Behind the Numbers: The PRB blog on population, health, and the environment

by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment 

My mind is often flooded with indicators: population size, percent of the population living on less than a dollar per day, landholdings per household, average family size, and unmet need for family planning are a few that often float around in my head. Statistical research, however, never replaces the wealth of insight that can be gained through visiting communities, talking to people, and connecting faces and stories with indicators, results, and statistical associations. 

I recently had such an opportunity while visiting the Southern and Oromia regions of Ethiopia, where PRB is building policy communications capacity with several organizations implementing integrated population, health, and environment projects. 

During this field visit I came to the realization that a field visit is probably as intimate a communications opportunity as a project can have.  People aren’t reading a one-pager or watching your perfectly crafted video.  They’re actually there, talking with project staff, listening to beneficiaries, and seeing your efforts with their own eyes.  Will you ever have a more captive audience? Probably not.  Thus, while visiting the projects and talking with community members, I was constantly reflecting on the process itself, and this set of visits presented a whole spectrum of different experiences to reflect upon. So here are a few of my initial quick thoughts on field trip best practices.  

Read the rest of this entry »

by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment

I was recently asked whether I thought Optimum Population Trust’s Carbon Offsets Program was akin to “population control” by rich countries on poor countries. I felt the question mischaracterized the program and population and climate change relationships in general, and this was my response:

Optimum Population Trust’s (OPT) carbon offsets program as well as a recent study they commissioned from the London School of Economics on population and climate change advocate for increased financial support for family planning programs that meet the needs of women regardless of their location in the context of climate change. Some have argued that this amounts to “population control” of developing countries. 

The idea of “Population control” referred to ideas and programs that were being implemented from the 1960’s to the early 1990’s that largely argued that national governments should address high fertility for various developmental, economic, and environmental reasons. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), however, led to a transformative change in the views, goals, and approaches to family planning, and all efforts since then have been focused on the individual needs of women, their reproductive desires and rights, and voluntary access to family planning for those who wish to space births or limit their number of children. Currently, there are approximately 200 million women worldwide who want to space their births or not have more children but are not using a modern method of contraception. Research indicates that this large “unmet need for family planning” is primarily due to inadequately financed voluntary family planning and girls education.   

The most recent research available from OPT and others indicates that adequately financing voluntary family planning programs and therefore meeting the existing need of 200 million women would benefit individual women and reduce future carbon emissions – a potential win-win. Unintended pregnancies occur throughout the world in both developing and developed countries and thus efforts should be focused where there is a recognized need by individual women (the U.S. for example has a very high rate of unintended pregnancies). 

Efforts to reduce emissions must start with developed or rich nations changing their energy and consumption patterns.  The amount of emissions reductions that are needed to avert the worst climate change scenarios, however, is daunting and will require efforts beyond anything we’ve yet seen. Adequately financing voluntary family planning programs is not a panacea but rather is a contribution to these efforts. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) climate change models depend on population size in their emissions scenarios. The research that I have read, including some very well done and sophisticated research that should come out sometime later this year, indicates that reducing unintended pregnancies through voluntary programs would result in reductions of at least 1 billion tons of carbon annually by 2050. For those of you familiar with the idea of carbon stabilization wedges, you’ll note that 1 billion tons annually is significant.     

I’d like end by pointing out the just-released UNFPA State of World Population 2009 report that deals with family planning and climate change from the perspective of women’s rights: Facing a changing world: Women, Population, and Climate.

by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment

This week is World Water Week, and an international conference in Stockholm, Sweden is focusing on the converging challenges that characterize the world’s growing water crisis.  Unfortunately I’m not participating in the meeting this week, though the humidity here in Washington DC certainly makes it feel like water week. 

Looking at the program for World Water Week, what I find most interesting, and what I see as one of the great challenges of the coming decade is meeting the water and sanitation needs of people living in small cities and towns of developing countries.  Safe drinking water and improved sanitation are among the Millennium Development Goal targets and are the two most important means of reducing infant mortality from diarrheal disease, one the leading causes of death of infants worldwide.

