Showing posts from category video.
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Carrying Capacity: Should We Be Aiming to Survive or Flourish?
›“In the eyes of many governments, population has, as we all know, been a rather uncomfortable topic for a number of years,” said Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston, FRS, chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics, and Innovation at the University of Manchester and chair of the Royal Society’s People and the Planet working group. At an event at the Wilson Center on February 22, Sulston and his co-panelists, Martha Campbell, president of Venture Strategies for Health and Development, and Professor Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue of Cornell University, encouraged active debate on a range of population dynamics and their connections to economic, environmental, and political futures. [Video Below]
The Nexus of Population and Consumption
The dialogue between population and environmental communities has been pushed aside for many years but has lately been climbing its way back onto national agendas, said Sulston. However, the debate remains polarized. Scientists need to “sort out the facts as best we can” to help bring the communities together, he said. The Royal Society’s People and the Planet study, which will be completed by early 2012, will “provide policy guidance to decision-makers as far as possible” and “play our part in engendering constructive dialogue,” he said.
“What we should be aiming to do is to ensure that every individual on the planet can come to enjoy the same high quality of life whilst living within the Earth’s natural limits,” said Sulston. Instead of talking about the maximum number of people the Earth can hold, we should also focus on “the quality of life of those people,” he said. People are happier, healthier, and wealthier than ever before, according to human development indexes. But, Sulston said, 200 million women worldwide have an unmet need for family planning, ecosystems are degraded, biodiversity has decreased, and there are widespread shortages of food and water.
For centuries humanity has pursued a policy of “competitive growth,” both in population and consumption. But in preparation for the UN “Rio+20” summit on sustainable development in 2012, policymakers should be discussing “pathways to sustainability within the context of population,” said Sulston.
“Humanity needs to learn to act collectively and constructively in the face of these long-term and therefore rather elusive threats, just as we do rather well when we’re faced with immediate and tangible ones,” Sulston said. “So we need the best technology, but we need it in the context of a thoughtful society, and then we can both survive and happily flourish.”
A Demographic Crossroads
“No longer is population growth or population size the only issue of the day,” said Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue. “You have to worry about both population growth and population decline, you have to worry about immigration, you have to worry about aging, you have to worry about HIV and adult mortality, et cetera.”
Some people, Eloundou-Enyegue said, take this diversity of demographic issues as “grounds for complacency” by thinking they do not share in others’ problems. Yet, he said, population and ecology are areas where the risks are shared by all.
These challenges demand a “more comprehensive framework” that details the interactions between population, affluence, environment, technology, and inequality, said Eloundou-Enyegue. Tensions persist between these different areas, and breaking them will require “call[ing] on other qualities of the human spirit,” he said. The world is, Eloundou-Enyegue concluded, at a “demographic crossroads.”
The Timing of Declining Fertility
The key to ending the sensitivity to the issue of population growth is to “understand that this is about options: options for women and options for families,” said Martha Campbell. Strong attention and funding support can meet needs and lead to declining birth rates, as in the case of Kenya before the mid-1990s. But with the broader emphasis on reproductive health and concerns about coercion that followed the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, funding for family planning declined. As a result, Kenya’s fertility rates leveled off instead of continuing to decline, said Campbell, contributing to an upward revision of global population projections.Campbell illustrated the impact of delays in achieving replacement-level fertility on the overall population size of individual states. In the case of Pakistan, for example, analysis by Venture Strategies for Health and Development and the African Institute for Development Policy projects that the country will have a total population of 350 million if replacement-level fertility is reached by 2020, and a population of almost 600 million if that same mark is reached by 2060.
Looking ahead to the “Rio+20” summit in 2012, Campbell emphasized the need for continued discussion about population growth and family planning. The silence on these issues after Cairo in 1994 and the subsequent global impact should serve as a warning for future generations, she said: “It is important for this next generation and the current generation to understand what happened so that it will never, ever happen again. The silence on population must not occur.”
