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The trend is to reduce personal resource consumption. But it's only half the solution and the other half has faded from prominence - that is the need to end population growth. This received a good deal of press in the 1970s, but since then, it's become a taboo subject. Pressure from groups who saw the population issue as a distraction from their preferred causes saw to that. Over a decade ago an article by John Holdren shows us precisely what determines our total energy consumption. It says total energy consumption, equals population size times the average per capita energy use. So if E * total energy use, P * population size, and e * energy use per capita, we can say E * P x e. It means we have little chance of tackling our energy and environmental challenges if we ignore both per capita consumption and population. Today's "ecological footprint" measure is an elaboration of Holdren's equation. The equation above shows comparing population growth to the growth in total energy or resource use is to compare one factor in the equation to the product. In the US, per capita consumption is higher than in developing countries. Holdren's equation tells us it's never wise to ignore either population or per person consumption. With regard to oil use, for example, adding one person to the US population is like adding about 15 in China. Ignoring population growth in the US is perilous. Solutions include programs to reduce unplanned pregnancies, lowering fertility rates to the sub-replacement levels and assistance to Mexico to improve economic opportunities so they're not forced to come to the U.S. to earn a subsistence wage. Consumption levels in the developing world are growing fast, in line with economic growth. Without attention to population, rising per capita consumption multiplied by large and growing populations puts the Third World on a course toward disaster. We can assist with humane programs to hasten lowering fertility rates. Developing countries need to increase girls' educational opportunities and women's economic and health care options. They must increase family planning services and improve child survival rates. Having overshot the earth's capacity to sustain our current numbers, we must act now to avert catastrophe. If we fail to reduce both per capita consumption and to halt the growth of our population no new technology will prevent an unimaginable loss of life.

Our civilization is being squeezed between advancing deserts and rising seas. Mounting population densities, once generated by the addition of over 70 million people per year, are now also fueled by the advance of deserts and the rise in sea level. Expanding deserts are primarily the result of overstocking grasslands and overplowing land. Rising seas result from temperature increases from the burning of fossil fuels. China is losing productive land at an accelerating rate. From 1950 to 1975 China lost an average of 600 square miles to desert each year. By 2000, 1,400 square miles were going to desert annually. Satellite images show two deserts in north-central China expanding and merging to form a single, larger desert overlapping Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces. To the west in Xinjiang Province, two even larger deserts--the Taklimakan and Kumtag--are also heading for a merger. Further east, the Gobi Desert is within 150 miles of Beijing. Chinese scientists report that over the last half-century, 24,000 villages in northern and western China were abandoned as they were overrun by drifting sand. Kazakhstan, site of the vast Soviet Virgin Lands Project, has abandoned nearly half of its cropland since 1980. In Afghanistan, with a population of 31 million, the Registan Desert is encroaching on agricultural areas. A UNEP team reports that up to 100 villages have been submerged by windblown dust and sand. In the northwest, sand dunes are moving onto agricultural land, from the loss of stabilizing vegetation due to firewood gathering and overgrazing. Iran, which has 70 million people and 80 million goats and sheep, is losing its battle with the desert. In 2002 sand storms buried 124 villages in the southeastern province forcing their abandonment. Drifting sands had covered grazing areas, starving livestock and depriving villagers of their livelihood. The Sahara Desert is pushing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria northward toward the Mediterranean. In countries from Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia in the east, the demands of growing human and livestock numbers are converting land into desert. Nigeria is losing 1,355 square miles to desertification each year. While Nigeria's human population grew from 33 million in 1950 to 134 million in 2006, its livestock population grew from 6 million to 66 million. The food needs forced the plowing of marginal land and the forage needs of livestock exceeded the carrying capacity of its grasslands. Nigeria's population is being squeezed into an ever-smaller area. In Mexico, the degradation of cropland forces some 700,000 Mexicans off the land each year in search of jobs in nearby cities or in the United States. Rising seas promise to displace greater numbers in the future. During the twentieth century, sea level rose by 6 inches. During this century seas may rise by 4 to 35 inches. Since 2001, record-high temperatures have accelerated ice melting making it likely that the future rise in sea level will be even greater. If the Greenland ice sheet, a mile thick in some places, were to melt entirely it would raise sea level by 23 feet, or 7 meters. A one-meter rise would inundate many of the rice-growing river deltas and floodplains of India, Thailand, Viet Nam, Indonesia, and China. A one-meter rise in sea level would cause some 30 million Bangladeshis to migrate, internally or to other countries. Hundreds of cities would be at least partly inundated, including London, Alexandria, and Bangkok. More than a third of Shanghai, would be under water. A one-meter rise combined with a 50-year storm surge would leave large portions of Lower Manhattan and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., flooded. If the Greenland ice sheet should melt, it would force the abandonment of thousands of coastal cities and communities. Rising seas and desertification will present the world with an unprecedented flow of environmental refugees and the potential for civil strife. We must deal with rapid population growth, advancing deserts, and rising seas. Growth in the human population is accompanied by a growth of livestock populations of more than 35 million per year. The rising concentrations of carbon dioxide that are destabilizing the earth's climate are driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Reverse these trends or risk being overwhelmed by them.

The Population Reference Bureau's latest projections show that by 2025, Uganda's population will almost double to 56 million, and in 44 years its numbers will grow by nearly as many as China's. In Uganda more than a third of all women say they would like to stop or delay having children, but reproductive health experts say a lack of information and female contraceptives plays a major role. Donors must share in the blame, said the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Donors have shifted their focus to HIV and nobody is talking about it any more. Population is off the development agenda and that's a tragedy for Africa.

The population of the US is projected to reach 300 million by October - a population growth rate comparable to that of China. Because of immigration, the number of people in the US could reach 400 million by 2050. About 76 million people are being added annually. This year's world grain harvest will fall short of consumption by 61 million tons. That's the sixth time in the past seven years that production has failed to satisfy demand. The world carry-over stocks of grain will fall to 57 days of consumption by the end of this year, the shortest buffer since a 56-day-low in 1956 doubled grain prices. Despite continued growth in world food output, the developing world had 815 million hungry people in 2002, 9 million less than in 1990. Population pressure in Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere has encouraged the flood of illegal immigrants in the US. Warren Buffett recognized population-related problems in announcing last week plans to donate $37.4 billion of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. stock to several foundations including some he's created that emphasize family planning, abortion rights, environmental and conservation issues, and education for low-income children. Human beings are similar to other animals. As food availability increases, the population will grow. And some animals regulate their fertility if food gets scarce. In the case of humans, there must be recognition that population growth is a function of increases in food availability. Otherwise, increased disease and death rates may ultimately control population growth. Other factors will brake population growth, including environmental changes, resource restraints, and a decline in the quality of life. World oil output is predicted to peak within 15 years. Fresh water in some areas is in short supply. Farmland is being chewed up by suburbia. Global warming will force hundreds of millions of people out of coastal regions in the next century or so. One way to boost the world's food supply would be if people ate more grains and vegetables and less meat, the world could then feed another billion people. The average American consumes 20 times as much in natural resources as the average African and if all the people consumed at the level of high-income countries, the planet could support only 1.8 billion people, not the actual 6.5 billion. It is doubtful if measures to encourage family planning will restrain the world's population. Leaders must come up with intelligent, creative, inventive measures to discourage births. Every 11 seconds another person is added to the US population.

As many as 400 million people are at risk of starvation because of drought and crop failure. Britain will face flooding through increased rainfall and parts of the coastline could be washed away by rising seas. Saving the environment is a top priority. The US has 5% of the world's population but accounts for nearly a quarter of global emissions. Blair and Bush must act now to save the planet for future generations.

Why Population Matters News Y6B: 6 Billion Reasons Sustainability Carrying Capacity Overconsumption Environmental Impacts Facts Impacts in the News

Though more than two-thirds of the planet is covered with water, only a small fraction'"around 0.3 percent'"is available for human use and reuse. And no more of this renewable fresh water is available today than existed at the dawn of human civilization.  

World population, currently 6.5 billion, is growing by another 76 million people per year. According to the UN the world will add another 2.6 billion people by 2050. Rapid population growth has placed incredible stress on Earth's resources. Global demand for water has tripled since the 1950s, but the supply of fresh drinking water has been declining because of over-pumping and contamination. Half a billion people live in water-stressed or water-scarce countries, and by 2025 that number will grow to three billion. In the last 50 years, cropland has been reduced by 13% and pasture by 4%.   June 2005   U.N.

Environmentalists Are Failing Sustainability 101.   The fact that China and the USA together are responsible for half of the increasing atmospheric carbon is partially a result of the large population increases engendered by these high fertilities. Unfortunately, fertility is a forgotten player in today's agenda being advocated in so many countries, including our own. If your environmental guru is a global warming guide from Al Gore, Sierra Club, NRDC, Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Defense, Outside Magazine's Green Issue, Time Magazine's Global Warming Survival Guide, or indeed the entire mainstream U.S. environmental movement, then you will find that the number of children a couple has is not a component of anybody's sustainability equations. This omission introduces dramatic errors into a major new international poll. A total of 14,000 people in 14 countries were queried to determine their environmental footprint and "to promote environmentally sustainable consumption". The survey was constructed with the help of 27 experts. National Geographic intends to repeat it year after year to determine how the world and how each country are faring. It is important that the survey be error-free. After I answered the questions, the website calculated my "Greendex" score. The higher the score, the smaller is one's environmental impact. The last of the 12 questions asked about the number of adults (18 and older) and children (younger than 18,in my household. My wife and I have no children, so I put "two" for the number of adults and "zero" for the number of children. Out of curiosity, I increased the number of children first to "one", then to "two" up to "six", but leaving other answers exactly the same. Surely a couple who has, say, 4 non-adopted children, has a much larger environmental impact than a couple who has none. Imagine my surprise, when my Greendex score went up substantially as the number of children living with my wife and me increased. When applied to the 14 countries surveyed, a country like India is rewarded for its high fertility of about 2.8 children per woman, while a country like Japan is penalized for its low fertility of about 1.2 children per woman. Taking this formula to its logical and absurd conclusion, the best environmentalist would be one who produced dozens of children over his/her lifetime. Ultimately, the fault must be attributed to the U.S. environmental movement that, for decades, has abrogated its responsibility to address in a politically meaningful way the environmental harm caused by population growth. As mentioned above, one could never tell from anyone's list of "50 simple things you can do to save the Earth", that arguably the environmentally most important life decision a couple can make is to limit their number of non-adopted children to two, at most.
Karen Gaia says: while this article is accurate in most points, it is not true that the Sierra Club does nothing about U.S. population growth. It is sad that this former member of the Sierra Club Board of Directors should make this claim.   2007   ElyNews