Global demographic trends illustrate the challenge effectively.  The image below links to a graph showing the urbanization and income trends for every country in the world from 1960 to 2006 using Gapminder.org’s innovative Trendalyzer web application.  On the vertical axis is the percentage of a country’s population that lives in an urban area.  On the horizontal axis is income per capita.  Press the play button after linking through to the graph and watch how countries of the world gradually become more urban as per capita income increases. 

Notice, however, that many of the dark blue countries of the world, which represent sub-Saharan Africa have become more urban over time with little corresponding increase in income.  I’ve highlighted Nigeria, the country with the largest population in Africa, as an example of this trend.

Click on the image to view trends in urbanization and income from 1960 to 2006.

Nigeria defines urban areas as, “towns with at least 20,000 inhabitants, engaged mostly in non-agricultural work,” and the United Nations Population Division now estimates that approximately 50 percent of Nigeria’s population of around 150 million lives in urban areas.  Urban areas constitute both an opportunity and a challenge for meeting water and sanitation needs. Services per capita are cheaper to provide and serve a far larger population. At the same time, the failure to provide services for concentrated populations can lead to massive exposures to pollutants and diarrheal disease. 

While urban populations tend to have better access to safe water and sanitation, the provision of these basic services in the growing number of small towns and cities of developing countries is a great challenge in the context of little growth in per capita income, limited infrastructure investment, and centralized government services.  In Nigeria, for example, access to improved water services has shown no improvement over the last two decades, and remains just under 50 percent of the total population or more than 75 million people living without safe drinking water.  

Click on the image to view trends in access to improved water services in Nigeria.

Some discussions at World Water Week are focused specifically on water and sanitation service delivery in small towns and more broadly on sanitation in urban areas of developing countries, and I look forward to reading more about the case studies and innovative approaches that are discussed.  If you know about innovative projects focused on delivering water and sanitation services to urban areas of developing countries I would love to learn about them, or if you think I’m wrong to focus on the challenge of urban areas given poorer access to water and sanitation in rural areas, let me hear your thoughts.

by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment 

Andy Revkin’s post this week on The New York Times’ DotEarth blog highlights a recent paper published in Nature that indicates that countries with the highest Human Development Index are seeing rises in fertility.  Revkin asks if this is a boon or trouble, and refers specifically to what impact rising fertility among the richest countries might have on climate change.

At first glance, the article suggests a fundamental change in our understanding of the relationship between fertility and development.  However, the United Nations Population Division’s (UNPD) medium projections for world population already account for an increase in fertility among developed countries.  The medium variant projection, which would put world population at about 9 billion by 2050 assumes that fertility in more developed countries will increase from a low level of 1.56 in the 1990’s to 1.8 by 2050.  The world population projections are an aggregation of individual country level projections based on the most recent census and the best available data on fertility, mortality, and migration trends.  Even for countries that have continued to experience fertility declines, such as Japan and Canada, the UNPD medium variant projection assumes an eventual reversal of the trend and an increase in fertility. More information about these assumptions can be found on UNPD’s website.

Photo used under Creative Commons from naoyafujii

As for the second part of the question (how will this increase impact the environment and specifically climate change), there is already quite a bit of research on the link between population and climate change, and population projections are already one of the backbones of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) carbon emissions scenarios.  The IPCC actually uses the UNPD’s medium variant population projections in their emissions scenarios, which suggests that the observed fertility increase among the most developed countries of the world is already accounted for in current scenarios. 

A more important question, however, is whether the consideration of population growth alone is adequate in current IPCC scenarios.  Research summarized by Population Action International suggests that age composition, the urban and rural distribution of a population, and the number of households as well as the number of people living in each household all have an impact on emissions.  For example, estimates of carbon emissions in China are 45 percent greater if aging and urbanization trends are considered in scenarios in combination with population size, while in the United States, aging results in reduced emissions scenarios.  

Instead of asking whether rises in fertility in the most developed countries is a boon or trouble, perhaps we should examine what other types of demographic shifts are occurring and how these affect the environment. Are aging, urbanization, and household size affecting climate change more than fertility rates? If so, what should be done?

by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment

When I tell friends and colleagues that I’ve just returned from a trip to Kenya to participate in a seminar on HIV/AIDS and the environment I’m usually rewarded with a puzzled look. “HIV and the environment…” (long pause) “What’s the link?”  The regional seminar on HIV/AIDS and environment linkages organized by International Planned Parenthood Federation-Africa Regional Office (IPPFARO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) East and South Africa Regional Office brought together professionals from diverse organizations from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to share knowledge and experiences concerning these relationships.