Photo Credit: “Rush hour,” courtesy of flickr user Jekkone, and Pakistan fertility chart, courtesy of Martha Campbell and Venture Strategies. -
Watch: Sir John Sulston on the Royal Society’s People and the Planet Study
›March 1, 2011 // By Christina Daggett“At the moment, the agendas of the growing population of people and the environment are too separate – people are thinking about one or the other,” said Sir John Sulston, Nobel laureate and chair of the Royal Society’s People and the Planet working group, in an interview with ECSP. “People argue about, ‘Should we consume less or should we have fewer people?’ The point is it’s both. We need to draw it together. It’s people and their activities.”
Sulston won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on mapping the human genome. He said that experience helped him appreciate the importance of utilizing science to the benefit of the wider public as he advocated for keeping the human genome in the public domain rather than allowing the knowledge to be privatized.
Sulston spoke at the Wilson Center on Febraury 22 on carrying capacity and the Royal Society’s People and the Planet study. He said “what we want to do is to see the issue of population in the open, dispassionately discussed on the environmental agenda, and then we’ll see where it goes.” The study will “draw together the strands, to summarize, and to put it down as a statement of the state of the art of our knowledge and where it’s going.” The study will be released in early 2012 with an eye to informing the UN “Rio+20” conference on sustainable development.
“We have one planet,” Sulston said, and “we have a lot of people, an increasing number of people. Now it’s not straightforward…but I think if you look at the facts dispassionately, you find that actually, because of our sheer numbers and because of our activities, the combination of those two things mean that we are putting an increasing burden on the planet and I think it is something we have to start thinking about.” -
‘Dialogue’ Interviews International Reporting Project Fellows on Liberia
›Since 1998, the International Reporting Project has been a pioneer in the “non-profit journalism” movement that seeks to fill the gap left by much of the mainstream media’s reduction in international news coverage. IRP has provided opportunities to more than 300 U.S. journalists to travel to more than 85 countries to produce award-winning reports. This month on the Wilson Center’s Dialogue program, host John Milewski speaks with guests Sunni Khalid, Ed Robbins, and Teresa Wiltz. They recently participated in an intensive fact-finding visit to Liberia under the auspices of the International Reporting Project where they produced stories on the country’s ongoing development and women’s empowerment efforts (among other topics).
Sunni Khalid is managing news editor for WYPR in Baltimore, Maryland. Previously, he worked for Time, The Washington Times, USA Today, Voice of America, and NPR.
Ed Robbins is an independent, multi-award winning director, writer, producer, and videographer. Outlets for his work have included PBS, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, ABC, and the BBC.
Teresa Wiltz is a senior editor for The Root, where she helps oversee the production of the African-American web-magazine. She previously served as a staff writer for The Washington Post’s style section.
The full 30 minute interview is available at the Wilson Center.
To hear more about their projects, see The New Security Beat’s “A Lens Into Liberia: Experiences from IRP Gatekeepers.” -
Watch: Laurie Mazur on a Pivotal Moment for the Global Environment and World Population
›February 24, 2011 // By Hannah Marqusee“It’s increasingly clear that we are living in a pivotal moment,” said Laurie Mazur, director of the Population Justice Project, in this interview with ECSP about her new book, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge. Currently, “nearly half the world’s population – about three billion people – are under the age of 25,” she said, and the choices these young people make, and the choices that are available to them “will determine whether world population grows from the current almost 6.9 billion to anywhere between 8 billion and 11 billion.”
“Numbers do matter,” said Mazur. “Clearly, a world population of 8 billion would be better than 11 billion for both human beings and the environment.” What’s more, “everything we need to do to slow population growth is something we should be doing anyway.”
