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Close Quarters: Population-Climate Panel Draws Crowd at Society of Environmental Journalists’ Annual Conference
›October 23, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarAt “Close Quarters: Could an End to Population Growth Help Stabilize the Climate?,” the only panel on population at the annual Society for Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference, Steve Curwood, host and executive producer of Public Radio International’s “Living On Earth,” pointed out that while it’s “something we don’t talk about at all in America,” U.S. population growth increases emissions faster than developing-country population growth, due to our larger per capita consumption. Curwood discussed the major connections between population and climate change, such as water use; food production and consumption; economic growth; and migration. Hypothesizing that climate change will lead to great demographic shifts not only in developing countries, but also in the United States, he noted that historically, “we haven’t dealt with them well.”
The panelists explored environmental reporters’ relative silence on the impact of population growth and other demographic dynamics on environmental issues. According to moderator Constance Holden of Science, the possible barriers to coverage—listed below—should be “irrelevant” to working journalists:- Population’s association with controversial issues like contraception;
- Fear of appearing anti-immigration;
- The widespread belief that population growth is necessary for economic growth; and
- The difficulty of researching and writing about the complex issues related to population and demographics.
Robert Engelman, vice president for programs at the Worldwatch Institute, criticized journalists for not delving into population’s significant, albeit complex, impacts on the environment. Reporters may wish to avoid writing about problems they believe have no easy solutions, but it is just as important for them to explore these thorny topics as more straightforward subjects, he said.
As an example of a potential story angle, Engelman displayed a graph showing that U.S. carbon emissions and population grew by the same percentage between 1990 and 2004. Yet when the data are disaggregated by state, they reveal a very different, surprisingly diverse picture. Some states’ populations and emissions increased roughly equally, but others, like Delaware, managed to decrease their emissions even while their populations grew. Engelman suggested that reporters could explore which factors had influenced the population-emissions relationship in their state.
Freelance writer Tom Horton explained how population growth has helped foil attempts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. As he wrote recently in Growing! Growing! Gone! The Chesapeake Bay and the Myth of Endless Growth, “[I]t seems questioning the expansion of the economy and the population are off the table, either because they are considered sacred cows, or they are just too hard to deal with. It is assumed we can cure the symptoms while vigorously expanding their root causes.” In an interview following the panel, Horton lauded the efforts of integrated population-environment programs in the Philippines, saying Filipinos “are far more advanced than we are” in their understanding of the relationships between coastal management and population growth.
While “Close Quarters” was the only SEJ panel to directly address population, Dennis Dimick, executive editor of National Geographic Magazine, noted the importance of population in a panel he moderated on agriculture and climate change. In addition, keynote speaker Rajendra K. Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, briefly mentioned the opportunities presented by India’s youthful population and the “demographic dividend.” However, he did not use the opportunity to discuss global population growth’s implications for climate change. -
Dictionary of Global Environmental Governance Hits the Mark
›October 22, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarIf you’re not too daunted by its size (it tops out at just over 400 pages), the Dictionary & Introduction to Global Environmental Governance serves as a useful primer on international environmental politics and policies. This volume could be particularly useful to those working in related, but distinct, sectors who want to familiarize themselves with global environmental governance’s history and recent developments. Ever wondered what an epistemic community is? What makes water soft or hard? Curious to see the authors attempt to define “environment” and “ecology”? This book answers all these questions and many more, and most definitions are distinguished by admirable clarity and brevity. -
Weekly Reading
›In an open letter on water policy to the next U.S. president, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute urges the next presidential administration to develop a national water policy; highlight national security issues related to water; expand the United States’ role in addressing global water problems; and integrate climate change into all federal planning and activity on water.
A recent survey conducted by Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that land disputes are a key threat to peace in Liberia, reports BBC News.
Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the former Soviet Union, called for a global glasnost, or openness, on environmental problems. “This financial turmoil, which will heavily affect the real economy, was absolutely predictable, and it is only one aspect of the wider crisis of all the current development systems,” said Gorbachev. “In fact, there are connected simultaneous crises that are rapidly emerging. These relate to energy, water, food, demography, climate change and the ecosystem devastation.”
The World Health Organization has developed a plan for research on the health impacts of climate change, reports the Science and Development Network. -
The New U.S. Army Field Manual on Stability Operations: Visionary Shift or Missed Opportunity?
›October 17, 2008 // By Will Rogers
Last week, the U.S. Army released its new field manual on stability and reconstruction operations, FM 3-07, the 10-month interagency brainchild of the Army, State Department, and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Some have hailed the doctrine as a fundamental shift in Army policy that recognizes the significance of non-military threats to U.S. national security, while others have criticized it as a missed opportunity to critically re-examine notions of what constitutes security.