I admit that the relationships between HIV/AIDS and the environment are not as intuitive as other population, health, and environment links, however a growing number of research studies and health and conservation programs have explored these relationships.  The simplest explanation is that HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality may affect people’s natural resource use or may affect institutions that govern resources, thus impacting natural ecosystems.  On the flip side, environmental change may have special impacts on people living with HIV/AIDS or may increase susceptibility to HIV infection among certain groups.

At the meeting in Kenya, we went into far greater detail on the nature of the linkages with the goal being the development of an HIV/AIDS-environment framework to assist organizations in determining priority actions for reducing the impacts on households, their resources, and the natural environment.  A few of the linkages discussed included:

AIDS, Food Security, and Exploitation of Natural Resources
Evidence shows that AIDS exacerbates vulnerability to food security because AIDS disproportionately affects young adults thus decreasing available labor for small-scale agriculture.  A survey in South Africa found that households affected by AIDS are significantly more concerned about food security.  The study also found that households that had experienced AIDS mortality were more likely to use natural resources as cost-saving substitutes (in particular turning to fuelwood from forests) perhaps due to their perceived need to save money for food.  

Impacts on the Conservation Workforce and Loss of Human Capacity
Conservation work tends to take adult males to remote areas and separate them from their families for long periods of time.  Unprotected sex and extramarital sex during these absences puts these workers and their partners at risk of contracting HIV.  For those conservation workers who are already living with HIV, long absences for work can complicate the care and support they need. In sub-Saharan Africa, the conservation workforce has been heavily affected by AIDS morbidity and mortality resulting in a substantial loss of human capacity among conservation institutions.  One conservation organization has reported losing 14 percent of its workforce to AIDS since 1994, and national agencies such Kenya Wildlife Service now have specific HIV/AIDS workplace policies and programs to increase awareness among staff.  

Limited Access to Land Ownership and Resources for Widowed Women and orphans
Women whose husbands have died from AIDS face challenges in maintaining livelihoods and food security in contexts where female ownership of land is prohibited.  In such contexts, widows may lose their household’s land and lose access to agricultural lands and a source of wealth.  Orphans whose parents have died from AIDS are also especially vulnerable to having their parent’s land and wealth taken from them.

Natural Resources, Migration, and HIV
Households dependent on natural resource-based livelihoods that require temporary migration to access resources, such as seasonal fisherman, are at greater risk of contracting HIV due to periodic absences from home, influxes of cash, and extramarital sex.  The increasing prominence of wage employment to supplement agricultural livelihoods may also take individuals away from the household to work in natural resource based industries such as mining, timber, and oil and gas production, and thus place people at greater risk of contracting HIV. 

Complex Emergencies, Resource Scarcity, and HIV
Natural disasters and armed conflict can make gathering food, fuelwood, and water risky endevours.  Traveling farther for food and resources during complex emergencies puts women at greater risk of sexual violence.  In addition, women may be more likely to be coerced into transactional sex to attain resources when a household’s survival depends on a woman bringing home food and resources.  Sexual violence and transactional sex both put women at risk of contracting HIV.

These were just a few of the relationships discussed, and a great deal of work on HIV and environment has been done by the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group among others.  Despite this work many participants at the seminar were new to the idea of HIV and environment relationships.  The IPPF and IUCN collaboration is promising, but much remains to be done to popularize these relationships. 

It would be great to hear your thoughts.  Have you thought about HIV and environment relationships before?  Do the linkages mentioned above make sense to you?  Are you already doing work to reduce the impacts of HIV on households, their resources, and the natural environment, or to reduce the impacts of a changing environment on people living with HIV?

by Charlie Teller, Bixby visiting scholar 

Teaching an entire semester’s graduate course in three weeks at the end of the academic year seemed a dubious task under normal conditions. But teaching it at the end of Ethiopia’s long dry season with shortages of electricity and water, not to mention scarcity of recent publications and slow internet speed in the mountainous capital city of Addis Ababa, made it even more challenging.

