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Rich Thorsten on Water Sanitation, Population, and Urbanization in the Developing World
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“For the first time in human history, more than one half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and some of the largest and fastest growing population centers in the world – countries like India, China, parts of sub-Saharan Africa – are in areas where water resources are becoming more and more scarce,” said Water.org’s Rich Thorsten in a recent interview with ECSP.
Thorsten serves as director of international programs for Water.org, which partners with local communities, governments, and NGOs across Central America, South Asia, and Africa to bring improved water sanitation to at-need rural and urban populations. He emphasized that ensuring access to clean water has a number of positive spillover effects, ranging from improved prospects for economic development to greater social stability, since access to non-polluted water supplies removes one potential source of tension within and between communities.
Community Health
The greatest benefit of improved sanitation services, however, comes in the form of enhanced public health outcomes. “I would definitely say there is a strong correlation” between the two, Thorsten asserted. “Water and sanitation-related diseases are related to the deaths of at least 3.5 million people every year in the developing world – not to mention millions of hours and dollars that are lost to treating health problems and coping with health problems as a result of poor [water] access and hygiene practices.”
Thorsten said that community participation has been a key aspect of ensuring the sustainability of Water.org’s projects. To pave the way for continued gains in economic development and public health, he said they work alongside water users, engineers, and government officials in target communities to make those parties stakeholders in the infrastructure development process. Fostering a sense of community ownership of sanitation projects helps reduce the likelihood that infrastructure will fall into disrepair or disuse after the initial programming intervention has been conducted.
Given that improving water-sanitation access for the world’s poor is a key element of the UN Millennium Development Goals, Thorsten said he is pleased the subject seems to be attracting more attention within the policymaking and development communities. Despite the positive momentum, however, he acknowledged the fight to ensure clean-water access for the developing world will remain an uphill battle.
“When one considers that….about 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation, that there’s more people in the world that have access to a cell phone than a pit latrine or a toilet, it’s still a very daunting task that will require a lot more investment, commitment, and attention in order to improve the situation for billions of people,” Thorsten said.
Sources: UN.
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
John Donnelly, Global Post
Family Planning and Seven Billion at the Aspen Institute
›September 9, 2011 // By Wilson Center Staff
The original version of this article, by John Donnelly, appeared on Global Post.
Sometime this fall, the world’s population will reach 7 billion people. Experts now forecast that by 2050, the population could be 10 billion.
Those numbers, said the former presidents of Chile and Latvia at an event in Washington D.C., Wednesday night, should force policy makers to focus more intently on making family planning much more widely available in the developing world.
“When we are 9, 10 billion people, what are we going to do? Go to Mars? Go to the moon?” said Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile and now the Under Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women, the latest agency created by the United Nations. “We are really going to have huge problems. Family planning is a huge issue.”
Her comments came during a series of discussions organized by Aspen Global Health and Development called “7 Billion: Conversations that Matter.” The talks, funded in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development, have often centered on global health issues, and Wednesday’s event was no different.
Continue reading on Global Post.
Video Credit: The Aspen Institute. -
Alex Evans, Global Dashboard
Is it Time for Sustainable Development Goals?
›September 8, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Alex Evans, appeared on Global Dashboard.
From MDGs to…SDGs? That’s one of the ideas swirling around in discussions ahead of the Rio 2012 sustainable development summit next year, anyway.
You can see the attraction. With less than a year to go, there are precious few concrete ideas on the table for what the summit might produce, especially in the area of “institutional framework for sustainable development,” one of two key themes for the event (sure, there’s much talk of a new World Environment Organization, but color me very unconvinced of the case for that). So might SDGs help to fill the gap?
Well, that would depend on what they cover. The government of Colombia has set out a proposal for SDGs that would cover various sectors – atmosphere, climate resilience, land degradation, sustainable agriculture, biotech, waste and so forth. This would mainly be about ‘reaffirming’ (that awful word – who, other than diplomats, ever ‘reaffirms’ anything?) commitments made at Rio 1992. But you have to wonder: important though delivery of existing commitments undoubtedly is, is ‘reaffirmation’ of stuff agreed 20 years ago really going to set any pulses racing outside the sustainable development priesthood?
Continue reading on Global Dashboard.
Sources: UN.
Image Credit: Adapted from UNSCD 2012 official logo. -
Watch: Don Lauro on How Integrated Development Deepens Community Involvement
›September 7, 2011 // By Schuyler NullPopulation, health, and environment (PHE) projects address an impressive range of issues – natural resource management, family planning, maternal and child health, water, sanitation, nutrition, and strengthening health systems – but perhaps their most important advantage is the level of community involvement elicited, said long-time PHE expert Don Lauro in an interview with ECSP.
“There’s a depth to these programs,” Lauro said. Tools like rural participatory appraisal allow communities to map out their problems and then come up with solutions on their own. “If you get deep enough, it becomes they who own the project, and I think that that’s your ultimate goal,” he explained. “You have a much greater prospect for sustainability of that effort, no matter what happens to the funding.”
Lauro recently visited the USAID-funded BALANCED Project in Tanzania as part of a wider look at integrated development projects. He emphasized that what exactly this integrated approach is called – be it PHE, HELP, or HELPS – is insignificant; what matters is that these disparate elements are combined. -
Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Family Planning Can Help in Afghanistan
›September 6, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this op-ed, by Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Most experts agree that the mark of long-term success in Afghanistan will be stable governance that allows the economy, democracy, and the people to flourish. Many factors will determine that, but a major one that seems to be left out of most high-level conversations is population.
Afghanistan is a country of 31 million people, but that number will double by 2035, according to the most recent UN projections, and could reach 126 million by midcentury. That’s 95 million more Afghans to govern, clothe, feed, and employ.
