Showing posts from category population.
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Africa’s Demographic Challenges, Genderizing Food Security and Climate Responses
›Gender and Climate Change Research in Agriculture and Food Security for Rural Development is a detailed training guide produced by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The guide’s purpose is to support “work to investigate the gender dimensions of responding to climate change in the agriculture and food sectors…to improve food production, livelihood security and gender equality.” The authors write that “the number of hungry people in the world could be reduced by more than 100 million if women in rural areas were given equal access to the same resources as men.” The guide focuses on sensitizing researchers and practitioners “to the links between socio-economic and gender issues” and provides a suite of tools for gathering data about the gender and climate change aspects of agricultural development. Along with concrete tools to understand and address gender inequities in agricultural development, the report adopts a nuanced social definition of gender in which “people are born female or male, but learn to be women and men,” keeping the focus squarely on the socio-economic and political barriers to full equality.
A report from the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, Africa’s Demographic Challenges: How A Young Population Can Make Development Possible, argues that “if mortality and fertility decrease” across the African continent, there will be a “demographic bonus.” If nurtured through ample investment in human capital, this bonus may become a “demographic dividend,” as growing numbers of working-age people participate in the economy. The report argues that taking advantage of this demographic window, however, requires policy actions that both encourage fertility reductions and foster economic development throughout the continent, declaring boldly that “high birth rates and development are mutually exclusive.” Thus, according to the authors, the pathway to development is supporting the empowerment and education of women and girls, strengthening reproductive health services, and ensuring that both young women and young men are able to engage socio-economically within their societies. Though the report’s argument that demographic change can be critical for development is convincing, the form, strength, and causal direction of these linkages at times becomes confused. -
Women’s Health: Key to Climate Adaptation Strategies
›The discussion about family planning and reproductive rights “needs to be in a place where we can talk thoughtfully about the fact that yes, more people on this planet – and we’ve just crossed seven billion – does actually put pressure on the planet. And no, it is not just black women or brown women or Chinese women who create that problem,” said Kavita Ramdas, executive director for programs on social entrepreneurship at Stanford University. [Video Below]
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The Missing Links in the Demographic Dividend
›March 9, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenThe “demographic dividend,” a concept that marries population dynamics and development economics, is on the rise in policy circles – Rajiv Shah, Melinda Gates, and African government ministers have all discussed it recently in high-level forums. Most notably for demographers, World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin wrote a blog post that focuses on the demographic dividend’s potential to give developing countries a powerful economic boost through declining dependency ratios and a proportionately large working-age population.
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More People, Less Biodiversity? The Complex Connections Between Population Dynamics and Species Loss
›March 8, 2012 // By Laurie Mazur“For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should vanish by piece-meal.”
~ Thomas Jefferson, 1799This much is clear: As human numbers have grown, the number of species with whom we share the planet has declined dramatically. While it took about 200,000 years for humanity to reach one billion people around 1800, world population has grown sevenfold since then, surpassing seven billion last year.
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Reaching Out to Environmentalists About Population Growth and Family Planning
›“Promoting women’s empowerment is an effective strategy for looking at climate and the environment but also is important in its own right,” said the Sierra Club’s Kim Lovell at the Wilson Center on February 22. “Increasing access to family planning for women around the world is a climate adaptation and climate mitigation solution.” [Video Below]Drawing on research by Brian O’Neill (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and others Lovell explained that meeting the unmet need for family planning around the world could provide up to 16 to 29 percent of the emissions reductions required by 2050 in order to avoid more than two degrees of warming (the target set by nations to prevent the most damaging effects of climate change).
For environmentalists and those concerned with climate change, “sometimes the idea has been that population is toxic, that we can’t talk about population growth,” said Nancy Belden of Belden Russonello and Stewart Consulting, but the results of a recent survey and several focus groups conducted in association with Americans for UNFPA demonstrate that there is great potential for engaging the environmental community in such a discussion.
Belden and Lovell were joined by Kate Sheppard from Mother Jones to discuss how the population and environment communities can come together in the lead-up to the Rio+20 UN sustainable development conference.
Besides providing a basic health commodity, empowering women through access to family planning also improves adaptation outcomes, said Lovell. “Climate change is already happening and women and families around the world are suffering from the effects of water scarcity [and] of erratic weather patterns,” she said. But “when women have the ability to plan their family size and have more choices about their families and about their reproductive health and rights, that makes it easier to adapt to those climate change effects that are already taking place.”
Resonating With Environmental Priorities
“The people who really care about the environment are generally the same people who care about access to contraception and birth control and family planning…they’re a ready audience to hear about these connections and they’re a ready audience to take action about them,” said Kate Sheppard. Reproductive rights issues are something that people can really connect with, she said; “most women, most men too…understand why it’s an important issue and they’ve understood it in their own life and they have [a] very strong response to it.”
When we approach the linkages between environment and population, said Sheppard, it is important to recognize the role of empowering language – language about access to services, education, and resources for women.
The aim of the Americans for UNFPA survey was to find out whether environmentalists can be engaged in discussions of population issues such as family planning and international voluntary contraception, and if so, how?