Africa: The Population Emergency.   The report of a demographic study was published recently, the work performed by a joint team from the IRD and academics from Belgium, Cameroon, France and the Ivory Coast. They examined the population trends in Sub-Saharan Africa and the relationships between these and the development of the region. This review demolished some accepted ideas, in particular that Sub-Saharan Africa is underpopulated. Today, 2 of 3 inhabitants are under 25 and, with 32 inhabitants per km2, Sub-Saharan Africa is more densely populated than Latin America (28 inhabitants/km2). Two-thirds still live in rural areas, but migration to the towns and cities is under way. In 1960, only Johannesburg had a population of over one million; Africa now has 40 of them. At the present rate of rural exodus, half of Sub-Saharan Africa's population would be urban dwellers by 2030. This should be met by investments in wastewater drainage and treatment and refuse reprocessing, whose management threatens to become more and more problematic. Intra-regional migration is disrupted by the conflicts and crises affecting several host countries. The possibilities for emigration to industrialized countries are increasingly subject to control. The risks of population decrease linked to AIDS appear to be receding, due to more effective prevention campaigns and improved access to health care. The latest assessments brought the proportion of the African population infected by HIV to about 5%. No country will see its population decrease owing to the AIDS epidemic. Fecundity is two to three times higher than the rest of the world, as four out of five African women live in countries where there is little access to contraception. Less than 20% of women use contraception, as against 60% or more in Latin America and Asia. The use of contraception is progressing very slowly, yet the control by women over their fecundity remains the essential lever by which Sub-Saharan Africa might achieve its demographic transition. The overall trend points towards a stabilization of world population, with Africa continuing on a substantial rise. The area is behind in the development process. In 2004 only six countries out of 48 obtained a growth rate equal to or greater than 7%, the threshold essential for halving of poverty between now and 2015. This population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is a major handicap to economic and social development. If the African nations want to take up the challenge of demographic transition and reduction of poverty, development policies must be completely rethought. It is by the implementation of policies education, prevention of mortality, equitable access to health care and to family planning that bring advances and improved living standards. This makes it imperative to place the population question at the core of their development policies.   January 19, 2008   Centre Population et Developpement (CEPED)

Australia: What Kind of Future Will Our Kids Inherit?.   Respondents to the Sunshine Coast Daily's recent survey expressed concern about the rate of growth and the impact on their quality of life. A study pointing out the appropriate population distribution for Australia, including impacts of climate change and peak oil, must now become a priority. There is no escaping the limits of the world's resources. The laws of physics trump the laws of economics every time. Global demands on natural systems exceeded their sustainable yield by an estimated 25%. With some exceptions, policy makers have allowed sustainability to be an environmental issue away economic development. Yet we have drawn upon the Earth's non-renewable resources as if they were limitless, and create an economy that demands cheap energy to sustain the movement of food and goods and water and people in ever greater numbers. Queensland government Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation Andrew McNamara called for the building of a new economy powered by renewable energy, backed by a transport system, and that uses and re-uses everything. And he warned of the dangers of exponential population growth. "The rampaging monster loose upon the land is over-population. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct." Let's throw away the notion that Australia is an empty space waiting to be filled up. Our rivers, our soils, our vegetation won't allow that to happen without an enormous cost to those who come after us. The conservation of soil, forests, stream flows and natural biological is one of the most important and urgent tasks which faces us today.   March 11, 2008   Sunshine Coast Daily

US Oregon: Treading on a Taboo.   The greenest of the green, my city styles itself. The sad fact is that unless we do something drastic, out-of-control population growth will wipe out the gains made by the most ambitious recycling and conservation programs, across the planet. Portland's efforts to stave off global warming by reducing carbon dioxide began more than two decades ago. And how much progress have we made? None. Why? Because at the same time Portland's population has grown by 42%. Projections say the metro population will grow by another million by 2030, even double to 3.85 million by 2060. A strange taboo keeps us from talking about the actual cause of global warming and a deadly smorgasbord of other environmental problems. In this supposedly plain-talking era, a former presidential candidate will tell us how Viagra cured his ED, but hardly anybody will talk about what's trashing the Earth. The taboo afflicts most media, including this newspaper. The Oregonian's Earth Day editorial urged support for politicians who back energy -efficient buildings, wind power, public transportation and so on. Everything but population control. Portlanders may have reduced their per-capita driving by 5% over five years, but the metro area's population grew by 8% over the same period. When it comes to global warming, we're ignoring one simple truth: The Earth doesn't care about per-capita greenhouse-gas production. It's the total amount of CO2 in the air that matters. When my grade-school teacher quizzed me about the world population total, the correct answer was 2 billion. Now the world's cities are growing by 1 million people a week. A century from now we'll clog the planet's pores with something between 9 and 14 billion human beings. 1 billion bodies and increased the average amount each one pollutes. China's now pouring out more than 2 tons of CO2 per person annually, and the United States cooks along at nearly 20. Experts predict that by 2050 global energy use could increase fourfold. We fixate on global warming, while our rampaging population mows down the rest of the planet's inhabitants behind our backs. The World Wildlife Fund just issued a report announcing that "human activities are causing the most rapid decline in species since the extinction of the dinosaurs." The impact of population growth reaches way beyond obvious environmental problems. Half the items in today's newspaper are population related. The paper that arrived the morning led with a battle over Willamette Valley development but neglected to mention that population growth fuels 94% of Portland's suburban sprawl. The front-page story on soaring gas prices overlooked the soaring population that drives up demand. A political story focused on health care, which has become a problem in part because population growth is overwhelming the existing system. Nearly 40 years ago, Richard Nixon asked, "How will we house the next hundred million Americans? Will we educate and employ such a large number of people? Will our transportation systems move them about as quickly and economically as necessary? How will we provide adequate health care when our population reaches 300 million?" Population threatens political stability, too. Countries that grow too fast just can't get ahead of their problems, and eventually everything comes crashing down. Mexico, quadrupled in population between 1933 and 1980. The only way it could avoid collapse was by flooding the United States with the excess. Projections call for countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to double their populations every 20 years, and many of those people will inevitably find their way to the United States. Ninety -one percent of our population growth over the next 40 years will come from post-2000 immigrants and their descendants. The quality of American life will be forever damaged by the arrival of 100 million immigrants, whether they're Mexican or English. Let's quit deluding ourselves by thinking that technology alone can save the world. Five ways to help the planet: Eliminate the taboo that keeps us from talking about the overpopulation that is not racist, communist, sexist or biased against the Third World. We all have a stake in this. Quit mistaking per-capita pollution numbers as a sign of progress. Reward politicians who support population control with your votes. Keep your own family small. Stop treating growth as not only inevitable, but also positive.
Karen Gaia says: We can take 'control' out of the phrase 'population control' and accomplish more. Freedom to choose one's family size results in a lower fertility rate.   June 15, 2008   Oregon Live

Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy.   An ad from 1975 asks "Could America run out of electricity?" Our need for electricity doubles every 10 or 12 years. That's an accurate reflection of a long history of steady growth of the electric industry in this country, growth at a rate of around 7% per year, which gives you doubling every 10 years. Did you realise that 7% growth per year could give an incredible consequence? That in ten years you'd use more than the total of all that had been used in all the proceeding growth? In the summer of 1986, the world population had reached five billion growing at the rate of 1.7% per year. More recently in 1999, we read that the world population had grown from five billion to six billion The world population today is increasing by about 75 million additional people every year. If this current modest 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would grow to one person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in just 780 years, and the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just 2400 years. Well, we know this couldn't happen. Zero population growth is going to happen. Today's high birth rates will drop; today's low death rates will rise till they have exactly the same numerical value. So maybe you're wondering then, what options are available. Some of those things that we should encourage if we want to raise the rate of growth of population and in so doing, make the problem worse. Everything in the list is as sacred as motherhood. There's immigration, medicine, public health, sanitation. These are all devoted to the humane goals of lowering the death rate and that's very important to me, if it's my death they're lowering. But then I've got to realise that anything that just lowers the death rate makes the population problem worse. Then there are some of the things we should encourage if we want to help solve the population problem. Abstention, contraception, abortion, small families, stop immigration, disease, war, murder, famine, accidents. It's obvious nature is going to choose and we don't have to do anything—except be prepared to live with whatever nature chooses. Or we can exercise the one option that's open to us, and that is to choose first from the last list. How long can growth continue? You don't need arithmetic to evaluate the contradictory statements that we've all heard and read from experts who tell us in one breath we can go on increasing our rates of consumption of fossil fuels, in the next breath they say "Don't worry, we will always be able to make the discoveries of new resources that we need to meet the requirements of that growth." Bill Moyers asked Isaac Asimov, "What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues?" and Asimov says, "It'll be completely destroyed. In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one individual matters." We must recognise that population growth is the immediate cause of all our resource and environmental crises. Can you think of anything that can get better if we crowd more people into our cities, our towns, into our state, our nation, or on this earth? The late Reverend Martin Luther King Jr said, "Unlike the plagues of the dark ages, or contemporary diseases which we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is solvable with means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution, but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the education of the billions who are its victims."   April 27, 2008   Global Public Media

