The lecture was only a few hours away. Chuck Norris was pitching his new book on post at the same hour. In desperation, I turned to Facebook. “I've got just 50 minutes with the cadets at West Point today to talk water, conflict, and cooperation. What are the most compelling examples you would use to make both hard security and human security points, both threat and opportunity points? I ask in part because it is proving harder to decide what to leave out than what to put in!”

Within seconds, experts from the Departments of State and Energy, USAID, and National Geographic responded with examples, including the Tibetan plateau and glacial melt, the lower Jordan River, and more. I used these cases and others to break through to an audience that included both those skeptical of “treehugger” issues and those eager to learn. The map of Chinese current and planned hydro projects produced audible gasps and wide eyes among the class of future officers.

While at West Point, colleague Meaghan Parker and I met with geography faculty to better understand how and what they are teaching on environmental security and demographic security. The professors on the banks of the Hudson face similar challenges to their non-military brethren; today’s students have shorter attention spans and lack experience conducting in-depth research (or getting beyond Google).

But some challenges are unique to the service academies: isolation from academic peers; the need to make sure the material is relevant to future military leaders; and most of all, the physical and mental demands on cadets’ time placed by army training. I saw it as a sign of success that I only had three stand up during my lecture, the military’s sanctioned way to keep yourself awake in class. (LTC Lou Rios USAF, one of the faculty members we met with, wrote about teaching environmental security at West Point previously on New Security Beat.)

Video, blogs, and other new media seem like a way to bridge some of these gaps. We’re especially excited that the cadets in at least three courses will be using the New Security Beat as part of their classes by reading posts, commenting, and proposing a post on a topic of their choosing. We’re looking forward to a cadet joining us next summer for internship with ECSP.

All of these outreach efforts are part of our strategy to both understand how all types of actors—including future army officers—come to understand environment and security links while providing insights and analysis to that same diverse group.

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Tackling population rise would fight climate change

PARIS -- Braking the rise in Earth's population would be a major help in the fight against global warming, according to an unprecedented U.N. report published Wednesday that draws a link between demographic pressure and climate change.

"Slower population growth ... would help build social resilience to climate change's impacts and would contribute to a reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions in the future," the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) says.

Its 104-page document emphasises that population policies be driven by support for women, access to family planning, reproductive health, and other voluntary measures.

"It really is the first time that a United Nations agency has looked hard at the connections between population and climate change," lead researcher Bob Engelman, vice president for programs at the green group Worldwatch Institute, told AFP.

"People are at the root of the problem and at the solution of it, and empowerment of women is the key."

The report, the 2009 State of World Population, paints a grim tableau of the peril of climate change and the likely impact on humans, in terms of floods, drought, storms, and homelessness.

But it notably puts distance between a decades-long tradition in the U.N. arena whereby population growth and its part in environmental destruction were rarely -- if ever -- evoked.

"Fear of appearing supportive of population control has until recently held back any mention of 'population' in the climate debate," the document admits.

Things, though, are starting to change. More than three dozen developing countries have already included population issues in national plans on climate, it says.

Negotiators, including the European Union, have tentatively suggested that the question be considered in talks, designed to culminate in Copenhagen next month, for a 192-nation post-2012 global climate pact.

Today, the world's population stands at around 6.8 billion. By mid-century, it will range between 7.959 billion to 10.461 billion, with a mid-estimate of 9.15 billion, according to U.N. calculations.

The difference between 8 billion and 9 billion is between one and two billion tons of carbon per year, according to research cited in the report.

That would be comparable to savings in emissions by 2050 if all new buildings were constructed to the highest energy-efficiency standards and if two million one-gigawatt wind turbines were built to replace today's coal-fired power plants.

"[P]opulation growth is among the factors influencing total emissions in industrialized as well as developing countries," it says.

"Each person in a population will consume food and require housing, and ideally most will take advantage of transportation, which consumes energy, and may use fuel to heat homes and have access to electricity."

Mitigating population rise would have a double benefit, it says.

