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Page added on September 20, 2014
On the Path Past 9 Billion, Little Crosstalk Between U.N. Sessions on Population and Global Warming
The United Nations and the streets of Manhattan are going into global warming saturation mode, from Sunday’s People’s Climate March through the Tuesday climate change summit convened by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and on through an annual green-energy event called Climate Week.
Largely missed in much of this, as always seems the case with climate change discussions, is the role of population growth in contributing both to rising emissions of greenhouse gases and rising vulnerability to climate hazards in poor places with high fertility rates (think sub-Saharan Africa).
That’s too bad given that on Monday a separate special session of the General Assembly is scheduled to hold a 20th-anniversary review of actions since the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. As Bob Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute mused at a Wilson Center meeting in Washington last week, there needs to be much more crosstalk.
Obviously, rates of consumption of fossil energy and forests per person matter more than the rise in human numbers. As I’ve said before, 9 billion vegan monks would have a far different greenhouse-gas imprint than a similar number of people living high on the hog.
But family planning, for instance, should absolutely be seen as a climate resilience strategy in poor regions. This is how I put it in 2010:
Africa’s population is projected to double — from one to two billion — by 2050. That means exposure to [deep, implicit] climate hazards will greatly increase in many places even if climate patterns don’t change at all. So family planning, and sanitation and water management, sure sound like vital parts of any push for climate progress.
I’d be happy to shift my view if someone can explain a flaw in my logic.
Read this timely (and aptly titled) piece by two former United Nations Population Division officials, Joe Chamie and Barry Mirkin for more: “Climate Change and World Population: Still Avoiding Each Other.”
For the moment, trajectories for fertility rates, particularly in Africa, are showing few signs of modulating, leading to this sobering title on the latest analysis of United Nations population data, published in the current edition of Science: “World population stabilization unlikely this century.”
The study uses models to generate not only a range of outcomes for population through 2100, but also probabilities. Robert Kunzig at National Geographic, who’s been writing in depth on human population growth for years, has a superb analysis of this paper and other work, led by the Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz, pointing to more modest growth.
What everyone cited in his article agrees on is that Africa is a critical region (read about Nigeria, particularly!) and that women’s access to secondary education and contraception are the key to shifted trajectories on family size — and so much else, of course. Please read Lutz’s piece on “Population policy for sustainable development” for more.
I reached out to one of the authors of the Science paper, Adrian E. Raftery, a professor of statistics and sociology at the University of Washington, for a final thought on the many benefits of action:
The projected rapid population increase in Africa may well exacerbate a range of challenges: environmental, health and social, including climate change. On the other hand, if fertility decline accelerates, Africa stands to gain many benefits. These include a demographic dividend, which happens when a country experiences a rapid reduction in fertility rates. This leads to a period of 30 years or so when there are relative few dependents (children or old people), and many more resources are available for infrastructure, education, environmental protection and so on. This dividend can be reaped even while population is increasing (albeit more slowly).
If African population growth could be kept to the lower end of our projected interval (3.5 billion instead of the median of 4.2 billion, compared with the current 1 billion), the outcomes would likely be much better. That’s another 2.5 billion people instead of 3.2 billion by 2100. It doesn’t sound that different, but it could change a lot of things. It’s feasible with the right policies.
We know the policies that can help to achieve this. The first is to improve access to contraception. 25 percent of women in sub-Saharan Africa who do not want to become pregnant are not using contraception, and this number hasn’t changed in 20 years. The second is to improve girls’ education. For example, more than 25 percent of girls in Nigeria do not complete primary schooling.The issues are priorities, resources and political will. Population was a major world concern up to the 1990s (with a peak at the Cairo conference in 1994), but since then has fallen off the world’s agenda. This now seems to have been premature. Population should come back as a major world priority. There’s a need for the world as a whole to support families and governments in high-fertility countries improve access to contraception and education.
18 Comments on "On the Path Past 9 Billion, Little Crosstalk Between U.N. Sessions on Population and Global Warming"
noobtube on Sat, 20th Sep 2014 7:03 pm
Why are Americans so fixated on how many people live outside “the West” countries.
Are Americans getting ready for a new genocide? What the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere were not enough?
The Tasmanians and Aborigines were not enough?
Now, the Americans want to murder everyone in the world, so they can keep their fat, dumpy asses in SUVs and dining at Taco Bell, so they can watch some football on more plastic electronic junk.
Makati1 on Sat, 20th Sep 2014 7:46 pm
noobtube, Americans are greedy and want it all. Anyone not American is supposed to just disappear. It’s called “Exceptionalism”. Even their “diplomats” think that of other populations. Remember Nuland’s famous “Fuck the EU!” comment? THAT was a slip of the tongue but obviously the shared view as she still has her job.
Now, bring on the intelligent, mature rebuttals, all of you ‘exceptional’ Americans … I’m waiting.
Nony on Sat, 20th Sep 2014 7:56 pm
USA! USA!
Nony on Sat, 20th Sep 2014 7:56 pm
Fuck the EE.
😉
redpill on Sat, 20th Sep 2014 8:01 pm
The resources and institutions simply don’t exist for Africa to hit 2 billion by 2050.