UK Unable to Sustain Population, Says Study.   If global population growth continues the world could be at war over resources in less than 50 years and calls on governments to advocate increased use of contraception. UK government targets to cut carbon emissions by 60% by 2050 will have little impact on the UK's sustainability. The number of people living in the UK is expected to hit 65 million within 10 years, and top 70 million by 2031. Britain could only sustainably support 40 million people with the same standard of living. If the world consumed as much and generated the same waste as the UK, it would need three and a half planets to sustain the human race. The world was living within its ecological means until the 1980s when populations began to grow rapidly. By 2050, when the global population is expected to hit 9.2 billion, it will be using up the equivalent of nearly two Earths each year, according to the study. This shows how desperately we need a national population policy. Even if the made a 60% cut in carbon emissions by 2050 UK "overpopulation" would grow from 43 to 50 million. How many people can live on Earth? Evidence suggests that, in 2003, total world population was 6.3 billion but the sustainable figure was 5.1 billion. Global overpopulation was 1.2 billion. As standards of living rise the number of people the planet can support will diminish. Although the UN forecasts a world population rising to 9.2 billion by 2050, the Earth's long-term sustainable population is in the 2-3 billion range. For the UK, a sustainable population is between 17 and 27 million, less than half the current total and between a third and a fifth of the 85 million who will be in the country in the last quarter of this century The size is a result of its affluence combined with a high population density. The ecological footprint is 3.5 times greater than its capacity. To live sustainably, the current UK population of 60 million would have to live similar to citizens of countries such as China, and the Dominican Republic. A zero-carbon Britain would have a maximum sustainable population of 40 million if it refused to change its lifestyle. In reality, a ‘zero-carbon' UK could never reach sustainability without population reduction. Resource wars and starvation "threaten the worst population crash in the history of humankind." There is an urgent need for national strategies on sustainable population in all countries. Politicians must persuade their nations to accept the necessity of smaller families and provide the means for people to reduce their family size. This study shows how far the UK is from sustainability and what a fundamental role human numbers play. This also shows how desperately we need a national population policy.   February 18, 2008   Telegraph

New Population Explosion.   About 100 years ago Thomas Robert Malthus predicted that world population growth would soon outstrip the ability of the planet to produce food to feed everyone. He did not foresee the rise in agricultural productivity and his theories are still debated among academics some of whom believe that his prediction was correct but his timing wrong. It is a fact that over the last 200 years food production technology has outpaced population growth. We are now at the biggest global baby boom in history and most of that growth is in the world's poorest countries. The London's Financial Times noted that, "There are 1.5 billion people between the ages of 12 and 24 in the world, and 87% are in developing countries." The growth rates in Uganda and Kenya alone are almost 4% per year. Most women of childbearing age in those two countries have an average of seven children. Most of the economically advanced countries have the lowest birthrates. It would appear that the more prosperous a country becomes, the fewer babies there are but the poorer a country is, the higher the birthrate. The median age for males in Uganda is 14 years 9 months, and over half the population is under 18. Most of these young people will soon begin having a lot of babies. It is happening over much of the globe and especially in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. We would do well to focus on these statistics. One might become educated over whether the US should or should not make foreign aid dependent on whether that country does or does not have family planning services. There are countries which deliberately try to export labor - partly because most then send money home and that props up many a sagging economy. There are going to be millions of unemployed young people. Who is going to take on that problem? These are issues that are not going to go away no matter who wins the White House.   March 10, 2008   Vermont Public Radio

The Folly of Shortchanging Family Planning.   Is the world heading toward the moment when people will outstrip the resources needed to sustain life. The optimists look at declining fertility and foresee population growth coming naturally in poor countries and industrial societies. Others struggling to raise awareness of the need for a new family planning push, say that population growth, mostly in the poorest countries, will continue for generations before there can be hope of a global decline. At the end of last year, the UN estimated that the world's population stood at about 6.7 billion, including about 136 million new babies. How could that be if fertility is declining? The Worldwatch Institute explains cautions against too-positive predictions of global population growth. The number of women of childbearing age keeps growing and global life expectancy continues to rise. At the end of 2007 there were 1.7 billion women in the childbearing ages. In 1970 there were 856 million. The UN Population Fund has watched money for family planning decline, yet women around the world ask for more help in limiting births. They know it is key to improving a family's living standards and raising healthier, better-educated children. UNFPA estimates that at least 200 million women do not have access to family planning. Of the 190 million women who become pregnant annually, 50 million have abortions. What UNFPA calls the unmet need for contraception is expected to grow at about 40% for the next 15 years. In Africa, some countries average six or seven or more children for each woman. And in Asia, in a country such as India, even with fertility levels falling below three children per woman, the huge population base of at least 1.2 billion people means a significant annual increase. The US, which pioneered global family planning in the 1960s continues to deprive UNFPA of tens of millions of dollars annually, largely on the spurious claim that the agency aids or abets abortion in China. If a new administration hopes to make a contribution to the development of the poorest countries, family planning will have to be back on the agenda, and the boycott of UNFPA will have to end.   Wordwatch

U.S.: The Human Population Explosion and the Future of Life.   After the end of WW2, scientists began to warn that human population growth would cause all kinds of problems. In the late 1960s, population growth moved to the front burner with the Sierra Club's publication of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich. During the next decade those who were worried studied, wrote, and warned about human population growth and its consequences. Human impact is a production of population, consumption and technology. At the time, P (population size) was seen as the underlying and key factor. During the last two decades, it has become fashionable to discount P and stress A (affluence or consumption). Some social engineers now argue that population size or continued growth is relatively unimportant; they say it is the level of consumption that is key for calculating how much damage an individual or population causes. Such activists argue that reducing consumption is more important than stabilizing population. Consumption vs. population may be an intractable debate since it is grounded in worldview as much as in evidence. I would argue that biologists deal with a more fundamental world than do culturalists. Let me offer two examples to show how population is the key. China's economic explosion has thrust it into the lead of nations cranking out greenhouse gases. However, were it not for the population policies of China, their population would be closer to two billion instead of a billion and a half. How much more greenhouse pollution would China be pumping out? Had the US instituted reasonable immigration policies in the 1960s our population would have stabilized around 250 million. Because we didn't deal with immigration, our population is over 300 million headed toward 400 million. How much less sprawl, greenhouse gas production, resource consumption, etc. would the U.S. boast today, had we stabilized our population then? As a conservationist and nature lover, I believe the impact of the population explosion on the rest of Nature is paramount. We can show how the spread and population growth of humans is harming Nature. To more accurately understand ecological wounds, we need to shake out how global and local populations have differing effects. An average American is responsible for more greenhouse gas production, but a poor Bangladeshi farmer may be more dangerous to the survival of tigers. Someone with a million dollar castle certainly consumes more than someone living in an old shack. But the rural dweller might contribute more to the extinction of the Mexican wolf in the wild. Collapsing fisheries around the world, die-off of coral reefs, and the functional extinction of once abundant species --- as hungry rural populations swell and spread, they vacuum the rainforest and other semiwild ecosystems of larger animals for food. The growth of numbers of Americans contributes to the destruction of wildlife habitat by new home developments. In the US, immigration plays the big role in increasing our population. Even if people come here poor, their goal is to increase their standard of living—which they do. If the U.S. had fifty or sixty million fewer residents, there would be fewer home developments in the California coastal chaparral, the Sonoran Desert around Phoenix, woods and forests surrounding Atlanta, and so on. In India, rapid growth of very poor peasants and tribal peoples is putting irresistible pressure on tiger reserves. Humans create barriers and fracture zones in wildlife habitats that isolate animal and plant populations into smaller and smaller areas and that will prevent migration. Increased numbers of people are a key cause of our spread into once unpopulated regions where wild critters could range as they needed before the human invasion. High population densities and the spread of humans lead to disruption of vital ecological and evolutionary processes, such as wildfire, river flooding and drying, predation, and pollination. Humans, whether Denver suburbanites or Indian peasants are intolerant of big cats, wolves, and other carnivores, leading to their extermination. For the global community, the resource in most short supply has turned out to be the ability of the atmosphere and the seas to handle industrial carbon dioxide and methane, among other gases. Also a speedy increase in Brazil's greenhouse gas production and loss of forests that could continue to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and sea. China passed the US as the number one greenhouse gas emitting country in the world because of its massive population charging after greater affluence and technology. The one-child policy in China may be giving us a few more years to deal with the staggering greenhouse problem. We cannot allow that obvious reality to overshadow the even-greater role of high population numbers and population growth rates in driving ecological wounds, from direct killing of threatened species to production of carbon dioxide. Should conservationists find the wisdom and courage to come back to calling for population stabilization, we must stress how the population explosion causes the ecological wounds that result in mass extinction and destruction of the biosphere.
Karen Gaia says: the author mentions little about sustainability and resource depletion.   March 11, 2008   Uncle Dave Foreman's Around the Campfire

Kenya: Exploding Population.   Corruption, ethnic rivalry and voting irregularities, are as old as Kenyan independence in 1963. One reason Kenyans have been able to cope with these troubles is because they've been enjoying greater political freedom and prosperity. Between 1975 and 2006, per capita income grew at least threefold. And since 1997, the number of political parties competing in national elections has grown from 11 to 26. The recent massacres took Kenyans by surprise. Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, told an interviewer she was stunned "that it could happen in Kenya", as if this pearl of East Africa was not to be compared with other African countries afflicted by bloodshed and chaos. As in so many other African countries, Kenya's violence can be traced to an exploding population that often goes unnoted. In only 80 years, Kenya's population has jumped from 2.9 million to 37 million. Had America grown at the same rate it would now have 1.56 billion citizens. Kenya belongs to a group of some 40 countries that have extremely high population growth rates. Between 1950 and 1985, Kenya's total fertility rate, children per woman's lifetime, hovered around eight. In 2007, each Kenyan woman still gave birth to an average of 5 children, compared to 2 in the US and 1.6 in Britain, and there were 40 newborn babies for every 10 deaths. The corresponding figures for the US is 14 births for every 8 deaths; for Britain, it's 10 for 10. As a result, Kenyan men have a median age of 18 years, compared to 35 in the US, 39 in Britain. Because of higher living standards, these younger Kenyans are much more vital and ambitious than their predecessors. Thus Kenya provides a textbook example of domestic violence that is driven by what I call a "youth bulge". With so many superfluous, frustrated young men, who are better fed and educated than ever before but have few prospects of finding a good job, nations with a youth bulge are likely to experience social upheaval. In countries where large birth rates are combined with abject poverty and hunger, young men are much more likely to sink into lethargy. What may be more surprising in Kenya is not the violence, but the long periods of relative calm partly due to the availability of uncultivated land for young men coming of age. Over the next 15 years, some 8.1 million young Kenyan males will reach "fighting age" (15 to 29 years), compared to the 5.7 million in that bracket today. With its unused land running out, Kenya may be overwhelmed by a wave of violence that matches those of its neighbors.   January 17, 2008   International Herald Tribune

