The Population Reference Bureau recently published several new resources on global family planning, including a data sheet on worldwide family planning and an article by James Gribble examining trends and patterns in family planning in West Africa. Gribble also recently co-authored an article on the successes and failures of Peru’s family planning policy, particularly among the poor.

An article published in Human Dimensions of Wildlife (subscription required) found that crop destruction by wildlife in three villages in northeastern Tanzania significantly reduced both food security and household income. The article recommends implementing several incentives—including microcredit for non-agricultural activities—for conservation.

A report from the Center for International and Strategic Studies’ Global Strategy Institute examines the future of water and energy in an increasingly urbanized Asia, with a particular focus on China.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development released a summary of the proceedings at the first African Water Week, which took place March 26-28, 2008.

Integrated population-health-environment (PHE) development programs can often produce greater improvements—at lower total cost—than multiple programs that each target only one sector. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko recently interviewed Lori Hunter, an associate professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, about her work evaluating integrated PHE programs with colleague John Pielemeier. In the following ECSP podcast, Hunter discusses the challenges associated with encouraging men’s involvement in family planning, implementing integrated development projects on the ground, and designing projects that are sensitive to local residents’ livelihoods and other priority needs.

“Africa is especially vulnerable to climate change, with many African states already suffering varying degrees of famine and food scarcity. Climatic changes could push these states toward failure and collapse,” writes John T. Ackerman in “Climate Change, National Security, and the Quadrennial Defense Review: Avoiding the Perfect Storm,” published in the Spring 2008 Strategic Studies Quarterly. Ackerman argues that climate change could cause a large-scale breakdown of natural ecosystems, which could destabilize or collapse weak, impoverished states. Terrorist organizations operate most effectively in weak or failed states, so it is clear that climate change poses serious traditional security threats, in addition to nontraditional ones.

The UN Security Council must take quick, decisive action on climate change, argue U.S. Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and George Mason University’s Michael Shank in an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor. “A concerted international strategy, on a par with the seriousness and scope of an UN Security Council resolution, is what’s needed to counter this climate crisis.”

The Environment for Development Initiative, a joint venture by U.S. NGO Resources for the Future and the Environmental Economics Unit at Göteborg University in Sweden, has released a set of discussion papers on environmental management in developing countries around the world. The papers highlight case studies from Kenya, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.

“New Limits to Growth Revive Malthusian Fears,” published earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, examines whether limited quantities of key resources—including arable land, fresh water, and oil—will curb the world’s growing prosperity. “The resource constraints foreseen by the Club of Rome are more evident today than at any time since the 1972 publication of the think tank’s famous book, ‘The Limits of Growth.’ Steady increases in the prices for oil, wheat, copper and other commodities—some of which have set record highs this month—are signs of a lasting shift in demand as yet unmatched by rising supply.”

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.

In today’s USA Today, General Anthony Zinni (Ret.) and Admiral Leighton Smith (Ret.) make a succinct argument for why addressing global issues such as poverty, disease, corruption, and climate change is essential to making the United States safer. Such an op-ed provides a prime example of how military leaders can play a productive role in advocating for non-military tools that will advance a broader human security agenda. “We understand that the U.S. cannot rely on military power alone to keep us safe from terrorism, infectious disease and other global threats that recognize no borders,” write Zinni and Smith. “We [the United States] must match our military might with a new commitment to investing in improving people’s lives overseas.”

“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.

According to Minority Rights Group International’s State of the World’s Minorities 2008, not only are ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities and indigenous groups suffering disproportionately from the effects of climate change, they are also less likely to benefit from humanitarian relief and more likely to be harmed by certain efforts to combat climate change. The report draws attention to the fact that the plight of minorities is often neglected in the international community’s discussions of climate change.

Frequently residing on marginal land, minority and indigenous groups also tend to be directly dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods, and therefore are more vulnerable to changes in the environment. Some efforts to mitigate climate change—particularly increasing the production and use of biofuels—have forced minority and indigenous communities off their land. For example, as of 2005, more than 90 percent of the land planted with oil palms in Colombia had belonged to Afro-Columbians.

The report also asserts that certain humanitarian relief efforts have been deliberately discriminatory, noting the slow pace of relief to the Dalits (members of the lowest Hindu caste) after last year’s floods in India. Minority and indigenous communities will continue to be at risk until policymakers seriously address these issues.