by Rachel Winnik Yavinsky, policy associate, International Programs
Bwindi district is located in the southwest corner of Uganda, about a 12-hour drive from Kampala. The district is the site of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to around 300 of the world’s estimated 740 remaining mountain gorillas. Bwindi’s other residents, the humans who surround the park, face many challenges, including lack of sustainable livelihoods, poor sanitation infrastructure, high fertility rates, and human, wildlife, and livestock conflict. Many of these difficulties are being addressed by a local PRB partner, Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH). CTPH was originally founded to monitor disease among the gorilla population, and prevent these rare and special animals from acquiring illnesses from the local humans and livestock. Today, CTPH manages a comprehensive and integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) program that seeks to improve the health of humans, livestock, and wildlife, and promotes health and conservation education and cooperation in the communities. PRB has been supporting CTPH for three years to steer the Uganda PHE working group and promote the PHE approach in the region.
Photo: Rachel Winnik Yavinksy/PRB
I recently joined staff from the Uganda Health Communications Alliance and journalists from many of Uganda’s major news outlets on a study tour of CTPH projects. These study tours aim to help journalists better understand PHE connections and thus improve reporting on population and family planning. We visited CTPH’s Gorilla Research Clinic, where they track the health of local wildlife, and met with CTPH partners, the friendly and passionate staff at the clean and well-stocked Bwindi Community Hospital. CTPH also maintains a partnership with the Uganda Wildlife Authority, which shares CTPH’s mission of protecting the health of gorillas and other wildlife.
A new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report, Women at the Frontline of Climate Change: Gender Risks and Hopes, released at COP-17, says that women, particularly those living in mountainous regions in developing countries, “face disproportionately high risks to their livelihoods and health from climate change, as well as associated risks such as human trafficking.”…
"Climate change vulnerability," courtesy of Riccardo Pravettoni, UNEP/GRID-Arendal.
It is the poorest people whose lives are most undermined by changes in the weather, said Chair of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive HealthMary Robinson at a side event on “Healthy Women, Healthy Planet” during COP-17 in Durban, South Africa. “When farmers don’t know how to predict the seasons, when there is more flooding than there was, when there are longer periods of drought and then flash flooding,” she said, people need more resilience. “They have to be even stronger in being able to cope with the drought and flooding.”…
by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment
This past week at the 2011 International Conference on Family Planning, four practitioners from the field traveled from remote parts of Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Tanzania to Dakar, Senegal to share their successes and challenges in reaching remote communities with an integrated package of health, livelihood, and environment services. Together they made up the panel, “Reaching the Hardly Reached: Delivering Family Planning Through Population, Health, and Environment Integration.”
Left to right: Didier Mazongo, WWF; Vik Mohan, Blue Ventures; Baraka Kalangahe, Tanzania Coastal Management Partnership; and Jason Bremner, PRB at the "Reaching the Hardly Reached" panel discussion.
The panelists came from four environmental organizations whose starting point for working in these remote places was the protection of the biodiversity and natural resources upon which all life depends. Dr. Vik Mohan, physician and medical director for Blue Ventures, talked about how he and his organization transitioned from focusing initially on the conservation of coastal marine reserves and coral reefs to now working to improve health care, including access to family planning. Blue Ventures, in response to community and women’s needs, opened a family planning clinic, and on the opening day 20 percent of the women of reproductive age in the community came out to request contraceptives. Today they offer a whole spectrum of short- and long-acting contraceptive methods through partnerships with Marie Stopes International, Population Services International, and various funders. Blue Ventures reported that contraceptive prevalence had risen from 8 percent when they began in 2007 to 35 percent today.
Another of our panel participants, Dr. Didier Mazongo, had traveled from the remote jungles of the Congo Basin where he’s been working with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to improve the lives of some of the most underserved people in the world. WWF-DRC has been working with communities in and around Salonga National Park in central Democratic Republic of Congo to improve community wellbeing, decrease dependency on unsustainable use of forest resources, improve reproductive health, and ensure the long-term conservation of the biodiversity of the Salonga National Park. Dr. Mazongo shared the experiences from WWF-DRC’s program and Jane Goodall Institute’s (JGI) program in the conflict-torn North Kivu Province. In both areas the projects began with women reporting absolutely no access to family planning services because they were completely beyond the reach of government and other development organizations services. Both WWF and JGI face extreme transportation challenges just to reach these communities and ensure consistent contraceptive supplies, but their dedication to the communities and their responsiveness to people’s needs has opened new opportunities for them to work more closely with communities on conservation.
With global population reaching 7 billion, alotofattention has been paid to the question of how to sustainably support so many people, much less the 9 billion expected by 2050, or the 10 billion possible by 2100. Add in the environmental variability projected from climate change and the outlook for supporting bigger and bigger populations gets even more problematic. Two new maps – one by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), the other by McGill University PhD candidate Jason Samson – show how the world might change over the next 40 years in the face of these twin challenges.
Nine Billion in 2050
PRB’s map, built using their DataFinder tool, shows the world in 2050 in terms individual country growth rates between now and then. Japan, Russia, and countries in Eastern Europe are set to grow more slowly than anywhere else, and some of that group will actually shrink by 10 to 20 percent of their current size. Western, Central, and Eastern Africa will be home to the highest increases. Niger’s 2050 population is expected to be 340 percent its 2011 size – the largest growth of any country.