Did You Know?.   *The 8 warmest years have occurred in the last decade. *For seven of the last eight years, the world has consumed more grain than it produced. One fifth of the U.S. grain is being turned into fuel ethanol. *One third of reptile, amphibian, and fish species are threatened with extinction. *Grain yields increased half as fast in the 1990s as in the 1960s. *Life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa today is lower than in the late 1980s. *Today's reserves of lead, tin, and copper could be depleted within the next 25 years if their extraction expands at current rates. *Nearly half of the global military budget of $1.2 trillion is spent by the US. *South Korea recycles 77% of its paper products. *Conservation agriculture is practiced on more than 100 million hectares around the world *Four years after London introduced a fee on motor vehicles entering the city center, car traffic had fallen by 36% while bicycle trips increased by 49%. *The world produces 110 million bicycles a year, but an annual production of 49 million cars. *Fish farming is the fastest growing source of animal protein worldwide, increasing 7% each year since 1995. *World soybean production has quadrupled since 1977. *Coal use in Germany has dropped 37% since 1990; in the UK it has fallen by 43%. *Solar cell production is doubling every two years. *Electricity used for lighting can be cut by 65% through switching to compact fluorescents. Follow the link to more fascinating data and charts on global trends.   June 14, 2008   Earth Policy Institute, Plan B 3.0

Population, Overshoot, Crash, Grandchildren.   The root cause of global warming, deforestation, starvation, pollution, and related issues, is human overpopulation. At the first Earth Day, 1970, the population was not yet 4 billion. It hit 5 billion in 1988 with barely a mention. There's a biological "overshoot" indicating that populations, if unchecked, grow beyond the carrying capacities of their environments. A ravaged environment then causes a population to crash. Governments have generally been failures at dealing with problems even when those problems have been carefully explained to governmental leaders. A good example is global warming. Ours is a system in which political success is measured by benefits from the standpoint of the earth's life support systems of relatively short term. It would be a kindness to take a moment to think of one's obligations toward one's descendents.   February 22, 2008   Op Ed News

The Common Future.   Humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet and will require new forms of global cooperation, states Jeffrey Sachs. In recent years cooperation was in the form of a series of "summits". At the meeting of the General Assembly of the UN in 2000, the leaders of the world adopted the Millennium Development Goals to improve the conditions of the poorest everywhere by 2015. The deliberations crystallised the objectives as environmental sustainability, population stabilisation, and ending extreme poverty. What Jeffrey Sachs does in this book is to spell out these objectives, their implications and suggest how they may be achieved. The analysis provides a rare synthesis as well as some strong warnings. For the first 18 centuries of the present era, the growth of population was slow and the use of resources limited. Up to the mid-19th century, population increased only four-fold, and the Earth's resources were adequate to cater to the limited needs of the population. But the Industrial Revolution rapid change of technology led to an increase in the use of resources and new medical facilities reduced the death rate. From 1830 to 2005, the global population reached 6.5 billion in 2005. This period of rapid growth of population also witnessed an increase in the material conditions of living, referred to as "economic growth." World income increased to $ 40,000 billion at its end. Per capita income increased from $ 2000 to $ 6000 during this period. Human exploitation has driven down other species. The future of human life on Earth is threatened. Global warming is increasing. Drinking water has become scarce. Droughts and floods are causing much damage. Ocean levels are rising and habitats destroyed. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has reached dangerous levels. The issue is whether nations have the determination and cooperation to deal with a problem that is trans-national in nature. Sachs concludes that a modest 2% or 3% of the annual income of the rich countries will address the challenges of environment, population and poverty.   June 02, 2008   The Hindu

Return of the Population Timebomb.   Only since 1800, has the human population shot into the billions. Now at nearly 6.7 billion, few environmentalists seem to care. Yet our environmental impact, as gauged by total resource consumption is the product of population size and the average person's consumption. Today's crumbling environment, is evidence our total consumption has gone too far. We are destroying our life-support system. Our demand exceeding the planet's absorptive and regenerative capacities. To avert catastrophe, we need to reduce our numbers and per person consumption. Ignoring that logic, most environmentalists today avoid half the equation. A typical assertion typical: "If everyone on Earth had consumed less, as they do in Mexico, we wouldn't have exceed carrying capacity." It's a simple notion that sidesteps the issue of population size and growth, a subject of much concern in the 1960s and 1970s but taboo today. Why taboo? Pressure from social justice activists who've insisted that any focus on numbers violates the right of women to manage their own fertility. China's one-child policy notwithstanding, humane, successful population programmes in countries as varied as Thailand, Iran, and Mexico contradict that assertion. Nevertheless, the criticism has cowed environmentalists and NGOs which once championed the population cause. Most environmentalists suggest a reduction in individual consumption is all we need to solve our ecological problems. The work of the Global Footprint Network (GFN), points to the answer. Measuring consumption as the use of biologically productive land and sea, their data shows a global maximum sustainable footprint, at today's population, of just under 1.8 global hectares (gha) per person. Currently, by drawing down nonrenewable resources, we're a bit over 2.2gha, overshooting Earth's limits by about 25%. What if everyone converged on Mexico's level of per capita consumption? A drop to the level of Botswana or Uzbekistan would put us in the right range. But that's not low enough. We'd next have to compensate for UN projections of 40% more humans by the middle of the century. That would mean shrinking the global footprint to under 1.3gha, roughly the level of Guatemala or Nigeria. While in overshoot, we erode carrying capacity. Once we'd got to some level of consumption on a par with countries living today in abject poverty, we'd find there were fewer natural resources on which to draw than there had been when we started. There are limits to how much we can reduce per-person use of resources it would not end our environmental woes. Our sheer numbers prevent it. We have no alternative but to return our attention to population. Already in overshoot, we must aim for population stabilisation followed by a decline in human numbers worldwide. Humane measures have documented records of success at reducing fertility rates. We have to provide easy access to family planning options while educating parents through the media in the benefits of smaller families and family planning. We must do these things internationally with a keen eye toward numbers, monitoring results and making adjustments accordingly. The stakes are too high to waste time evading the issue. Doing so is intellectually dishonest and a setup for global tragedy. It's time environmentalists ended the silence on population.   May 05, 2008   John Feeney

U.S.: Immigration Affects Environment, Too, Reports E -the Environmental Magazine; But Solutions go Deeper than Building Fences.   Immigration has become a hot issue, but often for the wrong reasons. What's missing is frank discussion of its impact on overall population growth, the environment and on how to address its fundamental causes. Largely because of immigration, the U.S. Census estimates that from 303 million today we'll grow to 400 million people as early as 2040, and 420 million by 2050. The U.S. is growing so fast it now has the third largest population in the world. America is a nation of immigrants. We absorbed 25 million people between 1860 and 1920, and most observers believe we are a stronger nation because of it. America's rapid population growth makes it nearly impossible to achieve sustainability. About 93% of U.S. increases in energy use since 1970 can be attributed to population growth. We pave over an area the size of Delaware every year, and every day we remove 3.2 billion gallons of water from aquifers that are not replenished by natural processes. The energy and climate effects are little understood. Any efficiency gains we make are being swamped by rapid population increases. With just 5% of the world's population, the U.S. is the top consumer of 11 of the world's top 20 traded commodities. The increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., which rose 13 between 1990 and 2000, mirrors the population increase. A huge percentage of climate emissions can be attributed to population growth. Many people want to come to America from the overpopulated developing world. The swelling numbers abroad create pressures leading to "increased poverty, hunger, land degradation, a lack of health services and limited social and economic mobility." How do we address these pressures without calling for the mandatory caps on U.S. immigration? The organization Population Connection wants to combine action at home (reducing teen pregnancy, ensuring contraceptive availability, defending reproductive rights) with foreign aid. If people see hope for better lives at home, they will feel less pressure to emigrate. Such views have many supporters. If we and the governments of the countries they are coming from were to devote as much to improving their standard of living at home, they might not feel the need to come to America. The obstacle is to get countries around the world to focus on eradicating hunger, infant mortality and poverty, and limiting births through universal access to family planning. A 20-year plan to address these issues has languished as donor countries, including the U.S., have fallen short of meeting their financial commitments. In addition, the reinstatement of the "Global Gag Rule" which mandates that no U.S. family planning assistance be provided to foreign organizations that use funding to make abortion available, has had a severe impact. Cultural and religious opposition have also combined to thwart efforts. Nevertheless, UNFPA, says that the process offers the best hope for reducing migration pressures. The growing poverty and demographic divide between rich and poor countries must be addressed.   May 07, 2008   NewsBlaze