The results show that “environmentalists are ready to talk about population, they’re ready to listen – it’s not toxic,” said Belden. She outlined three key findings:
First, environmentalists prioritize the environment but they also give a high priority to empowering women, said Belden. “Population pressures are seen as an environmental problem…they don’t dismiss it,” yet the “strongest framework that we could come up with…for engaging people on the issues around voluntary family planning and contraception focuses on women.”
Second, the environmental community is relatively optimistic about the potential outcomes of family planning programs and of foreign aid in general. When queried, half of the environmentalists strongly supported the idea of U.S. contributions to UN programs that provide voluntary access to contraception in developing countries, said Belden.
When asked to mark their top priority among a list of possible outcomes of providing voluntary access to contraception, 47 percent of the environmentalists selected either “improving living conditions for women and their families” or “ensuring women have options and can make reproductive decisions” as their top priority. While a significant number are also concerned about stalling population growth, this integrative focus on improving the lives of women and their families is heartening, said Belden.
In the Run-Up to Rio+20, More Than Pop
One point that all three speakers stressed is the need to integrate consumption into the integrated population message. In her survey work, Belden found that “if you don’t talk about consumption in the same breath, [environmentalists] start wanting to put it in there because otherwise…this is someone blaming others.”
Lovell similarly highlighted that “if we’re working to ensure a sustainable planet for future generations to come, we have to think about consumption and population.” For instance, “the United States makes up five percent of the world’s population but consumes 25 percent of the world’s resources,” she said.
Said Sheppard: “It’s not simply a problem that the numbers of people here on the Earth are going up, it’s a problem of how people, especially here in the U.S., live.”
It is imperative – especially from a sustainable development standpoint – that while working towards integrating environment and population we remain focused on a message that includes “using less but still having a high quality of life” here at home, said Sheppard.
Event ResourcesSources: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Photo Credit: “Timorese Traditional Home,” courtesy of United Nations Photo. -
USAID’s New Climate Strategy Outlines Adaptation, Mitigation Priorities, Places Heavy Emphasis on Integration
›February 29, 2012 // By Kathleen MogelgaardIn January, the U.S. Agency for International Development released its long-awaited climate change strategy. Climate Change & Development: Clean Resilient Growth provides a blueprint for addressing climate change through development assistance programs and operations. In addition to objectives around mitigation and adaptation, the strategy also outlines a third objective: improving overall operational integration.
The five-year strategy has a clear, succinct goal: “to enable countries to accelerate their transition to climate-resilient low emission sustainable economic development.” Developed by a USAID task force with input from multiple U.S. agencies and NGOs, the document paints a picture of the threats climate change poses for development – calling it “among the greatest global challenges of our generation” – and commits the agency to addressing both the causes of climate change and the impacts it will have on communities in countries around the world.
These statements are noteworthy in a fiscal climate that has put development assistance under renewed scrutiny and in a political environment where progress on climate change legislation seems unlikely.
Not Just Challenges, But Opportunities
To make the case for prioritizing action on climate change, the strategy cites climate change’s likely impact on agricultural productivity and fisheries, which will threaten USAID’s food security goals. It also illustrates the ways in which climate change could exacerbate humanitarian crises and notes work done by the U.S. military and intelligence community in identifying climate change as a “threat multiplier” (or “accelerant of instability” as the Quadrennial Defense Review puts it) with implications for national security.
Targeted efforts to address climate change, though, could consolidate development gains and result in technology “leap-frogging” that will support broader development goals. And, noting that aggregate emissions from developing countries are now larger than those from developed countries, the strategy asserts that assisting the development and deployment of clean technologies “greatly expands opportunities to export U.S. technology and creates ‘green jobs.’”
In addition to providing a rationale for action, the strategy provides new insights on how USAID will prioritize its efforts on climate change mitigation and adaptation. It provides a clear directive for the integration of climate change into the agency’s broader development work in areas such as food security, good governance, and global health– a strong and encouraging signal for those interested in cross-sectoral planning and programs.
Priorities Outlined, Tough Choices Ahead
President Obama’s Global Climate Change Initiative, revealed in 2010, focuses efforts around three pillars: clean energy, sustainable landscapes, and adaptation. USAID’s climate strategy fleshes out these three areas, identifying “intermediate results” and indicators of success – such as the development of Low Emission Development Strategies in 20 partner countries, greenhouse gas sequestration through improved ecosystem management, and increasing the number of institutions capable of adaptation planning and response.
In laying out ambitious objectives, however, the authors of the strategy acknowledge constrained fiscal realities. The strategy stops short of identifying an ideal budget to support the activities it describes, though it does refer to the U.S. pledge to join other developed countries in providing $30 billion in “fast start financing” in the period of 2010 to 2012 and, for those USAID country missions that will be receiving adaptation and mitigation funding, establishes “floors” of $3 million and $5 million, respectively.