Things are already starting to fall apart. Boko Haram is apparently making further gains in N.E. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country at ~177 million people, over 40% of whom are under 15.
And this is not “blaming Africa” as a certain “contributor” on this board constantly states, but rather pointing out that the continent has a great many countries that do not have their shit together now and that the prospect of further population growth just means more misery for voices that will only be heard when they commit violence.
redpill on Sat, 20th Sep 2014 8:11 pm
Well, appears others commented while I was typing my reply. And look how on point they are. Bravo I say, bravo!
What a coincidence these 3 “individuals” posted on what had been an empty comments section when I first started whipping up a reply.
redpill on Sat, 20th Sep 2014 8:13 pm
Mak, you wouldn’t be cashing in any Social Security checks over there, would ya?
HIruit Nguyse on Sat, 20th Sep 2014 9:58 pm
From UNFAO:
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012. Almost all the hungry people, 852 million, live in developing countries, representing 15 percent of the population of developing counties.
So I suppose we are just going to up that number to 3 Bln living in hunger…
Makati1 on Sun, 21st Sep 2014 1:23 am
redpill, you wouldn’t still be paying into that socialist tax scam would you? Do you have a choice? I do.
Yes, I’m still cashing my SS checks as I paid in more than I have received so far, but I don’t expect them to continue for much longer. I use it to help my kids and grand kids and to prepare for it’s ending. No problem. If you are not already getting them, you probably never will. I might actually get back what I paid in over the decades. Maybe.
As for Africa, maybe if the West hadn’t plundered them for the last 2,000 years, starting with Rome, they might have been on par with the EU today. After all, that is where the human race began, according to all recent discoveries. You should get educated about the Africa that is NOT in the headlines. There are 54 independent countries on that continent.
Any projection past today is pure guesswork. All we read these days is propaganda and spin. Nothing is as it is presented in the ‘news’. Nothing.
Nony on Sun, 21st Sep 2014 2:30 am
I hate paying that shit. Massive chain letter. Welfare for old people. What a commie gyp.
Makati1 on Sun, 21st Sep 2014 6:34 am
Nony, do you have grandparents? Are you ready to support them? How about your parents? Are you ready to let them live with you and provide for them? S.S. was a good thing, but was plundered like everything else, not nailed down, by the Banksters. The Banksters are robbing you more than any SS payment. If there was not SS, there would be a higher income tax. That is all that SS is. Another tax most will never benefit from. But, what can you expect from a socialist government?
Davy on Sun, 21st Sep 2014 7:09 am
Friggen hypocrites that bitch about how bad the US is but still take money from the US.
Kenz300 on Sun, 21st Sep 2014 7:31 am
Endless Population growth — the worlds biggest environmental problem………..
Davy on Sun, 21st Sep 2014 7:36 am
Another article with fancy sloping gentle graphs. It has taken us a few hundred years of modern life to get to this point where there is no more growth possible but academia just doesn’t get it. How many reports are going to be generated before these folks question the insanity of their thinking? It will not be possible to grow much more than where we are at currently. Like Richard Heinberg was fond of relating if we are not at PO then we will hit Peak something else. I see little opportunity for Africa to grow more than another 500MIL. This 500MIL growth is based upon SHTF date of 2020. All bets are off when we have liquid fuel shortages and food shortages. Africa cannot feed itself now how is it going to manage 2-4BIL. I guess the expat dog will say “bush meat” because we know that is what he will be living on in his jungle hole. Africa is doomed to a miserable existence until its population falls below 500MIL from the 1BIL now. Africa has allot of good survival points if the population would level off now and decline. Many Africans are subsistence farmers. There is no need to make that transition back to the land like the rich west must. What will be terrible is the very large and mega cities that must depopulate into these areas where the subsistence farms are. If my SHTF date is correct Africa’s transition will not be so bad. I see no chance of the African population increasing more than 500MIL. Asia is another story in the misery index and in a very bad situation of a huge population further along the development curve. Asians have much farther to fall than any other region with a dangerous amount of very large and mega cities. I see massive suffering there. There is no need to comment on the developed west. The Anti-Westerners here have that covered. The very large and mega population regions in the developed West will suffer horrible adjustments there too.
Mike999 on Sun, 21st Sep 2014 11:48 am
The only proven method to control population is EDUCATING Girls, which would also improve nations economic development.
It must be done.
Davy on Sun, 21st Sep 2014 12:29 pm
Mike, education of women is well know as the best population control method. It is a problem of being behind the eight ball. The population is rising far faster then education. It is kind of another Red Queen syndrome. I thing it is too late and we are out of money to make a difference. I know that sounds defeatist.
MSN Fanboy on Sun, 21st Sep 2014 1:05 pm
Davy, that sounds realistic.
Nevermind, the second dark age will be upon us soon.
Kenz300 on Mon, 22nd Sep 2014 11:56 am
It is amazing that the worlds poorest people are having the most children. Seems like governments and people might get the connection…… If you are too poor to provide for yourself you can not provide for a child. Want to life yourself out of poverty …. stop having so many children.
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