Population and Climate Change.   A larger global population means a larger demand for everything. The climate problem suggests that overconsumption may still be inevitable. To avoid catastrophic climate change, we believe that the international community should reverse population growth and reduce resource consumption. Projections for the depletion of oil, gas, and coal reserves estimated that, by 2076, 90% of these reserves will be gone. This is a much shorter timescale than previously believed, especially for coal. Mainstream predictions had indicated up to a 250-year supply, but probably did not take into account the demands of increased population. Germany, the largest coal producer in the European Union, reduced its estimated black coal reserves by 99% and its brown coal reserves by 80%. In less than 70 years, humankind will number 9 billion and energy will be scarce and expensive. A stark challenge is facing humankind: Cut energy demand to 40% and reduce global population to around 5 billion. Because nearly one-half of the world's population is in the midst or ahead of their childbearing years, reversing population growth cannot be achieved before 2050. The alternative is to prioritize voluntary family planning, education, and media outreach now. Africa had a per-capita ecological footprint of 1.1 global hectares (gha) against an available biocapacity of 1.3 gha per person. More than a 17.6% increase in Africa's population will make it impossible to sustain their current populations due to space, energy, and water constraints. Once the environmental carrying capacity is grossly exceeded, the only outcomes are starvation, disease, inter ethnic violence and genocide, migration, and/or aid from the international community. Fertility surveys have found that most couples worldwide want at least two children, in less-developed countries, people tend to want at least three children Even with family planning in place, reducing "unintended fertility"-- will not necessarily lead to replacement level fertility in less-developed regions, nor reduce average family size in more developed regions. The average global net growth is about 78 million people per year. If all nations instantly reached replacement-level fertility, the total global number of births would fall to about 120 million annually, about a 12-percent reduction. Nearly all of the more-developed nations have below replacement fertility levels. If all more-developed, industrialized countries reach replacement-level fertility, their total number of annual births would increase by 30%, about 4 million births. In the U.S. and in Europe, where fertility is well below replacement, immigration is the primary driving force behind most of the projected population growth. In the unlikely event that immigration were to cease, U.S. population by mid-century would be 80% smaller than projected, a greater demographic impact than reducing unintended fertility. If current trends continue, experts believe that China's greenhouse gas emissions will exceed that of all industrialized countries combined due to increasing local consumption and massive exports of commodities like steel and concrete. But reducing unintended fertility in China would have little effect on the country's production of greenhouse gasses. If China were to relax its one-child policy and fertility increased to replacement level, the country's annual number of births would increase by nearly 30%, or 5 million additional births. Annual births in India would drop by about 4 million if it were to reach replacement-level fertility, and the birth rates in the populous nations of Brazil and Indonesia would also drop by 5 and 2%, respectively, as their fertility levels are already near replacement level. Focusing on reducing unintended fertility to address climate change is a delay tactic. The focus should be on reducing damaging patterns of production and consumption. Reducing unintended fertility should be a top international climate priority Stopping emissions growth and climate change will be unattainable without universal, effective family planning programs and population stabilization. The international community should restore the goal of universal access to family planning as a top-tier priority. About 200 million women in developing countries would like to prevent or delay pregnancy but lack access to contraception. The most effective international family planning program in history was pioneered by USAID in the 1960s. The U.S. continues to be the largest donor to international family planning efforts. Curbing population must contribute to solving the climate crisis The world's population is living beyond its environmental means. Because of the long lag times associated with human demographic change, we need to act immediately. The global population growth rate has decreased from 2.1 percent in 1970 to 1.2 percent today, as a result of family planning programs and improved education. If we could reduce global unintended pregnancy rates to the levels that already exist in many European countries, population growth would slow further. We should act quickly to address the fact that almost 50 percent of U.S. pregnancies are unintended, through improved education and services. However, in a front-page story USA Today reported that the fertility rates in the United Stated rose above 2.1 children per woman for the first time since 1971, partly as a result of unintended pregnancies in all age groups. "Be fruitful and multiply" also plays well in churches and corporate boardrooms. Many groups believe that any discussion of population policy leads to coercion and racism. They all want to suppress dialogue and policies that relate to reducing population growth.
Karen Gaia sas: We must continue to educate, educate, and educate.   February 01, 2008   Population and climate change

Population Growth and the Environment.   The rate of human population growth peaked around 1963, but the number of people living on Earth, and sharing finite resources has topped out at over 6.6 billion today. Human population is expected to exceed nine billion by 2050. Many if not all of the environmental problems are either caused or exacerbated by population growth. Trends such as the loss of the planet's forests, the depletion of fisheries, and the alteration of atmosphere and climate are related to the fact that human population expanded from millions in prehistoric times to over six billion today. Population growth is behind the clearing of 80% of rainforests, the loss of plant and wildlife species, an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and the development of about half of the Earth's land surface. Half of the world's population will be exposed to water-scarce conditions and difficulties in meeting…consumption levels. In less developed countries, lack of access to birth control, as well as cultural traditions encourage women to have babies, and lead to rapid population growth. The result is an increasing number of poor people suffering from malnourishment, lack of clean water, overcrowding and inadequate shelter, and AIDS and other diseases. While population numbers in developed nations are leveling off or diminishing, high levels of consumption make for a huge drain on resources. As more residents of developing countries get access to Western media, or immigrate to the U.S., they want to emulate the consumption-heavy lifestyles. Environmentalists consider the support of the Global Gag Rule to be shortsighted, and that support for family planning is the most effective way to check population growth and relieve pressure on the planet's environment.   January 08, 2008   www.HealthNewsDigest.com

India Heading for 2 Billion Population.   India's population will almost certainly be near 1.8 billion by 2050 and could top 2 billion by the end of this century unless fertility rates decline more rapidly in India's largest and poorest states. The possibility of India becoming the only country ever to have 2 billion people depends on the course of events in each of India 35 states and Union territories. India passed the 1 billion population benchmark in 2000, and stood at 1.1 billion in 2007. The government has been concerned about population growth outpacing economic growth, and India was the first country to adopt a policy to slow population growth. Since the policy was first stated in 1952, the country's total fertility rate has declined from about six children per woman to about three, but fertility levels vary greatly throughout India. The decline has been greater in its southern states, which have much higher rates of literacy and education. The southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu now have TFRs below two children per woman. The large states of the north, the "Hindi Belt," are where about 40% of Indians live. Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, with about 93 million and 188 million people, currently have a TFR of about 4.3 children per woman. The state and Union territory populations were projected under two scenarios. One assumed that states with a current TFR above "two children" would decrease to 2.1 and then remain constant. The other assumed the TFR decline would continue until it reached 1.85 children per woman. The first scenario results in a population that would reach two billion in 2066-2071. By 2101, four states, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh would account for almost half of the country's population. Scenario B does not reach two billion, growth peaks in 2081-2086, after which it decreases. This state-based projection series uses national fertility rates and age structures, and PRB (Population Reference Bureau) believes it provides a more realistic scenario. The population projected for Uttar Pradesh ranges from 353 million to 364 million by 2051, and between 414 million and 480 million by 2101. The projected 2101 total for India ranges from 1.9 billion to 2.2 billion, depending on the assumptions for each state.   January 02, 2008   People and Planet website

Cities, Megacities, and the Price of Oil.   An urban poor person needs one or two dollars to buy everything he or she needs: shelter, food, fuel, medicines, clothes, transport, even taxes. But a rural poor person with a piece of land may be much better off in that their land, which may provide food, perhaps fuel, and shelter. Their monetary income may be additional to their basic needs. This is why land reform is more important than aid to poor countries, why a standpipe or irrigation system is better than encouraging a move to the city. But people vote in cities, pay taxes, are easier to monitor and control. Its cheaper to provide healthcare and education, businesses have the critical mass to survive. One of the aims of taxation is to force workers into a society which produces surplus, rather than self-sufficiency which cannot support a ruling class. Poor city-societies are vulnerable and require imports of energy and food, which must be paid for with the profit from commerce. In poorer countries that means trading of the country's natural wealth. That is the 'profit' that pays for everything else. But the main activity of the city may be government administration, tax collecting and all the paraphernalia we are familiar with. As energy prices rise and food prices double, poorer cities suffer most, because energy and food are their unavoidable imports. Poor self-sufficient people with their own land are largely unaffected. If we want to aid the people of a poor country, then land reform, provision of basic tools, water supply, non-hybrid seeds and harvest storage are best for the people.
Karen Gaia says: This opinion piece ignores the impacts of overpopulation on agricultural land. When the number of children that survive childhood expands from 2 per family to 4 or 6 (due to better sanitation and health practices), the multiplication of people upon the land forces migration of the excess younger people to the cities.   February 15, 2008   Donal Seeking blog

Niger: Population Explosion Threatens Development Gains.   If Nigeriens remain uninformed about family planning and keep reproducing at the current rate the population will more than quadruple by 2050, imposing unmanageable demands on the economy, social services and the environment. The current rate of population growth is 3.3% every year. If that growth continues, there will be 56 million people in Niger by 2050, compared to 13.5 million today. In 1960, it was just 1.7 million. The average number of children per mother is 7.1. Women said they would like nine and men said 12, but some families said 40 or 50 children. It a society that encourages procreation. Just 5% of Nigeriens use family planning and contraception. People aren't informed about the negative consequences of having so many children. The 85% of Nigeriens who rely on rain-fed, subsistence agriculture to feed themselves are going to be hardest hit as millions more people compete for the same amount of farmland to grow food. The Sahel has recently been identified as one of the regions most likely to be adversely affected by climate change. The increase in the population will continue to accentuate the cereal production and wood-for-fuel deficits which started in the 1980s. Niger's population will quickly overtake the government's ability to provide health, education, jobs and even water points, tasks that it is already failing at today. 94% of Nigeriens live on 35% of the land. The most populated areas are along the southern border with Burkina Faso and Mali. The Maradi region holds 20% of the population, 2,235,748 people, living on 3.3% of the country's land. Niger's desert and mountain north accounts for 53% of Niger's territory but only 3 percent of the population, 321,639 people. Niger plans this year to curb population growth which the INS says would reduce the population in 2050 to 33.3 million, still almost three times its current level. The government wants the number practising family planning to increase from to 15% or 20% by 2015. The INS says 20% of women claim to want it. The plan calls for information campaigns to educate religious leaders and women about the availability and importance of family planning. Currently, every second girl is married and likely to be procreating before the age of 15. Raising the marriage age to 18 would take up to four years off a woman's reproductive life. By 2015 population growth should have slowed to 2.5% and the average number of children per woman should be five. Diadi Boureima, deputy representative of the UN Fund for Population Affairs (UNFPA) in Niger, said the task was a critical one. If the demographics continue, Niger cannot develop. All the resources the country has will be going into social services and nothing will be left for investing in the economy. The government is acting accordingly.   December 11, 2007   UN Integrated Regional Information Network