Without attention to population, countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan stand a good chance of staying mired in poverty, conflict, and corrupt, repressive government. That is why sustained investment in family planning by the United States and other countries would do more to stabilize the political climate there than any other foreign policy initiative. Though efforts by the Afghan government to provide contraceptives have met some resistance by conservative Muslim groups, the success of family planning in other Muslim states demonstrates that it can be effective.
Continue reading on The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Sources: UN Population Division.
Photo Credit: “100430-F-2616H-050,” courtesy of flickr user Kenny Holston 21 (Kenny Holston). -
Top 10 Posts for August 2011
›August brought a crop of newcomers to the top 10 (measured by unique pageviews). Joining Richard Cincotta’s popular look at Tunisia’s demographics and the Mr. Y white paper launch at the Wilson Center were ECSP’s “Backdraft” event; PRB’s new population data sheet; interviews with Aaron Wolf and Alecia Fields; and guest contributions from Lukas Rüttinger, Moira Feil, and Jim Duncan.
1. In Search of a New Security Narrative: The National Conversation at the Wilson Center
2. Tunisia’s Shot at Democracy: What Demographics and Recent History Tell Us
3. Backdraft: Minimizing Conflict in Climate Change Responses
4. PRB’s Population Data Sheet 2011: The Demographic Divide
5. India’s Maoists: South Asia’s “Other” Insurgency
6. Guest Contributors Lukas Rüttinger and Moira Feil: Beyond Supply Risks: The Conflict Potential of Natural Resources
7. Watch: Alecia Fields on Population, Health, and Environment Advocacy with the Sierra Club
8. Conflict Minerals in the DRC: Still Fighting Over the Dodd-Frank Act, One Year Later
9. Watch: Aaron Wolf on the Himalayan and Other Transboundary Water Basins, Climate Change, and Institutional Resilience
10. Guest Contributor Jim Duncan: Redrawing the Map of the World’s International River Basins -
Karen Seto on the Environmental Impact of Expanding Cities [Part Two]
›“A lot of cities are trying to become green cities,” said Karen Seto in part two of an interview with ECSP about her recently published article, “A Meta-Analysis of Global Urban Land Expansion,” co-authored with Michail Fragkias, Burak Güneralp, and Michael K. Reilly. “I think one of the main policy implications of our study is that how a city urbanizes is critical, because one of the things we are finding is that urban land is growing faster than urban population, and in some cases it is growing much faster.”
Seto said that the cities with the best prospects for implementing green growth and expansion strategies “tend to focus on the low-hanging fruit,” such as planting trees or constructing buildings with green roofs. From the public’s perspective, these types of measures are relatively painless because they “don’t require changing people’s behavior.”
More challenging, said Seto, will be getting rapidly expanding cities to anchor future development around public-transit systems, especially given the changing lifestyle preferences of upwardly mobile urban populations across China and India, for whom private car ownership serves as an important status symbol.
Still, Seto said she is tentatively optimistic about city planners’ ability to grow cities in a sustainable fashion. “We’ve experienced this rapid growth of urban population and urban land areas, but we’re also seeing that over the next 20 years, according to the UN, we’re going to see even more people living in urban areas,” she said.
“We have this window of opportunity to really shape the way in which cities get developed, and I think that’s really one of the big messages of the study.”
Part one of Karen Seto’s interview is available here. The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.
Sources: China Daily, USA Today. -
Karen Seto on the Environmental Impact of Expanding Cities [Part One]
›“When we think about the environmental impacts of rapid urbanization, we really need to unpack what we mean by ‘urbanization,’” said Karen Seto, an associate professor in Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environment Studies, in this interview with ECSP. “There is the demographic component, where more people are living in cities; there is economic urbanization, which is where livelihoods and economies are becoming more urban rather than rural; and then there is the land component – the conversion of land from agriculture and other ecosystems to become urban.”
Seto is the lead author of a new article, “A Meta-Analysis of Global Urban Land Expansion” (with Michail Fragkias, Burak Güneralp, and Michael K. Reilly), which uses satellite imagery to help document the physical expansion of urban areas in developed and developing nations between 1970 and 2000.
Over that period, the population of cities in the developing world boomed. In 1970, there were roughly the same number of city dwellers in developed nations as in developing nations. By the mid-1990s, however, urban residents of the developing world outnumbered their developed-world counterparts by a factor of two to one. Since then, the gap has continued to grow.
According to the report, urban growth sprawled to cover nearly 60,000 square kilometers of previously non-urban areas during the last three decades of the twentieth-century. One of their most interesting finds, said Seto, was that “urban expansion has been occurring in low-elevation coastal zones more than it has been elsewhere.”
“Essentially what that means is that cities are growing precisely in areas that are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, like sea level rise and storm surges,” she said.
Demography and the Environment
Seto acknowledged that many of the today’s discussions surrounding urbanization focus on the negative impacts for the environment and human security – among them the “loss of agricultural land, conversion of forests, biodiversity loss, changes in hydrology, and climate effects.” Ultimately though, she said, urbanization and its attendant land-use changes shouldn’t be viewed through a black-or-white lens.
“Certainly we think about the oncoming demographic transition of something like three billion more people living in cities,” Seto said, but “that means there’s a lot of efficiency to be gained, whether it is in education, energy, sanitation, or health – urbanization allows for opportunities for really efficient use of resources.”
The real challenge to achieving environmentally sustainable urban development, said Seto, is thoughtful city planning: “How we configure ourselves has a big impact on the environment, so it is not the issue of just whether we are urbanizing – the form in which we urbanize [also] has a huge impact.”
Part two of Karen Seto’s interview is available here. The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.
Sources: Population Reference Bureau, UNFPA.
A Publication of the Stimson Center.