I had taught at the Flagship University of Addis Ababa’s Institute of Population Studies for four years in the mid-to-late 1990s, and served as external thesis examiner off and on since then, but now the government really needed more Ph.D demographers as it greatly increased its student intake in higher education, even pushing to start a Ph.D program on top of an already overstretched masters degree program.

In one of the poorest countries in the world, with 13 million food insecure, the second largest population in Africa (nearly 80 million), and an annual population growth rate around 2.6 percent, we discussed theories of population and development and debated models of the demographic transition. In a secret ballot early on in the course, I was not surprised to find out most of the 22 mature graduate students were Malthusian pessimists or even alarmists.

The job of a good professor is to challenge his students into reconsidering their cynicism and, in this constrained setting, provide rays of hope that things might get better. In the past few years, my Ethiopian colleagues and I had published evidence that the country was unexpectedly progressing better along the demographic transition than most of its neighbors, and that it was surprisingly on track to meet many of the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially in education and health.

In just a few weeks, in spite of the lack of computers, electricity, and inability to download publications from the internet, the students were able to work in  teams of two to three to read recent literature and access demographic and development data through sharing CDs, photocopies, and handouts. They closely assessed the quality of differing estimates of progress since 1990 on the MDGs: the 1993 National Population Policy and its ICPD+15 (2008) goals, and the 2005-08 Poverty Reduction Strategy.

Ethiopian population graduate students prepare outside on campus at dark when electricity went out. (Photo by Charlie Teller)

In their final exam, I asked if any had changed their minds away from pessimism, and why. To my pleasant surprise, some had after seeing progress on the some of the MDGs and social change in their own younger generation, calling themselves revisionists, neutralists,or cautious optimists.  They became convinced of the importance of using rigorous research methods and reliable indicators to closely monitor and evaluate the pace of the demographic transition and socioeconomic and gender inequities, as well as capacity building in research and training.

If these keen students in such a resource-constrained environment can learn so quickly, can’t a country under population pressure use its resilient and adaptive skills to begin to believe in their capacity to accelerate the demographic transition?    ?

by Charlie Teller, Bixby visiting scholar

“Wall-to-wall houses along the dirt road, clinging to the steep mountainsides,” is what I, a demography professor at Addis Ababa University, heard from fellow participants in the bus on a long weekend study tour of two areas with very high population densities in the Southern Region of Ethiopia.

The Ethiopian Consortium for Integration of Population, Health and Environment (CIPHE), coordinated the field trip with the Sustainable Land Use Forum, LEW Ethiopia, and other local NGOs with participation from the Wendo Genet College of Forestry and Natural Resources and film crews from Ethiopian national TV and radio. The objective was to create understanding between development actors and donors to facilitate the Gedeo indigenous afro-forestry system, a UNESCO-designated cultural heritage site, and enhance the integration of population, health, and environmental issues in highly densely populated areas of Southern Ethiopia.

As a social demographer/geographer, I thought it natural to come on this trip armed with up-to-date local area population data and agro-ecological maps: the recently released  2007 National Census results by district; the new 2008 Statistical Abstract; recent maps on rural demographic characteristics at the district level; the latest Health Information System Annual Report health indicators; food/nutrition security data on vulnerable household surveillance websites; survey data on fertility and mortality trends from the DHS and other surveys; and additional migration data from the University of Addis Ababa’s Institute for Population Studies.  In fact, my bag was completely stuffed with data and maps.

A study tour of the three-tier indigenous agro-forest system in Wenago District, Gedeo Zone, Southern Ethiopia, March 28, 2009. (Photo by Negash Teklu) 

The data indicated that two of these districts had the highest district crude densities (overall population size per area, one with over 1,000 per square km) in Ethiopia, with high fertility and declining mortality rates, and an almost 3 percent /year population growth rate, while the dryland had reached its carry capacity. But the data don’t tell the whole story. We got a more mixed picture of relationships between people and their environment in casual conversations with locals about their livelihoods.  There were interesting histories on the resilience of indigenous agro-forestry systems on the one hand, but clear indications of very high fragmentation of land holdings, invasive eucalyptus tree farming, and forest clearing for highly profitable khat cultivation on the other. Also observed was the drying up of a vast wetland near the booming Southern Regional capita city of Awassa.