Investments in family planning, girls’ education, women’s empowerment, and sustainable, equitable development are all means to slowing population growth, as well as being an end in and of themselves. Population growth “is an issue of really broad appeal” and should be of concern to environmental and reproductive health advocates, people of faith, or anyone who cares about development, justice, and eliminating poverty, said Mazur. -
Deforestation, Population, and Development in a Warming World: A Roundtable on Latin America
›“Rural development and MCH [maternal child health] in the most remote, rural areas are going to largely explain the future of Latin American conservation, development, population, and urbanization,” said David Lopez-Carr, associate professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a recent Wilson Center roundtable on “Deforestation, Population, and Development in Latin America.”
Nearly 80 percent of Latin America’s people live in urban areas, yet the continent’s rural populations have a disproportionate effect on its forests. Panelists Liza Grandia, assistant professor of international development and social change at Clark University, and Jason Bremner, director of population, health, and environment at the Population Reference Bureau, argued that meeting the needs of these communities is therefore key to conserving Latin America’s forests. [Video Below]
Rural Populations Have Disproportionate Impact on Deforestation
“There are two Latin Americas,” said Carr. Countries like Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay are 90 percent urban, while countries like Guatemala, Ecuador, and Bolivia are about 50 percent urban. However, despite this rapid urbanization and declining population growth at the national level, rural areas in Latin America are still experiencing high fertility rates and significant forest loss. So how are these trends related?
In his analysis of more than 16,000 municipalities in Latin America, Carr found “no statistical significance between population change at the municipal level and woody vegetation change at the municipal level.” Yet this lack of connection does not mean population growth and deforestation are unrelated, but instead indicates “a problem of place and scale,” he said. Within countries or even within municipalities, there are huge variations in fertility rates. Rural areas, which generally have larger families, more agricultural expansion, higher population growth, and lower population density, account for higher impact per capita on forests.
“Less than one percent of the population of Guatemala moves to any rural frontier at all,” said Carr, “yet that small, tiny fraction of the population has a disproportionate impact on the forests, and that is true throughout Latin America.” Carr also distinguished between the private sector primarily converting secondary forest for corporate agriculture and subsistence farmers clearing old growth forest.
Indigenous Lands Are Key to the Future
There are generally two groups of people on the frontier: indigenous people and “colonists,” who move in to take advantage of undeveloped land. Indigenous people, by and large, act as “stewards of the forests,” exhibiting lower rates of deforestation and forest fragmentation then colonists, Bremner said. “They do have a very protective effect, largely because they are excluding others from those lands.”
Indigenous communities tend to be “common property institutions” with an informal or cultural set of rules and traditions facilitating land use, said Bremner. They are “really good at mobilizing against external threats,” he said, which results in a protective effect over the forest. In the Amazon, for example, “indigenous lands, in the context of all of this colonization and deforestation that is happening, are now seen as key to the future,” he said.
However, as indigenous population growth and growing agricultural and industrial expansion change indigenous communities and livelihoods, more formal rules must be developed to govern land use. If indigenous communities “are the protective factor, then we need to know how to protect them,” said Bremner.
There are few demographic surveys of rural communities, but one of nearly 700 women in the Ecuadorian Amazon found the total fertility rate of indigenous women to be seven to eight children per woman. “Fifty percent of indigenous women didn’t want to have another child…of that 50 percent, 98 percent were not using a modern method of contraception,” Bremner said. “Responding to these women’s needs, I think, would go a long way in terms of changing the future of these communities.”
Guatemala: Reducing Fertility By Thinking Outside the Box
Grandia, with support from Conservation International and ProPeten, conducted a study of population and environment connections as part of the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) of Peten, a sparsely populated and highly biodiverse municipality of Guatemala. The 90,000 people living in the protected area in this park had “literally no family planning services,” said Grandia, and their population was on track to double within 20 years.
Using the DHS data, Grandia and ProPeten created a “somewhat eclectic population and environment program” that integrated many of the concerns of indigenous Maya communities in Peten, called Remedios. Remedios focused on a diverse set of issues, including agriculture, education, maternal and child health, family planning, and gender issues, and included projects like a “traveling education-mobile” and Between Two Roads, a bilingual radio soap opera in Spanish and Q’eqchi’ Maya, which used the story of a conflict between midwife and cattle rancher in a frontier community “to touch on a whole range of social and environmental issues.”