The new doctrine aims to shift the burden of fostering stability in fragile states from the Army to the State Department and USAID, which are better prepared to address non-military threats. To paraphrase Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV at an October 8, 2008, event sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies: The Army is up against non-military threats that can cause widespread destabilization—such as, access to basic necessities like food, water, and shelter—and with its traditional mandate to win wars with overwhelming military force, the Army does not have the expertise to address these threats.
Instead, a new Civilian Response Corps under the State Department and USAID will receive crisis training from the Army to prepare for managing conflict scenarios. The Army hopes that this interagency effort will expand civilian agencies’ capacity to prevent instability from devolving into state failure, which increases the chances of the Army being deployed. Sustainability and human security are clearly viewed as ways to achieve stability and prevent costly military deployments, not as goals in and of themselves.
According to Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program, it is important “to distinguish whether addressing sustainability needs is a tactic or a goal or both. It can be both for militaries but at times it is merely a tactic to achieve stability rather than a fundamental rethink of how security should be defined.”
Tad Davis, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for environment, safety, and occupational health, recently said, with respect to military operations and access to water in Iraq, “You can get out there…and deploy to an area for conducting operations, but if water’s not there for drinking purposes and for cooking, showering, laundry, things like that, then you’re not going to be able to sustain the force.” Clearly, Davis views environmental sustainability as key to the Army’s operations, but not necessarily as a critical component of a lasting peace.
Yet others argue that the Army would be wise to adopt long-term environmental sustainability and human security as immediate goals, as they would reduce the frequency with which the Army is dragged into conflicts. Dabelko wonders whether the War on Terror might be more successful “if part of a diversified response to the attacks of 9/11 would have included an aggressive effort to address poverty as an underlying source of grievances around the world rather than having just a uni-dimensional strategy of use of force. The symbolic and the real impact of such a strategy might have been quite tangible.” Nonetheless, the Army’s recognition that security is broader than military force is a laudable step—hopefully not the last—in the right direction.Photo: Two Iraqi girls from Al Buaytha, Iraq, pump water from a U.S. Army-supplied portable water tank. Courtesy of flickr user James Gordon. -
Watching the World Grow: The Global Implications of Population Growth
›October 16, 2008 // By Will RogersIn a recent nationwide Roper Poll commissioned to study the U.S. public’s attitudes toward population, barely 50 percent of respondents believed there is a strong link between global population growth and climate change, reported Thomas Prugh of World Watch magazine at the September 30, 2008, launch of World Watch’s population issue co-sponsored by the Worldwatch Institute and the Environmental Change and Security Program. People need to learn about population growth’s impact on climate change and other indicators of environmental health, said Prugh.
To Grow or To Shrink? That Is the Question
Historically, governments viewed population growth as a sign of a nation’s vitality; some promoted it by offering incentives to have more children. Prugh noted that such pronatalist attitudes are far from obsolete: “Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared September 13th a national holiday for conceiving children. And couples who delivered a baby nine months later, which not coincidentally would have been on Russia Day, got refrigerators for that accomplishment,” he said. In contrast, many governments are now promoting voluntary family planning rather than population growth. But a lack of political urgency has limited their success. “Support and funding for family planning is actually flat or in decline,” Prugh emphasized.
Empowering Women and Expanding the Discourse
Population has always been an “incredibly gendered issue,” argued Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute, which is one reason for the lack of public discourse on the subject. He called for a broader discussion of population and urged women who work in the sexual and reproductive health and rights fields to actively participate. If you “don’t talk about population from your perspective and from what you know about these issues, others will,” he warned, “and they may not know as much as you do about it.” For Engelman, providing access to family planning and placing population decisions in the hands of women “is natural—this is understandable—and in general, it’s a very good thing.”
The Good, The Bad: Urbanization
“This is the first year, 2008, in which half of us have become city-dwellers,” said Karen Hardee of Population Action International, a development that will have both positive and negative consequences. Urban populations have better access to family planning and education. However, urban growth can outpace local governments’ ability to enforce environmental regulations, treat hazardous and solid waste, and limit air pollution. At the same time, Hardee argues, technological innovation, access to information, efficient land and energy use, and better living conditions—as well as economies of scale—can limit urbanization’s negative environmental impacts. “Urbanization is inevitable, and it’s also accelerating, with most of the growth in the population in developing countries,” she stated.