The final section of the strategy lists over thirty countries and regions that have already been prioritized for programs, including Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Malawi, and Peru. But “we are unable to work in every country at risk from climate change impacts or with the potential for low carbon sustainable growth,” the strategy asserts. An annex includes selection criteria to guide further funding decisions, including emission reduction potential, high exposure to physical climate change impacts, a suitable enabling environment, coordination with other donors, and diplomatic and geographic considerations.
“Integration” Central to Strategy
The concept of integration figures prominently throughout the 27-page document. For those of us working in the large and growing space where the global challenges of climate change, food security, health, livelihoods, and governance overlap, this attention is heartening. While it may sometimes seem simply fashionable to pay lip service to the idea of “breaking out of stovepipes,” the strategy identifies concrete ways to incentivize integration.
“Integration of climate change into USAID’s development portfolio will not happen organically,” the strategy says. “Rather, it requires leadership, knowledge and incentives to encourage agency employees to seek innovative ways to integrate climate change into programs with other goals and to become more flexible in use of funding streams and administrative processes.”
To this end, USAID plans to launch a group of pilot activities. USAID missions must submit pilot program proposals, and selected programs will emphasize integration of top priorities within the agency’s development portfolio (including Feed the Future and the Global Health Initiative). Among other criteria, pilots must demonstrate buy-in from multiple levels of leadership, and will be selected based on their potential to generate integration lessons and tools over the next several years.
This kind of integration – the blending of key priorities from multiple sectors, the value of documented lessons and tools, the important role of champions in fostering an enabling environment – mirrors work carried out by USAID’s own population, health, and environment (PHE) portfolio. To date, USAID’s PHE programs have not been designed to address climate challenges specifically, and perhaps not surprisingly they aren’t named specifically in the strategy. But those preparing and evaluating integration pilot proposals may gain useful insights on cross-sectoral integration from a closer look at the accumulated knowledge of more than 10 years of PHE experience.
Population Dynamics Recognized, But Opportunities Not Considered
Though not a focus of the strategy, population growth is acknowledged as a stressor – alongside unplanned urbanization, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and poverty – that exacerbates growing challenges in disaster risk reduction and efforts to secure a safe and sufficient water supply.
Research has shown that different global population growth scenarios will have significant implications for emissions growth. New analysis indicates that the fastest growing populations are among the most vulnerable to climate change and that in these areas, there is frequently high unmet need for family planning. And we have also clearly seen that in many parts of the world, women’s health and well-being are increasingly intertwined with the effects of changing climate and access to reproductive health services.
In its limited mention of population as a challenge, however, the strategy misses the chance to identify it also as an opportunity. Addressing the linked challenges of population growth and climate change offers an opportunity to recommit the resources required to assist of the hundreds of millions of women around the world with ongoing unmet need for family planning.
The strategy’s emphasis on integration would seem to be an open door to such opportunities.
Integrated, cross-sectoral collaboration that truly fosters a transition to climate-resilient, low-emission sustainable economic development will acknowledge both the challenge presented by rapid population growth and the opportunities that can emerge from expanding family planning access to women worldwide. But for this to happen, cross-sectoral communication will need to become more commonplace. Demographers and reproductive health specialists will need to engage in dialogues on climate change, and climate specialists will need both opportunities and incentives to listen. USAID’s new climate change integration pilots could provide a new platform for this rare but powerful cross-sectoral action.
Kathleen Mogelgaard is a writer and analyst on population and the environment, and a consultant for the Environmental Change and Security Program.
Sources: FastStartFinance.org, International Energy Agency, Maplecroft, Population Action International, The White House, U.S. Department of Defense, USAID.
Photo Credit: “Displaced Darfuris Farm in Rainy Season,” courtesy of United Nations Photo. -
Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood (Book Preview)
›Several years ago, I wrote that the central irony concerning Africa’s urban youth was that “they are a demographic majority that sees itself as an outcast minority.” Since that time, field research with rural and urban youth in war and postwar contexts within and beyond Africa has led me to revise this assertion. The irony appears to apply to most developing country youth regardless of their location.
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Championing Women’s Rights and Population Issues in Kenya With the ‘Reject’
›“We find that politicians play around with [population] numbers when it comes to the common man and the common woman,” says Jane Godia in this short video interview. Godia writes for Reject, an African Woman and Child Feature Service biweekly news publication that won a Global Media Award from the Population Institute for its issue on family planning and politics in Kenya.
Godia says that politicians “use these numbers for their gain, they tell women not to use family planning because they want more children so that…they can have more voters, but nobody thinks about if this woman will be able to feed these children, if this family will be able to have their next meal, or even accommodation, or even land to till.”
The Reject’s name comes from the paper’s early practice of running stories – often about underserved groups, like women, children, and the poor – that had been rejected from mainstream publications. Population and environment issues have been highlighted since the first issue came out in September 2009, when “we were talking about families moving on to Mount Kenya…to look for pasture and water for their animals,” says Godia.
“When there’s no water and when there’s no food, people migrate,” she says. “And when people are migrating they’re moving with their animals, they’re moving with their families, and they end up going to places” that eventually become overcrowded and resource-stressed, sometimes introducing the same problems that led people to migrate in the first place.