Australia: Do We Need a Population Policy?.   Australia experienced an annual population growth rate of 1.5% for the year ending September 2007. The increase of 318,500 people saw Australia's population rise to 21,097,000. People are ready to grasp the argument that the unsustainable growth in population numbers is degrading our planet and that Australia must begin to think of itself as a country with a population problem. Any Australian population policy must recognise that the Australian economy is strongly inter-linked with the global economy. We can feed 25 million people without irreparable damage to our resources. All population growth - or even stationary population - does something to change the environment. If Australia is to become purely pantheistic and turn its back on the achievements and arts of civilisation, we have much to lose. Population increases from immigration should, be limited to maintain social and political stability. The cost of housing is soaring and rents are predicted to rise by 50% in the next four years. There are water restrictions on many of our major cities and our rivers are running dry, but still we keep the immigrants pouring in. If we are to meet our green house gas commitments we cannot keep on growing our population. It is high time we decided just what is the optimum population level for Australia.   April 04, 2008   Webdiary

Australia: Biofuel Bill Should Not Proceed.   Australian population grew 1.5% for the year ending September 2007. The increase saw Australia's population rise to 21,097,000. People grasp the argument that the unsustainable growth in population numbers is degrading our planet and that Australia must begin to think of itself as a country with a population problem. The human population on the Earth cannot continue to grow without destroying our life-support systems. The Australian economy is inter-linked with the global economy. We export to many other countries. It is by no means certain that controlling the Australian population will preserve our environment. We can feed 25 million people without damage to our resources. All population growth, or even stationary population, does something to change the environment. If Australia is to turn its back on the achievements and arts of civilisation, we have much to lose. The shutting of the immigration gates would prevent enrichment of our society. Population increases from immigration should be limited to maintain stability. A large immigration from countries with different cultural backgrounds would risk divisiveness as seen in other countries. The cost of housing is soaring and rents are predicted to rise by 50% in the next four years largely due to the large number of migrants coming to Australia. There are water restrictions on many of our major cities and our rivers are running dry, but still we keep the immigrants pouring in. If we are to meet our green house gas commitments we cannot keep on growing our population.   April 03, 2008   Scoop.co.nz

U.S.: Numbers Count in the Immigration Debate.   Immigrants, like native-born Americans, are good people, hard-working and patriotic. Individual immigrants are not problematic; mass immigration, both legal and illegal, is. Mass immigration is ruining the quality of life for the children and grandchildren of immigrants already in the United States. It is chewing up what little open space remains, driving up air-and water-pollution, amplifying suburban sprawl and placing a larger burden on publicly financed institutions. Most public debate ignores that immigration, both legal and illegal, has ballooned to record levels since the early 1990s. The number of foreign-born people in the US has reached 37 million. The most recent mass immigration, takes place when US population levels belabor and deplete the nation's natural resources. At least half of the 10.3 million immigrants who have arrived since 2000 are illegal. About 47% of all immigrants and their young children are on Medicaid or are uninsured. Nearly 33% of immigrant-headed households use at least one welfare program compared with 19% for natives. It is food assistance and Medicaid that explain the numbers. On the plus side, 82% of immigrant households have at least one worker in the household, compared with just 73% of native households. In fact, 78% of immigrant households using the major welfare programs have at least one worker. The public debate over immigration ignores the huge bubble of immigration the United States is now experiencing. It also ignores, the environmental impact of mass immigration. The CIS describes its mission seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted. If we want the US to become one nonstop mass of urban sprawl, we should continue to allow record levels of legal and illegal immigration. If we care about the quality of our environment and the quality of life here, we should take note of the numbers.
Karen Gaia: My issue with this article is that it does not seem concerned with the future sustainability of the U.S. It mentions Medicaid, food assistance, and immigrants, but if the author were truly interested in sustainability due to population, it would advocate: 1) fewer children to native born and immigrant alike (we have a large number of unwanted pregnancies), 2) a big cut in consumption by native born and immigrant alike, and 3) public policies and planning that help (not coerce) people to achieve numbers 1 and 2.   November 30, 2007   SignOnSanDiego.com

Uganda: Doctors Demand More Midwives.   Uganda will need to reduce its maternal mortality rate from 435 to 131 deaths per 100,000 if it is to meet this MDG by 2015. A high fertility rate at 6.7 births per woman is given as a contributing factor. The high fertility rates cause challenges which make access to quality maternal care difficult besides straining the health facilities to manage various health complications. The levels of literacy are low and it takes more time for people to understand the benefits of family planning. The government has not been such an active partner in regard to population control matters and a small percentage of the health budget has been allocated to issues of reproductive health. The quality of education is poor. The high rate of UPE enrollment is mainly a result of Uganda's high population. As the country's population soars, there is more need to increase access to health care facilities and improve health service delivery. The failure to be on course towards the attainment of the MDGs has been blamed on the country's high population growth, inefficiency in the management of the social budget and inadequacy of resources which is related to the demands of a high population which makes it difficult to apportion resources out of a limited resource like that of Uganda. A population growth rate of about 3.5% per annum could make achievement of many MDGs impossible.   February 19, 2008   Africa News Service

Growth of UK Population is Unsustainable, Says Cameron.   In his first speech on immigration and population, the Conservative leader will attack Gordon Brown for failing to tackle the causes of Britain's growing demographic problems. He will call for a "grown-up conversation" about population growth. Britain's population is set to rise by nine million over the next 20 years, because of higher life expectancy and higher immigration. He will say that we need to reduce the level of net immigration and the pressure of household formation. He will call for an understanding of the challenge, as well as action to ensure that the population grows sustainably. We need to bring policy on housing, skills immigration control, the family, border control, into a coherent long-term population strategy. In the past 40 years, the population grew by about six million. Over the next 40 years it is expected to grow more than twice as fast. The country faces a choice. We have to get used to it or most importantly, we will also make clear how our approach joins up and fits together into a coherent long-term strategy.   October 29, 2007   The Times

Humanity is the Greatest Challenge.   The growth in human population and rising consumption has exceeded the planet's ability to support us. We face two problems of importance. The first is our global ecological plight. The second is our difficulty acknowledging the first. Environmental writers remain reluctant to discuss the severity of the global dilemma we've created. There is an alarm to sound and the time for reticence is over. We've outgrown the planet and need radical action to avert unspeakable consequences. From deforestation to collapsing fisheries, desertification, the global spread of chemical toxins, ocean dead zones, and the death of coral reefs, an array of interrelated declines is evidence of our impact. The depletion of resources such as oil and ground-water, shows the challenge upon us. Barring decisive action, we are marching toward global collapse. Humans are not exempt from the threats posed by ecological degradation. Climate change-induced drought and the depletion of oil and aquifers could trigger famine on an unprecedented scale. Billions could die. At the very least, we risk our children inheriting a world empty of the richness of life we take for granted. The most worrisome is the convergence in time of so many serious problems. Issues such as oil and aquifer depletion and climate change are set to reach crisis points within decades. As a result of their interdependence, the extinction of species can trigger cascade effects. We're out of our league, influencing systems we don't understand. Some conclude we've postponed action too long to avoid massive upheaval and the best we can do now is to soften the blow. One thing is certain: continued inaction will be of no help - we're at a turning point in human history. Though few seem willing to confront the facts, we simply went too far. The growth which once measured our species' success has inevitably turned deadly. Our numbers and levels of consumption having exceeded the Earth's capacity to sustain us for the long-term. Inevitably, our numbers will come down, whether voluntarily or through such natural means as famine or disease. It's imperative we reduce consumption. We need a transition to clean, renewable energy. But abundant clean energy alone will not end our problems. There remains population growth which increases consumption of resources. On a finite planet, the physical component of economic growth cannot continue forever. It has gone too far already. As a promising alternative, the field of ecological economics offers the "steady state economy". We must end world population growth, then reduce population size. But today's environmentalists avoid the subject more than any other ecological truth. Their motives range from the political to a misunderstanding of the issue. Neither justifies hiding the truth because total resource use is the product of population size and per capita consumption. Expert consensus tells us we can address population humanely by solving the social problems that fuel it. Let's make the effort for today's and tomorrow's children.   January 13, 2008   BBC Green Room

Economic Collapse and Global Ecology.   Given failure to pursue policies to reverse deterioration of the biosphere and avoid ecological collapse, the best we can hope for may be that the growth-based economic system crashes. The Earth is faced with a conundrum, climate policies enjoy support only in times of rapid economic growth. Yet this growth is the primary factor driving environmental ills. The growth machine has pushed the planet well beyond its ecological carrying capacity. With every economic downturn, it becomes less likely that policies to ensure global sustainability will be embraced. This explores the possibility that it would be better for the economic collapse to come now rather than later. Economic growth is a deadly disease with capitalism as its most virulent strain. Throw-away consumption and explosive population growth are made possible by using up fossil fuels and destroying ecosystems. Humanity has proved unwilling to address environmental threats with haste and ambition. Action could be taken now at net benefit to the economy. Yet, the losers primarily fossil fuel industries resist futures not dependent upon their deadly products. Perpetual economic growth, and necessary climate and other ecological policies, are incompatible. Global ecological sustainability depends critically upon establishing a steady state economy. Industries like coal and natural forest logging will be eliminated even as new opportunities emerge in solar energy and environmental restoration. This transition to economic and ecological sustainability is not happening. The challenge is how to carry out environmental policies even as economic growth ends and consumption plunges. The response is going to be liquidation of even more life-giving ecosystems, and jettisoning of climate policies, to vainly try to maintain high growth and personal consumption. If efforts to reduce emissions and move to a steady state economy fail; the collapse of ecological, economic and social systems is assured. Greens take the continued existence of a habitable Earth with viable, sustainable populations of all species including humans as the ultimate truth and the meaning of life. Whether this is possible in a time of economic collapse is crucially dependent upon whether enough ecosystems and resources remain post collapse to allow humanity to recover and reconstitute sustainable, relocalized societies. It may be better for humanity's future that economic collapse comes sooner rather than later, while more ecosystems and opportunities to return to nature's fold exist. Economic collapse will be deeply wrenching part Great Depression, part African famine. There will be starvation and civil strife, and a long period of suffering and turmoil. Many will be killed as balance returns to the Earth. Most people have forgotten how to grow food and that their identity is more than what they own. Yet those who have lived most lightly upon the land will have an easier time of it, even as those super-consumers living in massive cities finally learn where their food comes from and that ecology is the meaning of life. Economic collapse now means humanity and the Earth ultimately survive to prosper again. Human suffering is inevitable given the degree to which the planet's carrying capacity has been exceeded. Humanity can take the bitter medicine now, and recover while emerging better for it; or our total collapse can be a final, fatal death swoon. A successful response would focus upon bringing down the Earth's industrial economy now. Maybe the best strategy to achieve global ecological sustainability is economic sabotage to hasten the day. It is more fragile than it looks. It is not yet known whether humanity is able to adapt, to ensure survival. If she can, all futures of economic, social and ecological collapse can be avoided. If not it is better that the economic growth machine collapse now, offering hope for a planetary and human revival. I wish no harm to anyone, and want desperately to avoid these prophesies. I speak for the Earth, for despite being the giver of life, her natural voice remains largely unheard over the tumult of the end of being.
Ralph says: Another piece of compulsory reading!!   January 15, 2008   CounterCurrents.org

