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How Did We Arrive at 7 Billion – and Where Do We Go From Here? [Part One]
October 26, 2011 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenMOREThe United Nations Population Division has estimated world population will reach seven billion on Monday. Which changes in demographic trends led us to this milestone? What do the past and present tell us about how human numbers will change in the future?
The “Day of Seven Billion” was announced this spring following the release of the latest revision of UN population projections. Although the seven billionth person will not be precisely identified, this estimate is based on careful demographic modeling. Every two years, the UN revises its projections to incorporate the latest trend data and modify its assumptions, as seemingly small changes can make a huge difference demographically.The UN estimates that the seven billionth person alive today will be born on October 31. Demographer Elizabeth Leahy Madsen explains how we got to that number, its significance, and where our demographic path might take us from here. Read part two here.
The United Nations Population Division has estimated world population will reach seven billion on Monday. Which changes in demographic trends led us to this milestone? What do the past and present tell us about how human numbers will change in the future?
The “Day of Seven Billion” was announced this spring following the release of the latest revision of UN population projections. Although the seven billionth person will not be precisely identified, this estimate is based on careful demographic modeling. Every two years, the UN revises its projections to incorporate the latest trend data and modify its assumptions, as seemingly small changes can make a huge difference demographically.
Demography Is Driven by Fertility and Population Momentum
Since world population reached three billion in 1959, the rate of growth has increased, peaked, and begun to slow. Each succeeding milestone was reached more quickly than the last: It took 15 years to reach four billion, 13 years to hit five billion, and only 11 years to get to six billion at the end of 1998. The interval leading to seven billion was slightly longer, at 13 years, as the global rate of population growth has slowed.
Although mortality and migration also affect population trends, the factor with the greatest influence by far is fertility – the average number of children born to each woman. The decline in the global fertility rate from an average of nearly 5 children per woman in the early 1960s to 2.5 children today has in turn slowed the pace of world population growth. However, demographic momentum from previous generations of high fertility can drive population growth for decades to come. Even if Nigeria reached replacement-level fertility today, its population would still grow by one-third by 2050 as the number of births continued to exceed the number of deaths.
Assumptions Matter
Population projections consider: 1) current data about fertility and 2) assumptions about the ways fertility will change in the future. These assumptions vary depending on the source, so how much of a difference do they make? As it turns out, quite a lot.
Projections of world population in 2050 range from 8.1 billion (if fertility rates fall to a global average of 1.7 children per woman) to 10.9 billion (if they remain unchanged). The gap of nearly three billion between those possibilities is greater than the combined populations of China and India today.
Estimates vary even more widely for the end of the century, with the UN projecting that by 2100 world population could total anywhere between 6 billion (if total fertility falls to an average of 1.55 children per woman) and 27 billion (if every country’s fertility rates remain constant at today’s levels).
While demographers parse the details of the projections, policymakers would like to know which of these scenarios is more likely. After all, the economic, environmental, and political consequences of a population of 8 or 11 billion two generations hence are not the same, and a world of 27 billion is difficult for anyone to fathom.
If we simply projected past trends into the future at a steady rate, the population estimates on the low end of the fertility spectrum seem more likely. The global fertility rate has fallen from 4.5 children per woman in the early 1970s to 2.5 today, a decline of 43 percent, so the 14 percent decline projected in the medium-fertility variant between now and 2050 seems reasonable at first glance, perhaps even conservative. The medium-fertility variant assumes that all countries’ fertility rates will begin moving towards replacement level, around 2.1 children per woman, regardless of whether they are currently above or below that number.
However, even a 14 percent decline in fertility assumes that areas where fertility rates remain stalled at high levels will soon begin rapid declines, paralleling the past experience of other regions. As Population Reference Bureau demographer Carl Haub writes, “the assumption that the developing world will necessarily follow the path of the industrialized world…is far from a sure bet.”
In the last 40 years, fertility rates in the Caribbean, northern and southern Africa, Latin America, and all of Asia declined by 50 percent or more. The pace of decline in sub-Saharan Africa, while still notable, was much slower, at 23 percent. In order to meet the UN medium-variant projections, the region’s fertility rate would need to fall by nearly 40 percent by mid-century.
Some of the largest, fastest-growing populations in the developing world would need to experience a major acceleration from recent trends. In Nigeria, fertility edged down by 15 percent between 1970 and 2010, but the medium variant projection depends on a decline of 37 percent over the next four decades; Ethiopia’s fertility rate will need to fall by half.