Most interesting, perhaps, were my conversations with youth in the areas of indigenous agro-forestry systems.  These conversations suggested a future of changing attitudes and more interest in education, smaller families, and nonfarm employment then in the traditional agro-forestry practices of their forefathers.

While my observations (and “spontaneous focus groups”) were selective, they seem to suggest a future of:

• Much greater reliance on new cash crops (khat, eucalyptus, and commercial flowers), in addition to the traditional small coffee holdings (the famous Yerge-cheffa sweet Arabaica)
• Rapid expansion of schooling and youth interest in nonfarm employment, along with increased migration to urban areas, rising age of marriage, and greater use of contraception
• Mushrooming of small market towns (although these are still coded among the 84 percent “rural” of the 80 million Ethiopians)
• Taller and healthier children (where 50 percent of rural kids are still stunted) related to expansion of basic health services to the rural population, including maternal/reproductive health, water/sanitation, and nutrition.

Another reflection I had was that the projects and we the visitors didn’t have enough reliable population data on local trends and spatial distribution to truly understand how population issues were interacting with health and the environment. No one else on the study tour came with existing data either, nor did the local forestry college have them.

When addressing these complex dynamics, local universities/colleges, NGOs and planning departments of the local government need to take more holistic approaches to inter-related population, health, and environment issues.  It seems that social and demographic change is occurring faster than poverty and food insecurity reduction, and that the youth are going to confront rising population pressure and cultural change by “voting with their feet”. Strengthening access to and use of macro and micro demographic data, as well as developing project M&E systems and media exposure, will help shed light on these rural-urban linkages that are seemingly necessary for effective policy and programs.

by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment

(Read part 1 of this post) 

The next morning, our group rises early for a long drive to Nyungwe National Park, in the southwestern corner of Rwanda.  In Nyungwe we meet members of the Destination Nyungwe Project (DNP), another collaborative project that is integrating interventions and organizations across a wide range of disciplines to address the complexities of conservation and development in the region surrounding Nyungwe National Park.  DNP is a collaborative effort led by International Resources Group with partners the Wildlife Conservation Society and Family Health International.  This project, with USAID support, aims to bring ecotourism development, biodiversity conservation, and public health programs to Nyungwe Forest National Park and surrounding areas.  The objective is to increase tourism revenue and community support for the protection of the park by getting communities involved in enterprises that contribute to the tourist experience while providing households with direct economic benefits.  This work is complemented by Family Health International’s efforts to improve government health centers in this remote area as another example of benefits that can come from conservation of park resources. 

After a day of visiting DNP, which included hiking through the forest, watching a local dance troupe, and visiting an improved health center, we work our way back towards Kigali.  Along the way we stopped for a brief visit to the Murambi genocide memorial in Gikongoro, to pay our respects to the more than 40,000 people who lost their lives at this site during the 1994 genocide.  The visit was an emotional experience for all of us and many people reflected on how such a human tragedy could happen.  Some of the interesting discussion and reflection on this visit later was focused on the role of land scarcity in conflict.  Participants in the meeting commented on the more recent ethno-political conflict in Kenya and observed that many people are discussing the role of demographics and land availability in that conflict.  Similar questions were raised in the drafting of a policy brief on the PHE linkages in Rwanda.  In each of these cases there are many root causes for the conflict that are far more apparent than PHE linkages.  Our visit in Rwanda and our drive through the thousand hills, however, helped us see those less apparent and complex challenges that households face in maintaining their vulnerable livelihoods.  At the end of our time together, the members of the East Africa PHE Network, renewed our commitment to bring these challenges to light and to share the lessons of those projects that are looking for innovative and integrated solutions to addressing them.  �

by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment Program 

Sitting on a chartered bus in Rwanda, surrounded by members of the East Africa Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) network, I’m excited to finally put into practice our work from the last several days at the “Meeting of the East Africa PHE Network.”  With me in the bus are a collection of practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers from Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.  We’ve spent the week discussing communication strategies for raising awareness about East African issues related to population, health, and environmental change, and shared experiences of projects that are integrating different interventions to address these interlinked challenges.  We are now on our way to visit projects that are coming up with creative solutions for meeting the complex and multiple needs of rural Rwanda. 