“As a result of our efforts…the total fertility rate dropped from 6.8 in 1999 to 5.8 in 2002, and in the most recent DHS it had fallen to 4.3,” said Grandia. She credited this success in part to the fact that the programs were “so cross-cutting across many of those schools of thought.” Yet the integration of a diverse range of issues also caused a split between the field-based ProPeten and the DC-based Conservation International, who wanted a more “narrow focus” on family planning and conservation, she said.
“Sometimes working outside the box can have unexpected results,” said Grandia. The population-environment movement could learn from the American environmentalist movement’s evolution from “an elite movement” into a “broader-based socially dynamic movement that involved new constituencies,” she said.
“Population and environment has often begged the articulation of a third field,” said Grandia. “How you fill in that blank often reflects the kind of development interventions you deem appropriate.” Perhaps “justice” should be considered “a new critical third paradigm,” she said.
Sources: Population Reference Bureau, World Bank.
Photo Credit: “Chevron’s Toxic Legacy in Ecuador’s Amazon,” courtesy of flickr user Rainforest Action Network. -
Watch: Geoff Dabelko and John Sewell on Integrating Environment, Development, and Security and the QDDR
›“We all must check our stereotypes of the other communities at the door…we’re not talking about hugging trees and hugging pandas,” said Geoff Dabelko, director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, in a panel discussion on Foreign Policy Challenges in the 112th Congress as part of the Wilson Center on the Hill series. Dabelko argued for a more multi-dimensional and integrated approach to addressing environmental issues.
“To tackle these problems, these connections between, say, natural resources, development, and security, it really does require that we have an integrated approach to our analysis [and] an integrated approach to our responses,” Dabelko said.
In dealing with climate change, for example, “a more diversified view would be one where we spend more time trying to understand adaptation,” said Dabelko. “How are we going to deal with the expected impacts of these problems?” he asked.
Dabelko called on policymakers to seek “triple bottom lines,” pointing out that “if you’re worried about climate change, or you’re worried about development, or you’re worried about fragile states, some of the same governance interventions and strong institutions in these fragile or weak states are going be the ones that will get you benefits in these multiple sectors.”
The Political Space
Fortunately, the current political environment is one in which “there is political space for integration,” said Dabelko, as demonstrated by, for example, the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), which Wilson Center Senior Scholar John Sewell addressed in his remarks.
“All of you who are directly or indirectly engaged in Congress are going to be faced with a very important opportunity in the next 12 to 24 months,” Sewell said, “to focus both diplomacy and development on the major challenges that are going to face all of us in the first half of the century.”
Calling the QDDR a “major rethink of both American diplomacy and American development,” Sewell applauded its conceptual alignment, but cautioned that the review leaves many questions unanswered about its implementation.
“The QDDR sets no criteria,” said Sewell. “Are we going to continue to put large sums of money into countries that aren’t developing? Are we going to follow the choice of issues – food, environment, and so on and so forth? It’s a question that is not answered in any of these documents.”
Sewell also pointed to potential clashes over budgeting, USAID/State leadership, and the lack of coordination with other large development agencies, like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
For more on Sewell’s analysis of the QDDR, see his recent blog post “Reading the QDDR: Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?” -
Teaching Environment and Security at West Point
›February 16, 2011 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoU.S. strategic assessments like the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the 2010 National Security Strategy, and the Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat assessment have placed natural resources, climate change, population, and poverty squarely on the American security agenda. But are these broad statements in doctrine and threat assessments translating into tangible changes, such as new approaches to the education of future military officers? My colleague Sean Peoples and I recently spoke with faculty and cadets at the U.S. Military Academy about how West Point’s Geography and Environmental Engineering Department is integrating these issues directly into their curriculum.