Gender Matters, Too
The great irony of fertility trends is that gender inequities play an important role at both ends of the scale. In countries with the highest fertility rates, women tend to have less education than men and less autonomy. Their fertility choices may be greatly affected by the preferences of their husbands or other family members. In Niger, which has the highest fertility rate in the world, married men would, on average, like three more children than married women. In Uganda, where women average more than six children each, 60 percent of men report that domestic violence is justified.
By contrast, in countries with the lowest fertility rates, women have achieved equal access to education and the labor market, with more autonomy about how to earn income and what to do with it. Yet cultural expectations that place the burden for child and elder care and housework almost entirely on women can make marriage an unappealing option. In Japan, which is among the 10 lowest fertility countries in the world, more women are choosing to stay single: The marriage rate has fallen by almost half since the 1970s. Japanese women who do marry are waiting until their late 20s and tend not to give birth until they are 30, both of which result in lower average family size.
Even at this end of the demographic spectrum, the assumptions embedded within population projections seem optimistic. Japan’s fertility rate was last above replacement level in the early 1970s; it has fallen steadily to 1.3 children per woman today. The UN projections assume that fertility will immediately reverse track and begin rising to over 1.8 children per woman in 2050, rebounding above two children per woman before the end of the century.
The stalled high fertility rates in much of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, together with unprecedented low fertility in Eastern Europe and parts of East Asia, indicate that we are currently in an era of remarkable demographic diversity, despite the UN’s projection of future convergence.
Continue reading part two here.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and former senior research associate at Population Action International.
Sources: Boling (2008), Haub (2011), Japan Statistics Bureau, Measure DHS, UN Population Division, UN Population Fund, Washington Post.
Image Credit: Chart data from UN Population Division, arranged by Elizabeth Leahy Madsen.Topics: Asia, demography, development, Europe, family planning, Japan, Niger, Nigeria, population, Uganda, UN, video -
On the Beat
People and Wildlife Compete in East Africa’s Albertine Rift
MOREThe original version of this article, by Robert Draper, appeared on National Geographic.
The mwami remembers when he was a king of sorts. His judgment was sovereign, his power unassailable. Since 1954 he, like his father and grandfather before him, has been the head of the Bashali chiefdom in the Masisi District, an undulating pastoral region in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Though his name is Sylvestre Bashali Mokoto, the other chiefs address him as simply doyen – seniormost. For much of his adult life, the mwami received newcomers to his district. They brought him livestock or other gifts. He in turn parceled out land as he saw fit.
Today the chief sits on a dirty couch in a squalid hovel in Goma, a Congolese city several hours south of Masisi. His domain is now the epicenter of a humanitarian crisis that has lasted for more than a decade yet has largely eluded the world’s attention. Eastern Congo has been overtaken by thousands of Tutsi and Hutu and Hunde fighting over what they claim is their lawful property, by militias aiming to acquire land by force, by cattlemen searching for less cluttered pastures, by hordes of refugees from all over this fertile and dangerously overpopulated region of East Africa seeking somewhere, anywhere, to eke out a living. Some years ago a member of a rebel army seized the mwami’s 200-acre estate, forcing him, humiliated and fearing for his safety, to retreat to this shack in Goma.
The city is a hornet’s nest. As recently as two decades ago Goma’s population was perhaps 50,000. Now it is at least 20 times that number. Armed males in uniform stalk its raggedy, unlit streets with no one to answer to. Streaming out of the outlying forests and into the city market is a 24/7 procession of people ferrying immense sacks of charcoal on bicycles or wooden, scooter-like chukudus. North of the city limits seethes Nyiragongo volcano, which last erupted in 2002, when its lava roared through town and wiped out Goma’s commercial district. At the city’s southern edge lies the silver cauldron of Lake Kivu – so choked with carbon dioxide and methane that some scientists predict a gas eruption in the lake could one day kill everyone in and around Goma.
The mwami, like so many far less privileged people, has run out of options. His stare is one of regal aloofness. Yet despite his cuff links and trimmed gray beard, he is not a chief here in Goma. He is only Sylvestre Mokoto, a man swept into the hornet’s nest, with no land left for him to parcel out. As his guest, a journalist from the West, I have brought no gifts, only demeaning questions. “Yes, of course my power has been affected greatly,” the mwami snaps at me. “When others back up their claims with guns, there is nothing I can do.”
Continue reading on National Geographic.
