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Friday Podcasts
Rich Thorsten on Water Sanitation, Population, and Urbanization in the Developing World
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“For the first time in human history, more than one half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and some of the largest and fastest growing population centers in the world – countries like India, China, parts of sub-Saharan Africa – are in areas where water resources are becoming more and more scarce,” said Water.org’s Rich Thorsten in a recent interview with ECSP.
Thorsten serves as director of international programs for Water.org, which partners with local communities, governments, and NGOs across Central America, South Asia, and Africa to bring improved water sanitation to at-need rural and urban populations. He emphasized that ensuring access to clean water has a number of positive spillover effects, ranging from improved prospects for economic development to greater social stability, since access to non-polluted water supplies removes one potential source of tension within and between communities.
Community Health
The greatest benefit of improved sanitation services, however, comes in the form of enhanced public health outcomes. “I would definitely say there is a strong correlation” between the two, Thorsten asserted. “Water and sanitation-related diseases are related to the deaths of at least 3.5 million people every year in the developing world – not to mention millions of hours and dollars that are lost to treating health problems and coping with health problems as a result of poor [water] access and hygiene practices.”
Thorsten said that community participation has been a key aspect of ensuring the sustainability of Water.org’s projects. To pave the way for continued gains in economic development and public health, he said they work alongside water users, engineers, and government officials in target communities to make those parties stakeholders in the infrastructure development process. Fostering a sense of community ownership of sanitation projects helps reduce the likelihood that infrastructure will fall into disrepair or disuse after the initial programming intervention has been conducted.
Given that improving water-sanitation access for the world’s poor is a key element of the UN Millennium Development Goals, Thorsten said he is pleased the subject seems to be attracting more attention within the policymaking and development communities. Despite the positive momentum, however, he acknowledged the fight to ensure clean-water access for the developing world will remain an uphill battle.
“When one considers that….about 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation, that there’s more people in the world that have access to a cell phone than a pit latrine or a toilet, it’s still a very daunting task that will require a lot more investment, commitment, and attention in order to improve the situation for billions of people,” Thorsten said.
Sources: UN.
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.Topics: Africa, Asia, community-based, development, environment, Friday Podcasts, global health, Latin America, podcast, population, South Asia, water -
Watch: Don Lauro on How Integrated Development Deepens Community Involvement
September 7, 2011 // By Schuyler NullMOREPopulation, health, and environment (PHE) projects address an impressive range of issues – natural resource management, family planning, maternal and child health, water, sanitation, nutrition, and strengthening health systems – but perhaps their most important advantage is the level of community involvement elicited, said long-time PHE expert Don Lauro in an interview with ECSP.
“There’s a depth to these programs,” Lauro said. Tools like rural participatory appraisal allow communities to map out their problems and then come up with solutions on their own. “If you get deep enough, it becomes they who own the project, and I think that that’s your ultimate goal,” he explained. “You have a much greater prospect for sustainability of that effort, no matter what happens to the funding.”
Lauro recently visited the USAID-funded BALANCED Project in Tanzania as part of a wider look at integrated development projects. He emphasized that what exactly this integrated approach is called – be it PHE, HELP, or HELPS – is insignificant; what matters is that these disparate elements are combined. -
Family Planning Can Help in Afghanistan
September 6, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffMOREThe original version of this op-ed, by Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Most experts agree that the mark of long-term success in Afghanistan will be stable governance that allows the economy, democracy, and the people to flourish. Many factors will determine that, but a major one that seems to be left out of most high-level conversations is population.
Afghanistan is a country of 31 million people, but that number will double by 2035, according to the most recent UN projections, and could reach 126 million by midcentury. That’s 95 million more Afghans to govern, clothe, feed, and employ.
Without attention to population, countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan stand a good chance of staying mired in poverty, conflict, and corrupt, repressive government. That is why sustained investment in family planning by the United States and other countries would do more to stabilize the political climate there than any other foreign policy initiative. Though efforts by the Afghan government to provide contraceptives have met some resistance by conservative Muslim groups, the success of family planning in other Muslim states demonstrates that it can be effective.
Continue reading on The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Sources: UN Population Division.
Photo Credit: “100430-F-2616H-050,” courtesy of flickr user Kenny Holston 21 (Kenny Holston). -
Friday Podcasts
Karen Seto on the Environmental Impact of Expanding Cities [Part Two]
MORE“A lot of cities are trying to become green cities,” said Karen Seto in part two of an interview with ECSP about her recently published article, “A Meta-Analysis of Global Urban Land Expansion,” co-authored with Michail Fragkias, Burak Güneralp, and Michael K. Reilly. “I think one of the main policy implications of our study is that how a city urbanizes is critical, because one of the things we are finding is that urban land is growing faster than urban population, and in some cases it is growing much faster.”