U.S.: Envisioning a Sustainable Chesapeake.   It's been most inspiring to see discussions begin to address the future of Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay. They prompt us to ask: "What does a sustainable Chesapeake really mean?" My vision is built upon a balanced, vibrant ecosystem teeming with fish, shellfish, underwater grasses and clear, healthy waters. But to be truly sustainable, the Chesapeake ecosystem needs to exist while also supporting the region's human population. Creating a sustainable Chesapeake will not be easy. But as we look around the state, we're seeing more and more positive steps being taken. Recently, the Maryland Commission on Climate Change made recommendations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and conserving energy throughout the state. These actions will require that we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by more than 25% within the next 12 years. An initiative was introduced that will seek to instill a sense of environmental stewardship among the 28,000 students graduating each year. It will also foster research and prepare the new "green" workforce. By changing our own actions, each of us has the ability to reduce our impact on the bay and the planet. As long as the region's population continues to grow, and we develop lands faster than needed to accommodate that growth, we make it more difficult to maintain the sustainability equation. We have struggled more than 20 years to reduce the amount of pollution flowing into the bay and we are still far from where we need to be. Another 10, 20 or 30 years of pollution-fighting efforts will still not be enough. Bay restoration efforts will be needed in perpetuity. We need to manage for sustainability by remaining aware of what will cross our path in the future.
Karen Gaia says: The way things are going, we will be forced to reduce our greenhouse gases because we have passed peak oil, meaning our consumption of oil will be reduced.   February 17, 2008   Annapolis Capital

Let's Change Direction on Human Population: Next Added 100 Million Americans.   This planet ain't big enough for the 6,500,000,000 humans. If you visit www.populationmedia.org, you'll see how fast human numbers explode across the planet on a minute by minute basis. The human race stands nostril-deep in trouble. Behind the climate crisis lies a global issue that no one wants to tackle: do we need radical plans to reduce the world's population? Global birth rates versus death rates is governed by the difference between an inflow and an outflow, and even small imbalances can have large effects. But population growth is almost entirely ignored. Which is odd, since it is at the root of the environmental crisis, and it represents a danger to health and socioeconomic development. For most of the two million years of human history, the population was less than a quarter of a million. Agriculture led to a sustained increase, but it took until 1800 before the planet was host to a billion humans. Today's grand total is estimated to be 6.6 billion, with a growth rate of 80 million each year Impressive increases in the food supply have played a part, but the underlying driver has been the shift from a society, in which energy was drawn from the wind, water, beasts of burden and wood, to a fossil fuel-based world in which most of our energy is obtained by burning coal, oil and gas. This transition has fuelled the changes in quality of life associated with modern technology. Although unevenly distributed, these bounties have seen life expectancy double and a corresponding reduction in mortality rates. But has not been matched by a lowering of the birth rate and this has resulted in the dramatic increase in the human stock. Since every individual can produce many offspring, the process will only cease when something happens to bring birth rate and death rate into balance. The overall growth rate of the world's population hit a peak of about 2% per year in the late sixties and has since fallen to 1.3%. As living standards rise and health conditions improve, the mortality rate decreases. The resulting difference between the numbers of births and deaths causes the population to increase. Eventually, the birth rate decreases until a new balance is achieved and the population again stabilizes, but at a new and higher level. Worldwide, the birth rate is about six per second, and the death rate stands at three per second. UN figures foresee numbers leveling out at a point when we have between 8 and 10 billion humans by 2050 - that's roughly a 50% increase on today's figure. Even at current levels, the WHO reports that more than three billion people are malnourished. Food availability continues to grow, but per capita grain availability has been declining since the eighties. 50% of plants and animals are harvested for our use, creating a huge impact on the world's ecosystems. It is the airborne waste from our energy production that is driving climate change. Yet, population control is rarely discussed. Today, however, publication of a new report by the United Nations Environment Program could be the spur we need. "If debate is started, some will say that we need to stop the world's population booming, and to do so most urgently where the birth rates are highest - the developing world. Programs that seek to reduce birth rates find that three conditions must be met. Birth control must be within the scope of conscious choice, there must be advantages to having a smaller family, if no provision is made for peoples' old age, the incentive is to have more children. The means of control must be available and socially acceptable, combined with education and emancipation of girls and women." The human multitude could only be sustained on a planet 25% larger than our own. But by avoiding a fraction of the projected population increase, the emissions savings could be significant and would be at a cost that would be as little as one-thousandth of the technological fixes. If we believe that the size of the human footprint is a serious problem then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed. So controversial is the subject that it has become the Cinderella of the great sustainability debate. In meetings addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are notable by their absence. As time passes, so our ability to leave the world in a better state is reduced. Today's report from the UN provides an opportunity to raise the debate once again. For the sake of future generations, I hope that others will this time take up the challenge. My best guess? The US continues on the same path as China, India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Africa and the rest of them until our misery exceeds our ability to continue growing. Unfortunately, by that time, it will be awfully ugly.   February 09, 2008   OpEdNews

Global Over-Population is the Real Issue.   The fertility of the human race: we are getting to the point where you simply can't discuss it, and we are thereby refusing to say anything sensible about the biggest single challenge facing the Earth. The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species. The population of the planet is growing with every word you read. There are more than 211,000 people being added every day. I see this change, and I feel it. You can see it as you fly over Africa at night, and you see mile after mile of fires as the scrub is removed to make way for human beings. In the satellite pictures of nocturnal Europe, the whole place lit up. You can see it in the Shanghai skyline, where new skyscrapers are going up round the clock. You can see it as you fly over Mexico City, a vast checkerboard of smog-bound, low-rise dwellings stretching from one horizon to the other; and when you look down on what we are doing to the planet, you have a horrifying vision of habitations multiplying like bacilli in a Petri dish. The world's population is now 6.7 billion.. If I live to my mid-eighties, it will have trebled in my lifetime. The UN last year predicted that there will be 9.2 billion people by 2050, and I cannot understand why no one discusses this impending calamity, and no statesmen have the guts to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves. How can we discuss global warming, and reducing consumption, when we are continuing to add so relentlessly to the number of consumers? The answer is political cowardice. There was a time, in the 1960s and 1970s, when people were becoming interested in demography, and the UN would hold giant conferences on the subject. But over the years, certain words became taboo, and certain concepts became forbidden, and we have reached the stage where the very discussion of overall human fertility and global motherhood has become more or less banned. All sorts of explanations are offered for the surrender. Some say Indira Gandhi gave it all a bad name, by her demented plan to sterilise Indian men. Some attribute our complacency to the Green Revolution, it became the wisdom that the world's population could rise to umpteen billions, as mankind learned to make several ears of corn grow where one had grown before. In recent years, the idea of global population control has been stifled by a pincer movement from the Right and the Left. American right-wingers disapprove of anything that sounds like birth control, and George W. Bush withholds the contribution America makes to the UN Fund for Population Activities. The Left dislike suggestions of population control because they seem to smack of colonialism and imperialism. So we have reached the absurd position in which humanity bleats about the destruction of the environment, and yet there is not a peep about the population growth that is causing that destruction. The debate is now unavoidable. Look at food prices, driven ever higher by population growth in India and China. Look at the Chinese desire for meat, which has pushed the cost of feed so high that Vladimir Putin has been obliged to institute price controls. In Britain, chicken farmers are finding that the cost of chickenfeed is no longer exactly chickenfeed, and, though the food crisis may be solved by the wit of man, the damage to the environment may be irreversible. It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet. This is not, an argument about immigration per se, since in a sense it does not matter where people come from, and with their skill and their industry, immigrants add hugely to the economy. This is a question of population, and the eventual size of the human race. All the evidence shows that we can reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn't it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?
Karen Gaia sayys: The article ignores what could be accomplished if enough money were spent on women's reproductive health, contraception, sex education, and girls education. The cost would be less than what we spend on pets in the U.S.   January 14, 2008   Telegraph

Closing the 'Baby Gap'.   In Japan, Russia, Germany and elsewhere in what gurus like to call "the global North," panic has set in about fertility declines, and couples are exhorted to have and are rewarded for producing more children. So fascinated are we in the developed world with this phenomenon that a misinterpretation of world population trends has taken hold. In a majority of nations, there is no shortage of babies. Women there are crying out for help in controlling their fertility. But when foreign aid priorities are set, family planning is no longer high on the list. The 1960s were the high point in family planning. Influential thinkers in richer countries came to accept that pushing family planning was a cultural or even political intrusion. President Bush has just barred for the fifth year U.S. government contributions to the U.N. Population Fund, which does more work in more countries than any other family-planning organization. His action is based on unsubstantiated claims, that the fund aids abortion in China. The U.S. is now $196 million in arrears. By 2025, the richer world will account for just over 1.25 billion of the projected global population of 7.9 billion; by 2050, 8 billion of the world's 9.2 billion people will be in poor nations. Almost all population growth will be among the people who already struggle hardest to survive. A large, young, productive workforce boosts an economy, through a higher birth rate and immigration, but when families and public services are overwhelmed by numbers, a terrible cycle of underachievement goes into motion. The exodus of desperate people from sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia is a symptom of the double burden of underdevelopment and overpopulation. Environmental damage is near- catastrophic. In India, nearly half the children are malnourished and no major city has running water 24 hours a day. Wouldn't the world's environment be better protected by offering more people a managed way to move to less-populated regions, perhaps through a new U.N. agency modeled on the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees? Wouldn't it be better to help developing nations achieve workable population levels through family planning, while filling current gaps in the working-age population of rich nations through immigration? Europe and Japan would rather have more babies. Does the world really need them?
Karen Gaia says: the trouble with moving people from poor countries to rich countries results in overextending the artificial sustainability of those countries whose economies are based on oil. All will collapse as is already happening in the US. The U.S. is already taking far more resources from other countires than it is providing in return.   September 26, 2007   New York Times*