The map is based on country-level data pulled from a number of sources: the UN Population Division’s latest “World Population Prospects,” the UN Statistics Division’s “Demographic Yearbook 2008,” the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Database, and PRB’s own estimates. It’s unclear what numbers come from which sources, though it is clear that PRB’s 2050 estimates span the UN’s range of medium, high, and constant-fertility variants. In spite of these variations, none of PRB’s estimates come anywhere near the UN Population Division’s low variant estimates.
PRB’s map, echoing its 2011 World Population Data Sheet, shows a world where sub-Saharan Africa will bear the brunt of population growth. The average country in Africa in 2050 is projected to be slightly more than twice its 2011 size; the average European country is expected to barely break even. Africa is home to more countries whose populations are estimated to least double (34) or triple (4) than any other continent. Europe, meanwhile, is home to more countries whose populations will stagnate (8), or even shrink (19), than anywhere else. Interestingly, the Caribbean is a close second in terms of countries whose populations are projected to stay the same (seven to Europe’s eight), and Asia is second to Europe in terms of countries whose populations are projected to shrink (Georgia, Japan, Armenia, South Korea, and Taiwan).
More People, More Climate Change, More Vulnerability
Samson’s map takes on the same time period but projects where people will be most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
“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.
Climate-related disasters could significantly impact military and civilian humanitarian response systems, so “an ounce of prevention now is worth a pound of cure in the future,” said CNA analyst E.D. McGrady at the Wilson Center launch of An Ounce of Preparation: Preparing for the Impact of a Changing Climate on U.S. Humanitarian and Disaster Response. The report, jointly published by CNA and Oxfam America, examines how climate change could affect the risk of natural disasters and U.S. government’s response to humanitarian emergencies.
The frequency of – and costs associated with – natural disasters are rising in part due to climate change, said McGrady, particularly for complex emergencies with underlying social, economic, or political problems, an overwhelming percentage of which occur in the developing world. In addition to the prospect of more intense storms and changing weather patterns, “economic and social stresses from agricultural disruption and [human] migration” will place an additional burden on already marginalized communities, he said.
Paul O’Brien, vice president for policy and campaigns at Oxfam America said the humanitarian assistance community needs to galvanize the American public and help them “connect the dots” between climate change, disaster relief, and security.
When discussing long-term population trends on this blog, we’ve mainly focused on demography’s interaction with social and economic development, the environment, conflict, and general state stability. In the context of climate change, population also plays a major role, but as Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research put it at last year’s Society of Environmental Journalists conference, population is neither a silver bullet nor a red herring in the climate problem. Though it plays a major role, population is not the largest driver of global greenhouse gases emissions – consumption is.
by Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam, PRB Women’s Edition Journalist
My name is Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam, and I’m a freelance journalist, writer, and editor from Pakistan. My passion is writing about human rights with a special focus on gender issues and reproductive health. Blogging is a personal joy to me, as I put my heart into my writing and blogging allows for a more personalized style. Digital journalism is a sign of evolution – one I happily accept. My pet peeve is marginalization on any grounds. I am a mother of a teenage daughter and live in Karachi.
As part of PRB’s group of journalists in Women’s Edition 2010-2012, I recently had the chance to travel to Ethiopia on a visit that was unforgettable. The visit inspired a series of seven brief travel-blogs, based on my seven days there. Women’s Edition is a wonderful opportunity to connect with other like-minded female journalists from developing countries around the world, and learn solutions to the problems from this interaction. The program has reaffirmed my belief that our commonalities are more than the differences.
Read Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam’s posts from her trip to Ethiopia on her blog,Impassioned Ramblings.
On May 25th-26th, Population Footprints, the 2011 UCL-Leverhulme Trust Symposium on Human Population Growth and Global Carrying Capacity, convened in London, with participants from 31 countries. The opening sessions were linked to a satellite meeting in Nairobi, Kenya hosted by the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP). The symposium was webcast and available at http://www.populationfootprints.org. Leverhulme Trust and UCL should be congratulated for tackling a subject that is left unspoken in global discussions about challenges facing the world.
Haniia Zlotnik, head of the UN Population Division, and other panelists described the demographic realty of the 21st century. Forty-two percent of the world’s population live in countries with low fertility of less than one daughter per woman, 40 percent live in countries with intermediate fertility, and 18 percent live in countries with high fertility of more than 1.5 daughters per woman. Most of that 18 percent live in Africa, with very youthful populations. The world is half urban and continued growth will be in urban areas, with implications for consumption and energy use patterns. Low fertility countries face aging populations, and longevity is increasing. Migration patterns are adjusting to demographic and environmental change with women moving internationally as carers and people moving from environmentally fragile areas.
The first months of this year brought the second global food price crisis in just three years, with soaring food prices against a backdrop of bad weather, poor harvests, and political turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East. This year will see another milestone: the planet’s population is set to surpass seven billion, with most of the population growth occurring in countries least equipped to meet rising demands on agriculture and the environment. As part of its 7 Billion: Conversations that Matter roundtable series, the Aspen Institute’s Global Health and Development program brought together three experts to discuss “The Revolution We Need in Food Security and Population.”
Photo credit: Flickr user Oxfam International.