Population and the Changing Nature of Security
“To be sure, rapid population growth does not have a simple causal relationship with conflict. And to suggest so would fail to take into account additional aggravating factors, such as poverty, poor governance, competition over natural resources, and environmental degradation,” said Sean Peoples of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. But population dynamics can fuel instability and increase the risk of a country falling victim to intrastate violence. According to The Shape of Things to Come, a report by Peoples’ co-author, Elizabeth Leahy, countries with youthful age structures—where 35 percent of the population is younger than 15—have a 150 percent greater chance of seeing conflict erupt than countries with more balanced age structures, due to pervasive joblessness, lack of education, and competition over resources.
Since countries with very young and youthful age structures represent a great challenge to international stability, population should be included in national security discussions. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently said, “We also know that over the next 20 years certain pressures—population, resource, energy, climate, economic, and environmental—could combine with rapid cultural, social, and technological change to produce new sources of deprivation, rage, and instability.” But there is hope of avoiding insecurity: “Progress toward more balanced age structures occurs when health care improves, leading to lower mortality rates and longer life expectancies, and when fertility rates fall, which happens when women and men have access to the services they need to choose their own family size,” said Peoples.
Photo: Thomas Prugh. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center. -
Protecting the Soldier From the Environment and the Environment From the Soldier
›The end of the Cold War coincided with a decline in the total number of armed conflicts around the world; moreover, according to the UN Peacekeeping Capstone Doctrine, civil conflicts now outnumber interstate wars. These shifts have given rise to a new generation of peace support operations in which environmental issues are playing a growing role. The number of peace support operations launched by non-UN actors—including the EU and NATO—has doubled in the past decade.
The environment can harm deployed personnel through exposure to infectious diseases or environmental contaminants, so preventive measures are typically taken to protect the health of deployed forces. However, because environmental stress caused by climate change might act as a threat multiplier—increasing the need for peace support operations—it is ever more necessary for the international community to conduct crisis management operations in an environmentally sustainable fashion. But can the deployed soldier, police officer, or search-and-rescue worker really act as an environmental steward?
I believe important steps are being taken to ensure the answer to this question is “yes.” The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations recently drafted environmental protection policies and guidelines for UN field missions and started to implement them through the UN Department of Field Services and the UN Mission in Sudan. Various pilot projects are underway, including an environmental awareness and training program and sustainable base camp activities, such as alternative energy use. These projects are coordinated by the Swedish Defence Research Agency and funded by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
Within NATO, Environmental Protection Standardization Agreements increase troop-contributing nations’ ability to work together on environmental protection. The NATO Science for Peace and Security Committee is also funding a set of workshops on the “Environmental Aspects of Military Compounds.”
Furthermore, defense organizations in Finland, Sweden, and the United States have cooperated to produce an Environmental Guidebook for Military Operations. The guidebook, which may be used by any nation, reflects a shared commitment to proactively reduce the environmental impacts of military operations and to protect the health and safety of deployed forces.
While the United Nations, NATO, and individual contributing nations are trying to reduce the environmental impact of their peacekeeping operations, the EU is lagging behind. In theory, the EU should find it easy to incorporate environmental considerations into its deployments. Most EU members are also NATO members, so if they can comply with NATO environmental regulations in NATO-led operations, they should be able to do the same with similar EU regulations in EU-led operations. Yet comparable regulations do not exist, even though the EU is often considered environmentally proactive—for instance, in its regulation of chemicals. Therefore, for the EU, it is indeed time to walk the walk—especially in light of its growing contribution to peace support operations, with recent operations conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Chad, and an upcoming intervention slated for Somalia.
Clearly, no single organization can conduct all of the multifaceted tasks required to support and consolidate the processes leading to a sustainable peace; partnerships between military and civilian actors are indispensable to achieving global stability. We must do a better job mainstreaming environmental considerations into foreign policy and into the operations of all stakeholders in post-conflict settings, with the understanding that the fallout from a fragile environment obeys no organizational boundaries. One small step in this direction is an upcoming NATO workshop, “Environmental Security Concerns prior to and during Peace Support and/or Crisis Management Operations.” If militaries continue to contribute to climate change and other forms of environmental degradation, they will be partially to blame when they are called in to defuse or clean up future conflicts over scarce, degraded, or rapidly changing resources.