Photo Credit: “Aerial View of Goma,” courtesy of UN Photo/Marie Frechon.Topics: Africa, agriculture, Burundi, conservation, development, DRC, environment, environmental security, forests, land, On the Beat, population, Rwanda, security, Uganda -
From the Wilson Center
Health and Harmony: Population, Health, and Environment in Indonesia
MOREBorneo’s Gunung Palung National Park is a microcosm of both the island’s ecological wealth and vulnerability. More than half of the park is undisturbed forest; the remainder, however, “is being torn down day after day” at an alarming rate, said Health in Harmony’s Nichol Simpson at an event on integrated approaches to population, health, and environment (PHE) programs in Indonesia. Alene Gelbard of the Public Health Institute’s Company-Community Partnerships for Health Indonesia (CCPHI) program joined Simpson on September 29 at the Wilson Center. Both speakers emphasized that no matter what issue a group works on, engaging local communities is essential for success.
The Destructive Cycle: Poor Health, Poor Environment
For Simpson, “the intersection between human and environmental health” is at the heart of Health in Harmony’s work. Health in Harmony opened Clinic ASRI in 2007, aiming to provide improved healthcare to villagers throughout Gunung Palung National Park while ending their dependence on illegal logging as a means of financial survival.
The area’s inhabitants were all too easily trapped in what Simpson called “the destructive cycle.” When faced by an unexpected medical emergency, families would go into debt to pay their medical bills. Health in Harmony found that of 232 local households surveyed, 13 percent had recently experienced a major medical emergency, at an average cost of $360. Most households in the area only hold around $260 in emergency savings, so to make up the difference, about a third turned to illegal logging to pay down their debt.
By deforesting the park, illegal logging worsens the health of nearby communities. For example, Simpson said that Clinic ASRI has seen a rise in cases of malaria and tuberculosis in the surrounding communities, in part because deforestation has increased the level of mosquito activity. The link between human and environmental health is clear, said Simpson: the people ASRI serves are “living it every day. They know the cause of this. And…they want it to stop.”
Protecting Natural Resources By Improving Health
The Health in Harmony clinic located in Sukadana, a small village sandwiched between Borneo’s coast and Gunung Palung Park, helps break the destructive cycle by treating patients regardless of their ability to pay. If patients do not have cash, they can barter for their care. In one case, a girl named Yani came to ASRI after her family incurred $500 over two months of visiting hospitals and traditional healers, none of whom could treat her condition. ASRI diagnosed and treated Yani for scabies. In exchange, her mother signed a pledge to protect Gunung Palung from logging and made the clinic a floor mat to cover the $1.50 bill.
By providing affordable, high-quality healthcare that is contingent upon pledging to protect the environment, Clinic ASRI improves human and environmental health in one fell swoop, said Simpson. “Because the infant mortality rate has decreased and you’re not overcompensating,” said Simpson, families can choose to have fewer children, using free birth control provided by ASRI.
“When you have fewer and healthier children, you’re investing in your education,” said Simpson. “When you’re investing in your education, you’re investing in your country and your community. This is the virtuous cycle. I didn’t invent it, but we are proving it in Sukadana.”
The communities around the clinic have embraced ASRI’s work, partnering with them to expand their services to address additional community needs, like training farmers in more productive organic methods and providing mated pairs of goats for widows, who pay ASRI back with kid goats and manure for fertilizer.
All but one of the 23 villages that ASRI services have been consistently free of illegal logging, according to monitors who visit them on a regular basis. “We’re proving the theory that we can protect natural resources by improving health,” Simpson said.
“Health Is Key to Sustainable Development”
Gelbard took a step back to talk about CCPHI’s experience establishing multi-sector partnerships among NGOs and corporations by building trust and enabling dialogue between the communities.
With corporate responsibility becoming more popular, “everyone’s talking about partnerships these days, and everybody’s partnering with everyone,” said Gelbard. “I don’t care what they call it – I care what they’re doing” and what results they achieve, she said. A successful partnership involves “all partners doing something more than just giving money.”
Gelbard said the 2004 tsunami reinforced the notion of corporate responsibility for a lot of companies operating in Indonesia. They saw that unless they branched out beyond their own walls and “did things to help strengthen communities,” efforts at corporate responsibility simply “would not benefit them in the long-run,” she said.
Through CCPHI, companies and NGOs have partnered on a wide range of efforts, including improving access to and funding for reproductive health services, improving sanitation by increasing access to water, and combating human trafficking by empowering girls and women.
Achieving the Millennium Development Goals will require increasing access to health care in a manner that reflects the needs of communities, she said. At its core, CCPHI’s work and the partnerships it facilitates are “based on the knowledge that health is key to sustainable development,” said Gelbard.