Seto said that the cities with the best prospects for implementing green growth and expansion strategies “tend to focus on the low-hanging fruit,” such as planting trees or constructing buildings with green roofs. From the public’s perspective, these types of measures are relatively painless because they “don’t require changing people’s behavior.”
More challenging, said Seto, will be getting rapidly expanding cities to anchor future development around public-transit systems, especially given the changing lifestyle preferences of upwardly mobile urban populations across China and India, for whom private car ownership serves as an important status symbol.
Still, Seto said she is tentatively optimistic about city planners’ ability to grow cities in a sustainable fashion. “We’ve experienced this rapid growth of urban population and urban land areas, but we’re also seeing that over the next 20 years, according to the UN, we’re going to see even more people living in urban areas,” she said.
“We have this window of opportunity to really shape the way in which cities get developed, and I think that’s really one of the big messages of the study.”
Part one of Karen Seto’s interview is available here. The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.
Sources: China Daily, USA Today.Topics: Africa, Asia, demography, environment, environmental health, Friday Podcasts, population, urbanization -
Friday Podcasts
Karen Seto on the Environmental Impact of Expanding Cities [Part One]
MORE“When we think about the environmental impacts of rapid urbanization, we really need to unpack what we mean by ‘urbanization,’” said Karen Seto, an associate professor in Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environment Studies, in this interview with ECSP. “There is the demographic component, where more people are living in cities; there is economic urbanization, which is where livelihoods and economies are becoming more urban rather than rural; and then there is the land component – the conversion of land from agriculture and other ecosystems to become urban.”
Seto is the lead author of a new article, “A Meta-Analysis of Global Urban Land Expansion” (with Michail Fragkias, Burak Güneralp, and Michael K. Reilly), which uses satellite imagery to help document the physical expansion of urban areas in developed and developing nations between 1970 and 2000.
Over that period, the population of cities in the developing world boomed. In 1970, there were roughly the same number of city dwellers in developed nations as in developing nations. By the mid-1990s, however, urban residents of the developing world outnumbered their developed-world counterparts by a factor of two to one. Since then, the gap has continued to grow.
According to the report, urban growth sprawled to cover nearly 60,000 square kilometers of previously non-urban areas during the last three decades of the twentieth-century. One of their most interesting finds, said Seto, was that “urban expansion has been occurring in low-elevation coastal zones more than it has been elsewhere.”
“Essentially what that means is that cities are growing precisely in areas that are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, like sea level rise and storm surges,” she said.
Demography and the Environment
Seto acknowledged that many of the today’s discussions surrounding urbanization focus on the negative impacts for the environment and human security – among them the “loss of agricultural land, conversion of forests, biodiversity loss, changes in hydrology, and climate effects.” Ultimately though, she said, urbanization and its attendant land-use changes shouldn’t be viewed through a black-or-white lens.
“Certainly we think about the oncoming demographic transition of something like three billion more people living in cities,” Seto said, but “that means there’s a lot of efficiency to be gained, whether it is in education, energy, sanitation, or health – urbanization allows for opportunities for really efficient use of resources.”
The real challenge to achieving environmentally sustainable urban development, said Seto, is thoughtful city planning: “How we configure ourselves has a big impact on the environment, so it is not the issue of just whether we are urbanizing – the form in which we urbanize [also] has a huge impact.”
Part two of Karen Seto’s interview is available here. The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.
Sources: Population Reference Bureau, UNFPA.Topics: Africa, Asia, demography, environment, environmental health, Friday Podcasts, population, urbanization -
Beat on the Ground
What’s in a Name? Watch Don Lauro on PHE, HELP, and HELPS
MOREPopulation, health, and environment (PHE) expert Don Lauro has worked on integrated projects for decades as a scholar, an implementer, a donor, and an evaluator. He recently visited the USAID-funded BALANCED Project in Tanzania as part of a wider look at this integrated approach. In an interview with ECSP, Lauro said the effort “made me think more broadly…about this area that we call population, health, and environment and what’s really in a name like that.”
“We commonly say PHE, and we all know what we’re talking about,” Lauro said of the population and development community, “but when you look deeply into these projects – or even not so deeply – you see that there’s other things going on as well.”
For example, Lauro pointed to the focus on livelihoods that many PHE programs have: “In the project I saw in Tanzania, there were many microcredit groups on the ground – mostly women – taking small loans for developing little enterprises that they had, like baking bread, raising bees, buying a cow…little enterprises to make their lives a little bit better.”
“Some people don’t use the term ‘PHE’…maybe it’s a ‘HELP’ project; that is health, environment, livelihoods, and population,” Lauro said. “Other people would say it’s maybe something even longer, ‘HELPS’ – health environment, livelihoods, population, and sustainability (or ‘security’ – Ed.).” When he was at the Wilson Center, Gib Clarke coined the “HELP” term in ECSP’s FOCUS Issue 20, arguing that livelihoods is such a critical component that it ought to be more formally recognized.