Is the Planet Full Yet?.   Of the top 50 things to save the planet, to have fewer people is only Number 18. The current population of 6.6 billion people is predicted to rocket to 9.7 billion in the next 40 years. Yet there is a conspicuous silence about the topic of sustainable family planning. Population growth is one of the factors which determines our impact on the Earth's ecosystem and therefore we should talk frankly about it. Population growth could wipe out any gains we make reducing the amount we consume. It has to be a part of the discussion and not ignored as some form of sacred taboo. Friends of the Earth do not campaign on the matter of population, claiming the big issue is resource use. But Green Party Caroline Lucas MEP disagrees. "There's a direct relation between the emissions we produce and how many of us there are." The idea of controlling the population may be distasteful but on a planet with finite resources and an exponentially growing number of people something, has to give. At present we are not able to feed the world's population adequately, yet we produce enough food to do so. That is a failure of our current structures. With the world's population set to rise significantly over the next century, if we can't cope now, how are we going to cope then? By encouraging high levels of immigration we are fuelling the problem because when people come here they are, going to start living our unsustainable lifestyle, too." The South East Plan proposes a further 11,000 homes should be built in Brighton and Hove by 2026, the result is likely to be severe pressure on our natural resources, such as water. Can a city hemmed in by the sea and South Downs accommodate any more without compromising quality of life and the future of the South Downs National Park? According to the UN, there are 78 million people added to the world every year, yet there are 200 million women who want to control their fertility but have no safe and effective access to contraceptive services. We need a major investment in family planning so women can choose their family size. In the Sixties and Seventies, population was a key issue for all the major campaign groups. Oxfam published a paper entitled World Population: The Biggest Problem Of All. But in 2007, to call for such frank discussion runs too great a risk of upsetting the other values environmentalists identify with: human rights, gender equality, race, immigration and, above all, individual choice. We've got to stop being paralysed by the sensitivities the population question naturally taps into and recognise there are actually valid ways to address it which could bring great benefits. The decisions we make relating to family issues, must be left up to individuals, but devoting resources to reproductive health and family planning services brings genuine win-wins in terms of community development and women's rights, as well as smaller populations. Scratch the surface of any environmental problem and it reveals population growth, and the way we live our lives, as the root cause. The need for a population policy has never been more urgent. While governments see big populations as an indicator of economic strength, the population problem will lead to environmental catastrophe.   November 26, 2007   The Argus website

We Face Worldwide Drought with No Contingency Plan.   What happens when there is not enough water to go around? Atlanta is a city in trouble in a region in trouble. Sonny Perdue, Georgia's Baptist governor, led a crowd of hundreds in prayers for rain. It seems, however, that the Almighty was otherwise occupied and the regional drought continued. Water rationing has hit the capital. Car washing and lawn watering are prohibited. Harvests in the region have dropped by 15 to 30%. By the end of summer, local reservoirs and dams were holding 5% of their capacity. But that compares Ankara, Turkey, hit by a fierce drought and high temperatures. Over the last decade, 15 to 20% decreases in precipitation have been recorded, accompanied by record temperatures and increasing wildfires in areas where populations have been growing rapidly. Or the drought that has swept huge parts of Australia, the worst in a century. Morocco has 50% less rainfall than normal. In Mexico's Tehuacán Valley, the drought conditions have made subsistence farming next to impossible. Four cities in Southern California, top the national drought ratings: Los Angeles, San Diego, Oxnard, and Riverside. We don't think of our country as water poor. But acording to the National Climate Data Center, federal officials have declared 43% of the contiguous US to be in "moderate to extreme drought." The Southwest is in the grips of a 'mega-drought,' even the 'worst in 500 years.' Such conditions may represent the region's new "normal weather." The water level of Lake Superior, has fallen to the lowest point on record for this time of year. In the Southeast, 26% of which, according to the National Weather Service, is in a state of "exceptional" drought, tt has been the driest year on record for North Carolina and Tennessee, while eighteen months of blue skies have led Georgia to break every historical record, whether measured by the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, inches of rain. Rock Spring, South Carolina, has been without water for a month. Farmers are hauling water by pickup truck to keep their cattle alive. Atlanta, its metropolitan area "watered" mainly by a 1950s man-made reservoir, Lake Lanier, which, is turning into baked mud. With a population of five million and known for its uncontrolled growth (as well as lack of water planning), the city is expected to house another two million inhabitants by 2030. And yet, Atlanta will essentially run out of water. The worst outcome would be mass migrations with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither. If drought becomes more widespread, more common in heavily populated parts of the globe already bursting at the seams (and with more people arriving daily), if whole regions no longer have the necessary water, How much burning and suffering and misery are we likely to experience?   November 26, 2007   Alternet

Pollution and Long-Term Environmental Degradation: Impediments to Pakistan’s Growth.   Leaders in the field of climate change and sustainable development provided an account of the threats that developing countries such as Pakistan faced in the wake of increasing pollution as well as long term weather & climate changes. Pakistan is in a quagmire in more ways than one. Our society is in a struggle to win freedom, this time from the corrupt politician-military alliance. At the same time, we face internal threats from religious extremism and suicide attacks, and external geo-political developments. In the middle is an ordinary Pakistani who is unable to earn decent wages, has to deal with rapid inflation and crunch on food supplies, and political-economic chaos around him continues to negatively impact his/her daily job. We are still an agrarian economy. In 2006 the agricultural sector accounted for 22% of the GDP and employs a significant percentage of the working population. Climate change can lead to increased incidences of flooding in Pakistan. According to the UN, this area has an agrarian economy with rice and wheat as the main crops. But all our fields have been destroyed and our livelihoods are in ruins. Two months after the deluge, the water is still running six to seven feet deep across vast tracts of farmland. In Sindh floodwater damaged about 71,806 acres out of a total of 140,000 acres sown for this year's harvest. Rice was hardest hit, with an estimated 3.05 million metric tonnes of produce damaged. The Pakistan Strategic Environmental Assessment by the World Bank, warns of environmental degradation as a threat that undermines Pakistan growth. It is costing Pakistan at least 6 percent of GDP or about Rs. 365 billion (US$ 6 billion) annually. Nearly 50% of the environmental damage cost is attributed to illness and premature mortality. Indoor air pollution alone is the reason for 30,000 child deaths per year. Around one-third of the cost is due to death and illness resulting from waterborne diseases. Reduced agricultural productivity due to soil salinity and erosion accounts for about 20% of the cost. The poor in our country will be the ones bearing the biggest burden of the climate and environment related degradation in health, ecology, and farmland. Environmental damage has severe impact in both rural and urban areas. Over 6% of Pakistan's population is rural and depend on natural resources such agricultural soils, water, rangelands and forests that are strained and degrading. The sustainability of agricultural production is under severe environmental threat. Nearly 40% of the country's irrigated land is water-logged, and 14% is saline. The estimated cost of deforestation is between Rs. 206 to 334 million (US$ 3.4 to 5.5 million) per annum, and up to 80% of the rangeland is degraded. Children are more susceptible to lung and throat diseases, including asthma, emphysema, chronic lung bronchitis and damage to lung's airways. A recent study has found that polyaromatic hydrocarbon compounds present in soot can lead to cancer, especially in children. Pakistan is the most urbanized country in South Asia, and exposure to urban and industrial pollution is a rapidly growing concern. Access to clean water is another burgeoning problem that will be more evident globally in the future. Future wars will be fought over water resources. The health costs associated with waterborne diseases amount to 1.8% GDP. The regulatory framework needs to be strengthened to include drinking water quality standards. Our actions must begin with a realization of how large the problem is and what is at stake if we fail to play our part in curtailing global climate change. We need a collective and systematic effort at the local, regional, national and international level to prevent pollution and large scale environmental degradation. The Government of Pakistan has made considerable progress in raising public awareness of environmental issues, and establishing a framework for environmental management. The main constraints to environmental performance include gaps in incentives and accountability, institutional design, the regulatory framework, and capacity limitations.
Ralph says: First and the most important is to halt the population growth   November 23, 2007   All Things Pakistan

Overshoot, Narcissus, and the Sirens' Song.   Overshoot is a major threat to the future of the human civilization. The danger is magnified by the misperception that much of our journey is "progress." Overshoot: is to increase in numbers so much that the habitat's carrying capacity is exceeded by the ecological load. In the past 10,000 years the human population has increased from 5-10 million to about 6.5 billion in 2005. At first, this growth was sustained by displacing other species, but in the past two hundred years, humanity has expanded based on a precarious practice of rapidly drawing down finite natural resources, many of which are becoming scarce. Overshoot can generate a surge of wealth, for example, as occurred with the discovery of oil in many parts of the world. The subsequent prosperity in the short-term reinforces the belief that this is the proper way to proceed over the longer-term. This is the illusion that currently bewitches the mass of humanity. This road leads inevitably to collapse and die-off. Humanity is in a state of overshoot, and this situation is rapidly worsening with the exponential growth of human numbers. The Union of Concerned Scientists, in 1992, delivered the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, in which 1,700 of the world's leading scientists, warned: "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. If not checked, many of our practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. In March 20, 2006, the UN Environment Programme delivered a similar message that warns that humans have provoked the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out sixty-five million years ago. We humans are responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of Earth. A rising human population of six and a half billion is destroying the environment, the global demand for biological resources now exceeding the planet's capacity to renew t