Event Resources
Sources: Alam Sehat Lestari, American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Company-Community Partnerships for Health Indonesia, ExxonMobil, The Guardian, Health in Harmony, National Geographic, PBS News Hour, Public Health Institute, Republic of Indonesia Ministry of Forestry, United Nations, World Wildlife Fund
Photo Credit: Used with permission courtesy of ASRI and Nikki See, Under-told Stories. -
PHE Is One Great Idea That Won’t Be On the Rio Agenda, Says Roger-Mark De Souza
October 17, 2011 // By Sean PeoplesMORE“I am now serving as an example to other women in the community because I am not having any more children. I have received training in sustainable agricultural practices, I’m generating income, and I’m educating others,” said Berhane Ferkade, an Ethiopian farmer, to Population Action International’s Roger-Mark De Souza earlier this year. The 39-year-old mother of 11 become one of the community’s model farmers after working with LEM Ethiopia – a local population, health, and environment (PHE) development organization.
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Jon Foley: How to Feed Nine Billion and Keep the Planet Too
October 12, 2011 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoMOREJon Foley of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment is a food security rock star, plain and simple. And he deserves that lofty status in part because he explains our complex 21st century agriculture challenges in such a clear and accessible fashion. See him present (like in the TEDx video above), and you are left wishing all scientists would drop in on the “how to make your work understandable” class that Foley must have aced.
Foley brought that clarity of presentation, mixed with self-deprecating humor, to this past week’s inaugural South by Southwest (SXSW) Eco conference in Austin, Texas. Foley said we must meet three big challenges in the realm of agriculture:- Feeding the population today: One in seven of the world’s seven billion people do not know where their next meal is coming from.
- Feeding the future population: The planet is expected to reach more than nine billion people in just 39 years (and may still continue to grow beyond nine billion, rather than leveling off as expected until recently).
- Farming the planet sustainably: We are a long way from achieving sustainable agriculture, given overuse of fertilizers, soil erosion and degradation, deforestation (leading to loss of biodiversity), and energy-intensive practices (producing excessive carbon emissions).
But Foley and his colleagues retain their scientific union cards while suggesting specific ways the world might meet the three food security goals listed above. In what must be considered the academic equivalent of a walk-off grand slam, they will be featured as next week’s cover story in Nature and a more accessible derivative in the November issue of Scientific American.
“Today, humans are farming more of the planet than ever, with higher resource intensity and staggering environmental impacts, while diverting an increasing fraction of crops to animals, biofuels and other nonfood uses,” Foley et al. write in Nature. “Meanwhile, almost a billion people are chronically hungry. This must not continue: the requirements of current and future generations demand that we transform agriculture to meet the twin challenges of food security and environmental sustainability.”
Their four-step plan in brief:- Slow agricultural expansion to stop deforestation and the huge ecological cost that stems from expanding into new lands, often to grow animal feed rather than food for direct human consumption.
- Grow more food on the acres currently under cultivation. The attention, resources, and innovation applied to the best-producing farms need to also be turned on the least productive farms, where rates as low as 20 percent of potential yields are the norm.
- Improve the resource efficiency of agriculture, through better water use, for example. Places like India, where the energy to pump groundwater is effectively free, are very inefficient in the use of water per calorie grown.
- Close “diet gaps,” where only 60 percent of what is grown is actually for human consumption (the rest for animals and fuel), and reduce food waste, whether it is spoilage on the way to market or the excesses of a food industry that leaves so much uneaten.
Sources: Nature.
Video Credit: “TEDxTC – Jonathan Foley – The Other Inconvenient Truth,” courtesy of Youtube user TEDxTalks. -
On the Beat
Lisa Hymas on Envisioning a Different Future With Family Planning in Ethiopia
MOREECSP caught up with Lisa Hymas, senior editor at Grist, last week during the first South by Southwest (SXSW) Eco conference and she spoke about her recent visit to Ethiopia to see the country’s community health extension program in action. “Ethiopia has a big challenge around population,” Hymas said, “but the government is committed to bringing that down.”
The government extension program places health-workers – young women, for the most part, who have received basic training – directly into each community, where they are able to give out immunizations, provide advice on nutrition, teach families how to properly hang bed nets to prevent mosquito-borne illnesses, and provide family planning services and advice.
Thanks to the program, these health workers and those in the communities they service can “envision very different lives for themselves than their mothers had,” Hymas explained. For instance, one woman recounted that her mother gave birth to 10 children, “and almost died giving birth to the last one, because there was no access to birth control, and there was no good access to health care.” In contrast, she is now able to have a career and to use family planning to delay and space her own childbearing.
