“It is true that countries like Kenya and Pakistan and some other developing countries have high population growth rates. And that is a real tragedy for Kenya and Pakistan, which are trying to improve their lot but are getting overwhelmed with more people to feed,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond told Living on Earth host Bruce Gellerman in a recent interview. “But it’s not a tragedy for the rest of the world because those people in rapidly growing third world countries don’t consume very much. The real tragedy for the world is the growth rate of population and consumption in the first world.” Diamond’s comments echoed points he made in a January 2008 New York Times op-ed, in which he argued that total consumption, not total population, is the real threat to Earth’s dwindling natural resources.

Diamond believes we should focus on reducing consumption rates in affluent societies, where the average person consumes 32 times more resources than the average person in a developing country. “Whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates [in the United States and other developed countries], because our present rates are unsustainable. Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates,” wrote Diamond. “Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher.”

Diamond also struck an optimistic tone in “Environment, Population, and Health: Strategies for a More Secure World,” an article in Environmental Change and Security Program Report 10: “Every one of our problems—deforestation, overfishing, water scarcity, and toxic waste—is of our own making. Therefore, we can choose to stop causing them.”

According to The Economist, one similarity between seemingly dissimilar Gaza and Kenya is that they both have “too many young men without either jobs or prospects.” Improvements in health and education—which resulted in more current 15-to-24-year-olds being healthy and relatively well-educated—have not been matched by sufficient growth of economic opportunities, leaving many young people frustrated in their attempts to provide for themselves and their families. Fertility rates have fallen somewhat in both places, from around seven children per woman 20 years ago to approximately five today—but this is still far higher than the 1.6 children per woman average in developed countries.

For a more detailed analysis of the relationships between large youth cohorts and conflict, see Population Action International’s report The Shape of Things to Come. As report author Elizabeth Leahy noted at the Wilson Center in October 2007, “The problem is not that there are too many young people, but that there are too few opportunities and resources available to them….Young people are the most important asset a society has in looking to the future. When young people are educated, healthy, and employed, they are the ones who renew and revitalize a country’s economy and institutions.”

“Cities themselves represent microcosms of the kinds of changes that are happening globally, making them informative test cases for understanding socioecological system dynamics and responses to change,” argue the authors of “Global Change and the Ecology of Cities,” published in today’s issue of Science magazine. The article focuses on changes in land use and cover, biogeochemical cycles, climate, hydrosystems, and biodiversity.

In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai argues that the country’s post-election violence is partially the result of “the inequitable distribution of natural resources in Kenya, especially land.” Maathai has written extensively on the links between peace and natural resource management.

A joint policy brief by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the World Resources Institute lays out the challenges associated with simultaneously increasing energy security and reducing carbon emissions, and proposes principles to guide these transitions.

Austria has not abided by its promise to crack down on a leather factory that Hungary contends is polluting the transboundary Raba River, said Hungary’s minister of environment, who proposed bilateral talks to resolve the issue.

This mid-term report evaluates progress made by the USAID-funded Okavango Integrated River Basin Management Project, which seeks to strengthen regional water management institutions and preserve the basin’s biodiversity.

“HIV and AIDS affect all people in a community by driving faster rates of resource extraction and use, increasing gender inequality, lowering the general health of the labor force, and impeding an individual’s ability to maintain a viable livelihood,” argue the authors of “Guidelines for Mitigating the Impacts of HIV/AIDS on Coastal Biodiversity and Natural Resource Management,” which suggests ways to combat these challenges.

Effective development programs require multisectoral strategies, says Roger-Mark De Souza, and succeed by building local and regional partnerships and winning the trust and participation of individuals and communities. In the following podcast, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko discusses integrated development approaches in the Philippines with De Souza, who is the director of foundation and corporate relations at the Sierra Club and formerly the technical director of the Population Reference Bureau’s population, health and environment program. De Souza shares his experiences of how local communities have successfully integrated environmental conservation and population issues to alleviate poverty and improve their quality of life. Many of the issues regarding integrated population, health, and environment approaches discussed in this podcast also appear in an article by De Souza in ECSP Report 10.

2007 was a significant year for China’s environment. An estimated 750,000 people in China died from respiratory illnesses related to air pollution, while approximately 60,000 died from waterborne diseases. China’s food processing and production sectors made headlines around the globe. Growing desertification in north and northwest China due to excessive water use and land mismanagement created more intense and frequent sand storms that affected the economy and health in China and Northeast Asia. In addition, China most likely surpassed the United States as the leading emitter of greenhouse gasses—and while the central government set laudable energy efficiency goals, it recently admitted that China had not met them.

These events have led to growing numbers of environmental health-related protests in China: 51,000 in 2005 and more than 60,000 in 2006. In June 2007, thousands of Xiamen residents protested the construction of a planned chemical plant. And last month, middle class residents of Shanghai took to the streets to oppose potential harm from an extension of China’s magnetic levitation train. As the Chinese government becomes increasingly concerned with the country’s stability, it is beginning to place greater emphasis on mitigating the effects of environmental degradation on its people. Read more about China’s environmental health problems—and what local and international NGOs, governments, and agencies are doing to address them—in China Environment Series 9, the flagship publication of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum.

By CEF Program Assistant Linden Ellis.

USAID’s “Adapting to Climate Variability and Change: A Guidance Manual for Development Planning” seeks to help USAID country missions and partners increase their projects’ resiliency to global climate change, though it neglects to mention the links between climate change and population.

The North-South Institute’s Canadian Development Report 2008—Fragile States or Failing Development? (free registration required) assesses reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan; Canada’s contributions to gender equality in Afghanistan and Haiti; and the destabilizing effects development aid and intervention can have in fragile Latin American states.

“After decades of mistreatment, abuse, and exploitation, African farmers—still overwhelmingly smallholders working family-tilled plots of land—are awakening from a long slumber,” writes G. Pascal Zachary in the Winter 2008 issue of the Wilson Quarterly. In “The Coming Revolution in Africa,” Zachary argues that sub-Saharan Africa’s small-scale farmers—who constitute 60 percent of the region’s population—are making important gains that could transform them into key economic and political players in their countries.

Lacking adequate protein in their diet, refugees in Tanzania are eating chimpanzees and other endangered species, says a report by the international wildlife conservation group TRAFFIC, a joint project of the World Wildlife Fund and the World Conservation Union (IUCN). “Relief agencies are turning a blind eye to the real cause of the poaching and illegal trade: a lack of meat protein in refugees’ rations,” said George Jambiya, the lead author of the report, which urges humanitarian agencies to supply refugees with legal, sustainable wild meat.