Leaving Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, we head south winding our way through the endless hills and valleys of this land appropriately coined “the land of a thousand hills”.  These thousand hills are actually part of the population, health, environment story of Rwanda.  Rwanda, a country about the size of Massachusetts, has a population of approximately 10 million people, and is the most densely populated country in Africa.  The majority of Rwandans depend on agriculture for their livelihood, and less than a fifth of the population lives in cities.  As we look out at the hillsides we see the intense use of all types of land for agriculture.  Lowlands and river floodplains are packed with plots of rice and other crops, and steep hillsides are contoured with terraces and planted with bananas, coffee, cassava, and eucalyptus trees.  In fact, as we drive the two hours to Huye (formerly called Butare), the second largest city in Rwanda, we see little land not being used for some use or another. 

What this means for households, however, is less apparent, and cannot be summed up in a single, simple to understand indicator.  Households that depend on small plots of land for their livelihood face a whole host of risks to their health and well-being.  First, due to limited land availability, many households only produce just what they need for subsistence or even less, which means they face the risk of malnutrition if droughts, pests, or poor health of a family member reduce crop yields.  Those households with sufficient education and skills might prevent against this danger if they supplement their livelihood with work in non-farm employment, but others will simply remain vulnerable.  Second, if there is no available land for new households, families will have to either divide their already small plots among their children as they become adults, or children will have to make touch choices regarding their future.  The options for these young adults will be to stay and eke out a livelihood from a small inherited piece of land, migrate to a city and compete for a limited number of jobs, or migrate to a rural area looking for available land.  In Rwanda, available land tends to be poorly suited for agriculture or at the edges of protected areas.  Also not apparent from looking out over these hills is the fact that despite great strides in meeting people’s desire for family planning, the population in Rwanda is still growing by approximately 2.5 percent annually.

Our first stop on the trip is to the SPREAD project (Sustaining Partnerships to Enhance Rural Enterprise and Agribusiness Development), an alliance between USAID, Texas A&M University, and public and private institutions.  SPREAD targets rural Rwandan agricultural cooperatives and enterprises involved in high value commodity chains and provides them with appropriate technical assistance and access to credit and health related services to increase incomes and improve livelihoods.  What makes this project interesting to our the PHE network members is that the project focuses on improving the livelihoods of rural farmers but also recognizes the role that improved access to health services plays in these development efforts.  The project aims to complement their agricultural extension agents’ work on improving coffee production with health education related to hygiene, HIV/AIDS, and family planning.  In fact, when I listen to the extension agents talk to us about their work, I realize that they communicate about PHE relationships and the interlinked challenges that households face more easily than I often do.  We have an excellent visit that stimulates a great number of questions both for the SPREAD staff and extension agents as well as discussion among the group itself.

(Read part 2 of this post)

by Mark Mather, associate vice president, Domestic Programs 

Newspapers today reported on results of a massive, global census. But this is not a typical census of people and housing. It is the largest-ever census of marine life. The purpose? To “assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans,” according to the Census of Marine Life website

The task seems daunting. After all, oceans cover more than 70 percent of the world’s surface, and parts of the ocean are thousands of feet deep. But this initiative got me thinking: if we can conduct such a massive census of undersea life, why can’t we conduct a global census of human population?

The Demographic and Health Surveys provide something like a global census for developing countries, but there are no comparable surveys of the developed world. Yet with globalization and rising levels of international migration, national boundaries are increasingly blurred. In the United States, rapid population growth and increasing race/ethnic diversity is closely linked to trends in immigration, particularly from Latin America and Asia. Policymakers and researchers could use data from a global census to help predict future trends in population growth, diversity, and migration.

OK, this may be asking too much. Conducting a global census would cost billions of dollars, and who would foot the bill? What kinds of questions would yield comparable data across the world’s vastly different cultures?

Let’s hold off on the global census, but how about starting on a smaller scale, with a continental census of North America? Canada, Mexico, and the United States each conduct regular censuses, but population concepts and questionnaire items vary widely across the three countries. Understanding our neighbors in Canada and Mexico, through a standardized series of census questions, could go a long way toward a better understanding of how the United States fits into the global picture.