For more on Ethiopia’s health extension program, see Schuyler Null’s report on visiting a village health clinic near the town of Fiche last spring. -
From the Wilson Center
Strengthening the Voices of Women Champions for Family Planning and Reproductive Health
MORE“The health, security, and well-being of families depend importantly on the health of women,” said Carol Peasley, president and CEO of the Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA). “When women have the ability to voluntarily space and limit the number of children they have, maternal and newborn child deaths decrease, as do abortions and abortion-related injuries,” she continued.
Peasley was joined by three panelists on September 28 at the Wilson Center: Dr. Nafis Sadik, special advisor to the UN Secretary General; Tigist Kassa Milko, health communications program coordinator for Panos Ethiopia; and Rosemary Ardayfio, a reporter for the Ghanaian paper, The Daily Graphic.
Ardayfio and Milko both recently participated in a CEDPA-led workshop, which is designed to create effective women champions for family planning and reproductive health.
“The voices of women champions may in fact be the best way to influence policymakers and just average citizens around the world,” said Peasley.
Women’s Rights Essential for Development of All
According to Sadik, women have gained some autonomy over their reproductive health:- Maternal mortality around the world is down by 40 percent compared to 1990 levels;
- Family planning reaches over 65 percent of women who need and want it;
- Many developing countries will achieve parity in girls’ and boys’ education by 2015; and
- Women are increasingly prominent in national and international leadership.
- Women’s literacy rates are still much lower than men’s;
- Pregnancy and childbirth still pose major health risks for women;
- Maternal mortality is the single biggest differential between developed and developing countries;
- We are far from reaching the Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality by 75 percent; and
- The current unmet demand for family planning (215 million women) is projected to rise by 40 percent by 2050 as the reproductive age population grows.
Local Champions for Local Needs
Although Tigist Kassa Milko and Rosemary Ardayfio come from two African countries hundreds of miles apart, their struggles are eerily similar.
In Ethiopia, the more than 1.5 million women who live in pastoral or nomadic areas shoulder many responsibilities, including walking long distances to fetch food and water for their families. The well-being of these women and their families is further strained by the challenges of climate change and limited health service provision.
To help overcome these obstacles, a number of micro-credit associations now offer female pastoralists alternative livelihood options. Panos Ethiopia also provides “reproductive health, family planning, gender-based violence forums” and “trainings on life skills and saving” to those who come for loans, said Milko.
But “when it’s a choice between walking to get water and walking to get contraceptives, water will win,” said Milko, so it is essential to focus on integrating ways to improve livelihoods, health, and ecosystems – also known as population, health, and environment (PHE) programs.
In Ghana, women also grapple with competing issues of development, poverty, healthcare, and cultural barriers. According to Ardayfio, 35 out of every 100 Ghanaian women want to space or limit births but are not using modern family planning methods. As a journalist, she acknowledged that there are many myths about reproductive health that need to be dispelled. The newspaper she writes for, The Daily Graphic, publishes three articles on women’s health each week.
“The stories of women dying from pregnancy-related causes should continue to be told in a compelling manner until our government makes good on the many international commitments it has signed to,” said Ardayfio. “Our decision-makers should be told again and again that it’s time to scale up family planning.”
Event Resources:
Sources: CEDPA, Guttmacher Institute, Population Reference Bureau, UNESCO, UNICEF, USAID.
Photo Credit: Dave Hawxhurst/Wilson Center. -
SXSW Eco Panel: Three Great Ideas That Won’t Be On the Rio+20 Agenda
September 30, 2011 // By Schuyler NullMORESouth by Southwest (SXSW) – the popular music, film, and alternative showcase – is moving into the green space with its first ever “eco” conference, kicking off next week, October 4, with more than 50 panels on “solutions for a sustainable world.” There’s one in particular though you should tune into: “Three Great Ideas that Won’t Be On the Rio Agenda,” featuring Geoff Dabelko, director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program; Roger-Mark De Souza, vice president of research and director of the climate program at Population Action International; and Aimee Christensen, CEO of Christensen Global Strategies.
The panel will feature discussion on three issues that will likely not be on the table at the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development next year: integrated population, health, and environment development programs, climate adaptation as a path to peacebuilding, and how to get the private sector better involved in helping cope with climate change.
If you’re traveling down to Austin, “Three Great Ideas” is scheduled for Thursday, October 6 at 10am CST; if not, stay tuned for webcast information!Topics: climate change, development, environment, global health, PHE, population, Rio+20, SXSW, video
A Publication of the Stimson Center.