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A Dialogue on Managing the Planet
›“Collectively, the impact of humanity on the way the planet works is enormous and headed in disturbing directions,” said George Mason University professor Thomas Lovejoy in January at the first in a monthly series, “Managing the Planet,” led jointly by George Mason University and the Woodrow Wilson Center. The series will focus on how to take “environmental management to the scale of the entire planet,” as climate change, increasing energy consumption, and population growth place increasing stress on natural resources. We need to “chart a better course for the human future,” said Lovejoy.
Joining Lovejoy at the kickoff meeting were Dennis Dimick, executive environment editor at National Geographic, and Professor Molly Jahn of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. [Video Below]
Signs From Earth
“The entire human enterprise is based on the assumption of a stable climate,” said Lovejoy. The “most dramatic part of the story” in recent decades has been the melting of ice in the Arctic and in the mountain ranges of tropical zones. At current rates, tropical glaciers will completely disappear within the next 15 years. Though scientists predicted it would last until at least 2015, Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier – once renowned as the world’s highest elevation ski area – was reduced to a “few lumps of ice” in 2009, according to the BBC.
Glacial melt has raised water temperatures, altered species migrations, and threatened water supplies, coastal ecosystems, and the communities that depend on them, said Lovejoy. Higher ocean temperatures also cause the “fundamental partnership” between coral reefs and algae to break down, and “the Technicolor world essentially goes black and white,” he said.
Ocean acidification, fresh water shortages, melting glaciers, pollution, forest fires, and a “vast whipsaw” of temperature and weather extremes are just some of the effects human consumption has had on the planet, said Dimick. “It’s a sign from the Earth. It is telling us, ‘not all is well.’”
Finding Balance
As the world’s population nears seven billion this year, “we have one planet, yet we live like we live on four,” said Dimick. National Geographic’s new series “Population 7 Billion” seeks to answer the questions, he said, of “how do we find balance? How do we find ways to lower the intensity of our demands on an Earth that is telling us it is strained?”
Finding solutions to these challenges will require us to “look forward and confront the future,” said Dimick. “We need to rethink our whole global energy system,” he said, and “rethink our basic premise about what we need, as opposed to what we want.”
The global emissions limit of 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon – the level needed to achieve the two-degree warming limit agreed upon at Cancun and Copenhagen – “is probably too high,” said Lovejoy. Most scientists agree that 350 ppm is a safer level; however, the world is already at “390 and climbing,” he noted, and global temperatures are projected to rise two degrees Celsius by 2035. If we want global warming to stop at two degrees, carbon emissions will need to stop growing by 2016, he said.
Figuring Out “Plan B”
“We have a problem that is presenting itself in a whole host of ways, with urgency that cannot be denied or dismissed,” said Jahn. “The way we do agriculture is a very significant contributor” to that problem, she said. Today, in the United States, “we waste 40 percent of the food we grow,” she said.
“Plan A…was about maximizing productivity at all costs,” said Jahn. “It looks like we may need another plan.” But figuring out “Plan B” will require steps by both policy and science communities. “We still have enormous gaps in our understanding towards even the basic science platform upon which these very important decisions about ways forward lie,” she said.
Managing the planet must begin with managing data so that we can “transition between data, information, and knowledge, and march this information out to…those making decisions that matter,” said Jahn. The information management structure that developed in the medical sciences and led to the creation of the National Library of Medicine is a useful model for managing the planet, she argued. “Personalized medicine” for the planet would allow people to use data to make better decisions about who should be doing what and where.
Using and expanding the knowledge base is a crucial step towards bringing together the science and policy communities on an international scale in search of solutions to managing the planet. “If we work together, we can change the world,” said Dimick.
Sources: 350 Science, BBC, Earth System Research Laboratory, United Nations Environment Program, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Photo Credit: “Sun Over Earth (NASA, International Space Station, 07/21/03),” courtesy of flickr user NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