Annica Waleij is a senior analyst and project manager at the Swedish Defence Research Agency’s Division of Chemical, Biological, Radioactive, and Nuclear Defence and Security. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Swedish Ministry of Defence. -
Conservation Learning Exchange Highlights Climate, Energy, Population, Poverty
›October 15, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarThe Nature Conservancy’s first Conservation Learning Exchange, or ConEx, concludes tomorrow in Vancouver, Canada. It focuses on six themes: climate change and energy; poverty, population growth, and consumerism; ecosystem services; science and technology; working with others; and values and society. You can read more about the goings-on on the ConEx blogs. A sampling from today: “People, poverty and diversity are major themes running throughout this conference and the underlying buzz from the ballrooms to the bars is mission drift. In the sessions I’ve attended, over and over I hear that the Conservancy needs to bring people, of all races, religion and socio-economic backgrounds into our work. Conservation is not just about biodiversity, it is also about human diversity.” -
The Security Implications of Societies’ Demographic Growing Pains
›In their provocative article in The National Interest entitled “The Battle of the (Youth) Bulge” (subscription required), Neil Howe and Richard Jackson take a critical look at the limits of the “youth bulge hypothesis,” which posits that a large and growing proportion of young adults puts societies at greater risk for political instability and civil conflict. The authors’ bigger target in this article is an assumption they perceive as widespread in the security community: that ongoing decline in youth bulges will necessarily produce what the authors dub a “demographic peace.” Howe and Jackson argue that such an expectation is overblown, and that’s clearly the case: Researchers, including myself, describe the effects of a declining youth bulge in terms of lowered risk of instability or conflict (see articles in ECSP Report 10 and ECSP Report 12). Its effects have never been proven absolute or inalterable.
For me, Howe and Jackson’s strongest points lie in their identification of four complications that can arise at various points during the demographic transition:- Unsynchronized fertility decline among politically competitive ethnic groups, leading to shifts in ethnic composition;
- Possible instabilities arising from a secondary youth bulge (an echo bulge), created as the previous generation’s bulge passes through its prime childbearing years (see figure);
- Questions about whether fertility can decline “too fast”; and
- The implications of continuous flows of foreign migrants into low-fertility countries—in particular, European countries today.
Some of Howe and Jackson’s other points seem muddled and inconsistent with quantitative studies, however. They cite researchers who argue that the mid-stages of economic development are the most threatening to security, and then link this to the demographic transition by declaring that “economic development…tend[s] to closely track demographic transition in each country.” This is mistaken: An extensive body of research informs demographers that economic development and fertility decline have been only weakly linked, even during the European fertility decline. While in several countries (including Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa) fertility declined abreast of rising per capita income, none of the East Asian “tigers” escaped the World Bank’s low-income country status until fertility dropped to near 3 children per woman, even though this measure had been declining steadily for years.
Nor can Howe and Jackson validate their assertion that having one of the middle structures is riskier than having one of the younger structures. Studies using the Uppsala Conflict Database’s record of minor and major conflicts show that, from 1970-1999, the very youngest countries (median age less than 18) and the middle group (median age 18-25) both experienced elevated risks of the emergence of a civil conflict —and both have large youth bulges. As Leahy and colleagues have shown, the youngest group was at greatest risk.
However, there is a way to salvage Howe and Jackson’s point. When infant mortality declines rapidly in the absence of fertility decline, age structures actually grow younger—in other words, some aspects of development push countries back into the youngest, most vulnerable category. If this is what the authors mean, they could have been clearer.
The authors go on to contend that neo-authoritarian regimes are likely to crop up among late-transition age structures. Here Howe and Jackson cede demography too much power over a state’s destiny. If one considers Deng Xiaoping the architect of China’s neo-authoritarian state, Lee Kwan Yew Singapore’s, Ali Khamenei Iran’s, and Hugo Chávez Venezuela’s, then this thesis has little empirical support. None of these regimes were established during the latter part of the demographic transition. Deng, Lee, and Ali Khamenei actually hastened fertility decline from high levels. I will, however, grant that Deng and Lee grew powerful as their countries’ age structures matured, and as that maturity promoted economic growth and reduced political tensions.
Overall, I’m much more positive than Howe and Jackson. I believe that parts of the world will, indeed, be left more politically stable and more democratic when very young age structures mature. Look at much of East Asia. Few veterans of conflicts in that region would have expected that, in 2008, most of its countries would be listed as vacation spots. I find it hard to believe, as Howe and Jackson do, that the most advanced phases of the demographic transition—a period yet to come—pose the greatest global security threats. Of course, I’m guessing…and so are they.
Richard Cincotta is the consulting demographer for the Long-Range Analysis Unit of the National Intelligence Council.
Figure: Iran’s 2005 youth bulge could give rise to an echo bulge in 2025. Courtesy of Richard Cincotta.
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