The final results confirm the Maoist victory in Nepal’s historic elections earlier this month, paving the way for the end of the monarchy and the final resolution of the decades-long civil war that led to more than 13,000 deaths. But will they be able to maintain stability after so many years fighting to disrupt the system? The roots of the Maoists’ rise—and the underlying conditions that supported their insurgency—may hold some clues to the future.

An article in today’s Washington Post explores the interconnected problems of poverty and rapid population growth in the Philippines. Many factors contribute to the country’s high poverty rate, including corruption and traditional land ownership laws, but a birth rate that is among the highest in Asia is also significant. Eighty percent of the Filipino population is Catholic, and both the influential Catholic Church and the current government—in power for the last five years—oppose modern family planning methods. Filipinos are permitted to buy contraception, but no national government funds may be used to purchase contraception for the millions who want it but cannot afford it.

The situation may be poised to worsen, notes the Post: “Distribution of donated contraceptives in the government’s nationwide network of clinics ends this year, as does a contraception-commodities program paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development. For years it has supplied most of the condoms, pills and intrauterine devices used by poor Filipinos.”

Yet the story is not entirely gloomy. A recent brief by Joan Castro and Leona D’Agnes of PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc. describes IPOPCORM, a development program that has successfully delivered family planning services to impoverished Filipino communities while simultaneously promoting environmental conservation and overall human health. Based on this success, some municipal governments in IPOPCORM’s service areas have set aside money in their budgets to purchase family planning commodities directly. A major conference in 2008 (building on an earlier conference in 2006) addressed population, health, and environment connections in the Philippines; featured speakers included former Congressman Nereus Acosta and Joan Castro.

A lack of consensus among researchers and policymakers over how to define “environmental security,” “national security,” and “human security” complicates discussions of the security implications of environmental and demographic change, assert Robert Mcab and Kathleen Bailey in “Latin America and the debate over environmental protection and national security,” published recently in the Defense Institute of Security Assistance Management Journal. A shortage of theoretical and empirical evidence makes proving the existence of environment-demography-security linkages difficult. Nevertheless, argue the authors, “given the relatively fragile nature of many Latin American economies, accurately addressing these threats is imperative for economic and social stability and security.”

Latin America’s rural environments face severe threats, including deforestation, land degradation, erosion, and water scarcity and pollution. “Human-induced land degradation and water shortages directly affect economic sufficiency in many rural areas,” write the authors. Another environmental cause of insecurity and violence—in Latin America and elsewhere—is land distribution. Inequitable land distribution in El Salvador, Latin America’s most densely populated country, was one of the causes of the country’s 18-year civil war. The 1992 peace agreement that ended the war set up a plan for land redistribution, although some question how fully it has been implemented.

Demographic shifts can also destabilize communities and regions: Migration can generate tensions and violence between newcomers and established populations, as has occurred in the disputed rural region of San Juan, which lies between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Moreover, Latin America is the most urbanized part of the developing world, and growing urban populations—often swelled by internal migrants—are straining cities’ and municipalities’ ability to provide basic services such as waste disposal and clean water.

Mcab and Bailey emphasize that demographic phenomena such as population growth and migration do not automatically create environmental degradation or threaten national security. Instead, it is the manner in which they interact with other socio-economic and political factors that can lead them to damage the environment or foster insecurity.

“Images of overpopulation tend to reinforce racist stereotypes of the world’s poorest people, demonizing those who are the least responsible for global warming” and obscuring important questions about how well family planning and other policies actually combat climate change, argued Hampshire College professor Betsy Hartmann in a lively roundtable discussion on population and climate change hosted by The Bulletin Online.

Because one-third of all pregnancies are unwanted, and because some 200 million women desire family planning services but lack access to them, contributor Frederick A.B. Meyerson, an ecologist at the University of Rhode Island, argued that policies to reduce unwanted pregnancy must be a chief global priority. He called for the international community to “restore the goal of universal access to family planning as a top-tier priority, to protect both the climate and human wellbeing.”

Joseph Chamie, research director for the Center for Migration Studies, called this a “delay tactic” that would do little to slow climate change, and said the international community should instead focus on decreasing consumption in the developed world, noting that the average American creates nearly 20 times as much carbon dioxide as the average Indian. He added that the 200 million women Meyerson mentioned live primarily in regions of Africa and Asia where per capita emissions are so low that changes in fertility will have negligible impact on climate. Increasing access to voluntary family planning services could have greater effects in India or China, he said, where economic development has resulted in continually increasing per capita emissions levels.

