“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.

Yesterday, in a post on his Dot Earth blog, New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin called attention to the fact that 2.6 billion people lack access to sanitation facilities—and that includes pit latrines, not just flush toilets. The World Health Organization estimates that inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene are responsible for 4 percent of all deaths worldwide and 5.7 percent of the total global disease burden (including premature death and years lost to disability caused by disease). Children are the most acutely affected by poor sanitation: 1.5 million children die each year from diseases—primarily diarrhea—caused by inadequate sanitation.

Tomorrow is World Water Day, and in honor of 2008 being the International Year of Sanitation, the United Nations and other organizations will strive to raise people’s awareness of sanitation, combat the taboos against discussing it, and galvanize efforts to halve the number of people without access to sanitation by 2015—a Millennium Development Goal.

The Environmental Change and Security Program’s (ECSP) Navigating Peace Initiative seeks to call attention to the importance of water and sanitation issues. ECSP’s Water Stories Flash website includes a multimedia presentation on dry sanitation in Mexico, while “Low-Cost Sanitation: An Overview of Available Methods,” an article by Alicia Hope Herron in ECSP’s recent report Water Stories: Expanding Opportunities in Small-Scale Water and Sanitation, analyzes the pros and cons of the numerous inexpensive, innovative sanitation technologies currently available.

The Pacific Institute recently released an updated Water Conflict Chronology, which documents instances of conflict over water from 3000 B.C. through the present.

In an article on the Carnegie Council’s Policy Innovations, Saleem Ali of the University of Vermont argues that commentators should not have been so quick to blame the recent violence in Chad on oil, as civil strife in the country predates the discovery of oil by several decades. If oil revenues were managed transparently, he suggests, they could significantly improve stability and quality of life in Chad.

Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute highlights recent population trends—such as declining global fertility but a growing global population—and emphasizes the difficulty of accurately predicting future ones in the latest edition of Vital Signs.

Video, presentations, and photos—as well as an agenda and list of participants—from last week’s NATO Security Science Forum on Environmental Security are now available online.

A senior wildlife official with the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) was arrested this week amid charges that he organized the executions of up to 10 endangered mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park last year. The official is also accused of cutting down protected trees to convert them into charcoal. WildlifeDirect, a wildlife conservation NGO that works in the park, suggested that Mashagiro had orchestrated the killings of the gorillas to distract rangers from the charcoal production, which was destroying the gorillas’ habitat, and to discourage the rangers from protecting the gorillas.

Last month, the New Security Beat reported on a new agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Uganda, and Rwanda to protect the mountain gorillas’ rapidly diminishing habitat. The initiative was one of the few promising developments for the gorillas over the past several months.

In early March, rebels who had taken control of the park’s Gorilla Sector—home to half of the world’s approximately 720 gorillas—threatened to kill any park ranger who attempted to enter it. According to local officials, the rebels have set up a parallel gorilla administration in the sector, charging tourist groups to view the gorillas. The park rangers had hoped they would be permitted to enter the Gorilla Sector following a January 2008 peace agreement between the Congolese government and the rebel groups, but the rebels have continued to forbid them from returning to the area.

“The defining challenge of the 21st century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet,” asserts leading international economist Jeffrey Sachs in his new book, Common Wealth: Economics For A Crowded Planet. Sachs argues that multilateral, multisectoral cooperation is needed to address four critical global challenges: climate change, population growth, poverty, and the ineffectiveness of global institutions. By investing two to three percent of the world’s annual income in combating these problems, he contends in a piece in Slate magazine, “10 million children per year can be saved from death while stabilizing the world’s population growth, ending extreme poverty, curbing climate change, and developing alternative energy sources.”

Humanity has successfully achieved several significant collective goals, says Sachs—for instance, the almost complete eradication of polio in the last half-century, and a 90 percent decline in the prevalence of measles over the past seven years. Yet nations continue to direct massive amounts of funding toward military responses to security problems, while failing to fund far less expensive ways of preventing violent conflict.

As Sachs opines in Slate, “Today’s impoverished drylands continue to combust in a tinderbox of violence…We send armies when we should send engineers and doctors. Violence is spreading. In seven brief years, we will have squandered more in the so-called ‘war on terror’ than all the world has ever given in all of its aid to all of Africa for all time.” Sachs says his book is an attempt to galvanize world leaders to take quick and decisive collective action to address these long-term security issues.

New research suggests that strengthening local natural resource management (NRM) can also improve governance and reduce the risk of violent conflict. Community involvement in governing natural resources is vital to successful conflict prevention, however. In this ECSP podcast, Masego Madzwamuse of the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) Region of Southern Africa office describes how IUCN’s Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) Support Programme in Botswana helps communities manage their own rangeland, forests, and water. Illustrating NRM-governance-conflict connections in a different part of the world, David Bray of Florida International University recounts his work in two adjacent watersheds in Guerrero, Mexico—one where strong community-led NRM helped prevent conflict, and another where weak community institutions contributed to violent situations.

“The relationship between natural resources and violent conflict is shaped to a large extent by the quality of the governance of those resources, which in turn is a correlate of good governance in general,” says In Control of Natural Wealth? Governing the resource-conflict dynamic, a report by the Bonn International Center for Conversion. “Furthermore, our results confirm the assumption that good (resource) governance increases state stability and, in countries that had experienced violent conflict, the duration of peace.”

Peri-Urban Water Conflicts: Supporting dialogue and negotiation, a report by the Netherlands’ IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, explores water conflicts on the outskirts of three developing country cities: Cochabamba, Bolivia; Chennai, India; and São Paolo, Brazil.

“Poverty Reduction and Millennium Development Goals: Recognizing Population, Health, and Environment Linkages in Rural Madagascar,” published in Medscape General Medicine, evaluates Madagascar’s progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals and discusses how the government’s plans for the country’s development address the linkages between poverty, population, health, and environment.

According to a study carried out by Michael Ross of UCLA, vast oil wealth tends to diminish women’s rights. “Oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and political institutions,” writes Ross.

The Economist reports on the global effects of China’s growing hunger for natural resources—including oil, copper, grain, and timber. “Some non-governmental organisations worry that Chinese firms will ignore basic legal, environmental and labour standards in their rush to secure resources, leaving a trail of corruption, pollution and exploitation in their wake.”