’s 600 or so slums,” the wall does not address the issues of acute poverty and lack of access to affordable housing that keep many Brazilians living in slums, harvesting resources from the rainforest.
Without access to decent housing and living-wage jobs, many slum residents will continue to encroach on the hillsides, warn Brazilian environmentalists. “It is hypocrisy to talk about protecting the Atlantic rainforest without considering the issues of housing and transport to take the pressure off the forest,” said Sergio Ricardo, a leading environmental campaigner in Rio de Janeiro, in an interview with the Jornal do Brasil.
Slums have often stalled Rio’s efforts to improve its environmental report card, as slum residents tend to be focused more on daily survival than on the environmental consequences of their actions. But slums do not have to be a thorn in the side of the government’s eco-friendly image. In fact, Rio’s previous attempts to reverse deforestation through grassroots reforestation projects have been extremely successful.
According to a 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, municipal reforestation projects around Rio employed several hundred slum residents to plant millions of trees surrounding their communities. The projects “resulted in the return of dozens of species of birds, monkeys and other animals—many not seen in decades,” as well as cooler air temperatures, writes William Bennett. At the same time, the municipal projects became a source of steady work for residents. “Before this job, I worked as a day laborer; one day I would have work—the next day nothing,” said Carlos Alberto Ribeiro, a reforestation worker who earned about $200 a month planting trees. By 2005, community reforestation projects had employed 914 slum residents in 93 projects that had restored a total of 4,500 acres of native-species trees to the region.
Rather than segregating slum residents from the rest of the city in what some critics have called “social apartheid,” perhaps Rio should scale up community forestry projects, employing greater numbers of slum residents to improve the health of the Atlantic rainforest. While the government still has far to go in providing affordable housing, a steady wage could help residents secure access to adequate housing and reduce pressure on the region’s delicate environment.
Photo: Rocinha, one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest slums with an estimated 200,000 residents, is one of hundreds of slum neighborhoods surrounding Rio, putting extreme pressure on the region’s environment. Courtesy of flickr user andreasnilsson1976.
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Population, Family Planning Experts Urge Obama to Make Billion-Plus Investment
›January 22, 2009 // By Rachel WeisshaarFamily planning experts and advocates have wasted no time urging President Barack Obama to reverse former President George W. Bush’s international family planning policies. Five former directors of population and reproductive health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) call for the United States to renew its political and financial commitment to global family planning programs in Making the Case for U.S. International Family Planning Assistance, a report by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). The former bureaucrats recommend that USAID’s budget for international family planning be increased to $1.2 billion in FY 2010, up from $457 million in FY 2008, and that it be raised gradually to $1.5 billion in FY 2014 in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of universal access to reproductive health services by 2015.
In a compelling white paper (executive summary) submitted to the Obama transition team by Population Action International (PAI), the authors argue that by investing in voluntary family planning, the United States can “foster more peaceful, stable societies and improve maternal and child health, reduce unintended pregnancies and abortion, lower HIV infection rates, reduce poverty, enhance girls’ education, decrease hunger, and slow the depletion of natural resources.” PAI asks President Obama to:- Increase total U.S. FY 2010 spending on family planning and reproductive health to $1 billion;
- Rescind the Global Gag Rule/Mexico City Policy;
- Restore U.S. funding to the UN Population Fund; and
- Increase funding for programs to reduce maternal and child mortality, prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and improve the status of women.
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Man vs. Wildlife: Now Playing in Southeast Asia
›January 22, 2009 // By Will Rogers“There are no winners when elephants and humans compete for the same resources,” writes Amirtharaj Christy Williams, a biologist with the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), in the BBC’s Green Room. As urban sprawl and deforestation across Southeast Asia shrink elephants’ natural habitat, they are increasingly forced to compete with humans for access to freshwater and vegetation. And when elephants and humans compete for natural resources, elephants are no match for the “destructive power of humans.”
According to Williams, elephants need roughly 200 square kilometers of forest to roam. When their habitats become fragmented by roads, canals, dams, and mines—as in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh—or are destroyed to create palm oil, coffee, tea, and other plantations—as in Indonesia—they cross roads and trample through fields with awesome destructive power, sometimes taking human lives in their search for food and water. Angered and frightened, the villagers, “lacking technical help and access to effective and humane mitigation methods, retaliate by throwing burning tyres, shooting at the beasts with sharpened nails, even by laying out foods laced with killer pesticides,” Williams writes.