John Guillebaud, emeritus professor at University College London, and Martin Desvaux, trustee of the Optimum Population Trust, resisted Chamie’s assertion, writing, “It’s not difficult to understand that one less person born into poverty is one less person who needs to be helped out of poverty—a development process that cannot occur without increased energy consumption and (in the medium term) more carbon-dioxide emissions per person.” They wondered whether the international community would be better off focusing on reducing absolute emissions or providing for a more equitable distribution of emissions by reducing it in more-developed areas and allowing it to increase in less-developed areas as a result of improved standards of living.

Pointing out that some credit smaller landholdings (the result of a growing population) with higher investment in soil conservation and better-managed tree densities in Rwanda, Hartmann highlighted the complexity in forecasting the consequences of population growth. Seemingly counterintuitive findings like this one pepper the debate, encouraging us to carefully analyze the mathematical models and projections we rely on.

The Pacific Institute recently released an updated Water Conflict Chronology, which documents instances of conflict over water from 3000 B.C. through the present.

In an article on the Carnegie Council’s Policy Innovations, Saleem Ali of the University of Vermont argues that commentators should not have been so quick to blame the recent violence in Chad on oil, as civil strife in the country predates the discovery of oil by several decades. If oil revenues were managed transparently, he suggests, they could significantly improve stability and quality of life in Chad.

Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute highlights recent population trends—such as declining global fertility but a growing global population—and emphasizes the difficulty of accurately predicting future ones in the latest edition of Vital Signs.

Video, presentations, and photos—as well as an agenda and list of participants—from last week’s NATO Security Science Forum on Environmental Security are now available online.

“The defining challenge of the 21st century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet,” asserts leading international economist Jeffrey Sachs in his new book, Common Wealth: Economics For A Crowded Planet. Sachs argues that multilateral, multisectoral cooperation is needed to address four critical global challenges: climate change, population growth, poverty, and the ineffectiveness of global institutions. By investing two to three percent of the world’s annual income in combating these problems, he contends in a piece in Slate magazine, “10 million children per year can be saved from death while stabilizing the world’s population growth, ending extreme poverty, curbing climate change, and developing alternative energy sources.”

Humanity has successfully achieved several significant collective goals, says Sachs—for instance, the almost complete eradication of polio in the last half-century, and a 90 percent decline in the prevalence of measles over the past seven years. Yet nations continue to direct massive amounts of funding toward military responses to security problems, while failing to fund far less expensive ways of preventing violent conflict.

As Sachs opines in Slate, “Today’s impoverished drylands continue to combust in a tinderbox of violence…We send armies when we should send engineers and doctors. Violence is spreading. In seven brief years, we will have squandered more in the so-called ‘war on terror’ than all the world has ever given in all of its aid to all of Africa for all time.” Sachs says his book is an attempt to galvanize world leaders to take quick and decisive collective action to address these long-term security issues.

In “An End to One-Child Families in China?,” a recent post on his blog, Dot Earth, New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin comments on reports that China is considering ending its one-child policy. But a few of Revkin’s assumptions about population and its relationship to climate change are a tad oversimplified:

1. Revkin writes, “Demographers I consulted today said this [relaxing of the one-child policy] could overturn predictions of an imminent end to global population growth.”

Who’s predicting an imminent end to population growth? The latest UN mid-range projections predict the global population will continue to grow over the next several decades—to 9.2 billion by 2050. Furthermore, even without China abandoning its one-child policy, many already consider the UN mid-range projections optimistically low, since they assume that funding for family planning will continue to increase and the total fertility rate will continue to fall (neither of which is guaranteed). If fertility rates remain the same as they are today, the world population will be 11.9 billion in 2050.

2. Revkin also writes, “Urbanization is likely to help [reduce human impact on the environment] more than hurt.”

But according to Brian O’Neill, a scientist who studies the relationships between demographic variables and climate change at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Institute for the Study of Society and Environment, preliminary projections of future urbanization in China show higher levels of urbanization correlating with an increase, not a decrease, in carbon emissions. (For more on O’Neill’s findings, click here.) 2008 will mark the first time in history more people have lived in urban areas than in rural ones, and the UN Population Division estimates that by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will reside in cities. Given that the vast majority of future population growth—including urban population growth—will be in developing countries, energy-efficient and environmentally friendly design in developing country cities will be crucial in the coming decades.

Uncovering the numerous variables that can influence global climate change can be daunting. Brian O’Neill and his colleagues are improving our understanding of some of these factors by modeling how demographic shifts—such as aging or urbanization—could impact climate change. O’Neill is a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Institute for the Study of Society and Environment in Boulder, Colorado, and also leads the Population and Climate Change (PCC) Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. Researching population-environment interactions and the science and policy of global climate change led to O’Neill’s recent work as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s Fourth Assessment Report. In this podcast, O’Neill describes how shifting demographic patterns could influence a changing climate.