But, said Lauro, “on the ground they don’t use these terms – they say things like, ‘this is a healthy community program’ or ‘this is a green community program.’”
“I think it’s very important for us to realize what happens on the ground is lot different, and maybe more real, than how we talk about it.” -
Beat on the Ground
Improving Human Health and Conservation in Madagascar’s Forest Communities
MOREThis PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project.
Madagascar is one of the world’s most unique ecosystems, with a total of eight plant families, five bird families, and five primate families that live nowhere else on Earth. Madagascar’s tropical forests and marine environments are home to endemic species of flora and fauna, although tragically 15 species are now extinct. At the same time, Madagascar is rich in freshwater resources, yet more than 60 percent of the island’s 19.7 million people do not have access to safe drinking water.Since 2003, Zo Zatovonirina has worked for Conservation International (CI) in Madagascar, and he has seen up-close the challenges of reaching remote forest communities, often requiring one- or two-day hikes over treacherous roads. As coordinator for USAID’s Healthy Families, Healthy Forests Program, Zo worked with two Malagasy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), MATEZA, and the Association for Health Action and Security, to implement integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) approaches in response to community needs in the Ankeniheny Zahamena forest corridor in eastern Madagascar.
From 2003-2008, CI and partners reached more than 25,000 village residents with PHE messages; increased contraceptive prevalence in target zones from 17 percent in 2005 to 30 percent in 2008; constructed 3,000 latrines; and improved environmental health in all priority sites.
Today, biodiversity in Madagascar is under increased pressure, in light of political instability since 2009 and continued population pressures. Recognizing CI and partner experience and investments in conservation efforts to improve human well-being, USAID Madagascar and World Learning recently awarded a new 15-month grant to CI Madagascar and two Malagasy NGO partners – Voahary Salama and Ny Tanintsika – to implement an integrated PHE project in the southeastern Ambositra Vondrozo forest corridor. All three organizations have implemented PHE projects in Madagascar, and they have established trusting relationships with the people living in these fragile ecosystems.
Madagascar has a rich history of implementing successful PHE projects, and this project represents a new PHE pilot phase in the midst of political uncertainty. According to Zo, PHE approaches remain constant – simultaneously addressing several complex and linked problems such as poverty, child survival, and unsustainable dependency on natural resources. In Zo’s experience, CI’s PHE approach touches on all these aspects and delivers a pragmatic, integrated package of interventions designed to increase community capacity to better manage their health and environment. Utilizing PHE approaches, CI, Voahary Salama, and Ny Tanintsika will strive to reach communities for the first time ever with family planning, water, sanitation, and hygiene services while helping them conserve their biological heritage.
This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project. A PDF version can be downloaded from the PHE Toolkit. PHE Champion profiles highlight people working on the ground to improve health and conservation in areas where biodiversity is critically endangered.
Photo Credit: The forests of Madagascar, courtesy of Conservation International/Russ Mittermeier, and Zo Zatovonirina, courtesy of Conservation International. -
The Hungry Planet: Global Food Scarcity in the 21st Century
August 16, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffMOREThe original version of this article, by Russell Sticklor, appeared on World Politics Review.
At the dawn of the 20th century, the world population was inching toward a modest two billion. In the 111 years since, notwithstanding the impact of war, genocide, disease, and famine, the global population has soared, reaching three billion around 1960 and now quickly approaching the neighborhood of seven billion. By 2050, the planet will likely be home to two billion more.
We may not be witnessing the detonation of the “population bomb” that Paul Ehrlich warned of in his seminal 1968 book, but such rapid demographic change is clearly pushing the international community into uncharted territory. With a limited amount of arable land and a finite supply of fresh water for irrigation, figuring out how to feed a planet adding upward of 70 million people each year looms as one of the 21st century’s most pressing challenges.
The push to ensure global food security transcends the desire to avoid repeating the famines that devastated the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Ethiopia, and so many other corners of the world during the past century. Instead, aid and development organizations today rightly view food insecurity problems as deeply intertwined with issues of economic development, public health, and political stability, particularly in the developing world. To maintain order in the international community and prevent the emergence of new failed states in the decades ahead, it will be critical to find innovative means of feeding the rapidly growing populations of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and East Asia.
Continue reading on World Politics Review.
Note: World Politics Review has graciously white-listed all entrances from NSB for this article, so as long as you use the above link, you should be able to read the full article for free.
Russell Sticklor is a consultant for the Environmental Change and Security Program.
Photo Credit: “Crowded market street,” courtesy of flickr user – yt –.
A Publication of the Stimson Center.