But it would be too easy to blame people for their destructive reaction to the elephants. “Imagine the psychological impact of elephant raids on villagers living in fragile mud and bamboo huts,” and the subsequent loss of a loved one, and you can begin to understand the human side of this conflict, Williams observes.
To be sure, those in illegal settlements and plantations in protected parks are partly to blame for encroaching on elephant habitat with little regard for the consequences. According to an October 2007 WWF report, Gone in an Instant, Indonesia’s illegal Sumatran coffee plantations were responsible for a decline in the elephant population in the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park (BBSNP) between 2000 and 2004. The report found that 45 “problem” elephants were killed in the BBSNP during that time as a result of human-elephant conflict. Most alarmingly, the report discovered that the conflict between illegal coffee farmers and wildlife was not limited to elephants, but that the Sumatran rhino and tiger—both listed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature—were also victims of human displacement and poaching.
At the same time, “more wholesale damage is caused by sanctioned habitat clearing at the hands of short-sighted government officials who encourage large areas to be set aside for monoculture cash-crop plantations or infrastructural and development projects” than by the retaliatory acts of villagers and farmers, Williams argues. Environmental impact assessments written by corrupt officials and narrow-minded politicians with their own interests in mind often neglect elephants (and other species) altogether. The sad truth is that “elephants are virtually led to the slaughter by the very governments mandated to protect them.”
Yet solutions to human-wildlife conflict do exist. “Sharing the Forest: Protecting Gorillas and Helping Families in Uganda,” outlines how a holistic approach—encompassing environmental conservation, family planning, basic health care, and support for alternative livelihoods—can lessen human-wildlife conflict. It is possible to reduce the rate of human-wildlife conflict—while boosting endangered species’ populations and helping communities escape poverty—but it takes creativity, patience, and a comprehensive approach.
Photo: Elephants in the wild near Habarana, Sri Lanka. Across East and Southeast Asia, urban sprawl and deforestation threaten wild elephants by displacing them from their natural habitats, forcing them to compete with humans for access to vital natural resources. Courtesy of flickr user Jungle Boy. -
Weekly Reading
›A study in Science warns that climate change “is likely to have more dramatic effects on global agriculture than previously predicted, leaving around half the world’s population facing serious food shortages,” reports SciDev.Net.
In an op-ed for Defense News, Sherri Goodman and David Catarious express hope that President-Elect Barack Obama will take steps to reduce climate change’s security impacts.
“Much of politics is repetitive and unproductive, but sometimes a logjam breaks. In the past two years, most politicians have ceased being in denial about climate change, greenhouse emissions, limits to water, and peak oil. All these crises reflect the deeper underlying problem: our population growth is out of control. Waiting for the population debate to begin is like waiting for the other shoe to drop,” writes Mark O’Connor for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Regional Water Cooperation and Peacebuilding in the Middle East, an Initiative for Peacebuilding paper by Annika Kramer of Adelphi Research, surveys peacebuilding challenges and opportunities around water among Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians.
Stephan Faris outlines the global divisions over climate change policy on Global Post, a new online-only international media site.
“The whole world is aging, and the developed countries are leading the way,” said Neil Howe of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at a January 27, 2009, 
Jackson explained that the developing world is in the midst of the “demographic transition”—the drops in mortality and fertility that generally accompany economic and social development. Since 1970, the developing world’s overall fertility rate has declined from 5.1 to 2.9 children per woman, and its overall population growth rate has dropped from 2.2 percent to 1.3 percent per year, according to Jackson. Additionally, the median age has risen from 20 to 26 years old, “a cause for hope and optimism about the future,” Jackson argued, as countries with more balanced population age structures tend to be 
Sciubba praised the report’s comprehensive, policy-friendly approach to demography, but urged the authors to remain true to the nuances of their topic, even in their conclusions and recommendations. “Policymakers like to know what we don’t know and what we do know. And with population aging and national security, often there’s a lot more of what we don’t know than what we do know,” she said. “Going into the future, we need more of an emphasis on places where policymakers can make a difference,” said Sciubba. “Opportunities matter just as much as challenges.”
The city of Rio de Janeiro’s plan to erect a 