It reduces greenhouse-gas output, especially if the decline occurs in developed countries, whose per-capita emissions are up to 10 times those of poor countries.

And it also helps countries -- especially poor nations with high population growth -- adapt to the impacts of climate change.

"The growth of population can contribute to freshwater scarcity or degradation of cropland, which may in turn exacerbate the impacts of climate change," says the report. "So too can climate change make it more difficult for governments to alleviate poverty and achieve the Millennium Development Goals."

The report says taking demographics into account can help national policies and the quest for a U.N. climate agreement.

Women are not only more vulnerable than men to the effects of climate change but also hold the key to helping resolve it through fertility control and involvement in the economy, it adds.

Thus helping women will entail access to reproductive health care, education, and gender equality.

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In Chapter 7 of the recently released Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Lester Brown lays out the Plan B goals for eradicating poverty and stabilizing population. Behind the scenes are a number of datasets and graphs that delve deeper into the trends discussed in the chapter. Here are some highlights from the Chapter 7 data:

World population has grown steadily over the past half century, increasing from 2.5 billion in 1950 to a projected 6.8 billion in 2009. The United Nations medium fertility level scenario projects that world population will grow to 9.2 billion in 2050. Their high projection takes the world to 10.5 billion in 2050. Under their low projection, which assumes rapid reductions in fertility rates, population peaks at just over 8 billion in 2042, then begins to decline.

Though life expectancies around the world have increased in the past half century, large discrepancies remain among different regions. Overall, world life expectancy increased from an average of 47 years in the mid-twentieth century to 68 years today. While life expectancy in 1950 hovered around 40 years in both Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, it has since increased far more rapidly in Asia, reaching 69 years, compared to 51 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. On a regional basis, the United States and Canada top the world with an average life expectancy of 79 years. Leading causes of death also vary widely across regions. In low-income countries, 18 percent of deaths are caused by infectious or parasitic diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and diarrheal diseases. Such diseases cause only 2.5 percent of deaths in high-income countries.

Some progress, however, has been made in fighting infectious disease in low-income countries. Thanks to an international vaccine campaign, the number of polio cases worldwide has dropped from close to 400,000 in 1987 to fewer than 2,000 in 2008.

On the economic front, China and India, the two most populous countries in the world, have experienced significant economic growth over the past several decades. However, while India’s gross domestic product (GDP) of $363 per person in 1990 just barely exceeded China’s, since then, China’s per capita GDP has grown 10-fold, while India’s has grown only 3-fold.

As countries have experienced economic growth, poverty rates have declined, though discrepancies again exist between countries and regions. Poverty rates in China have declined significantly, from 60 percent of the population in 1990 to 16 percent in 2007. Brazil, another success story, has reduced poverty rates by two-thirds, from 15 percent to 5 percent over the same period. India’s poverty rate has declined more modestly, from slightly over half the population in 1990 to 42 percent in 2007. Sub-Saharan Africa has also made slow progress, with poverty rates declining from 58 percent to 51 percent over the same period.

These data highlights show that while there have been some successes in the fight to reduce poverty and improve quality of life around the world, many challenges remain, particularly in the face of continuing population growth. You can download our datasets to learn more about the Plan B proposals for eradicating poverty and stabilizing population -- goals that play an important role in the mobilization to save civilization.

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Photo: Editor BThe stresses in our early twenty-first century civilization take many forms--social, economic, environmental, and political. One distinctly unhealthy and visible illustration of all four is the swelling flow of garbage associated with a throwaway economy. Throwaway products were first conceived following World War II as a convenience and as a way of creating jobs and sustaining economic growth. The more goods produced and discarded, the reasoning went, the more jobs there would be.

What sold throwaways was their convenience. For example, rather than washing cloth towels or napkins, consumers welcomed disposable paper versions. Thus we have substituted facial tissues for handkerchiefs, disposable paper towels for hand towels, disposable table napkins for cloth ones, and throwaway beverage containers for refillable ones. Even the shopping bags we use to carry home throwaway products become part of the garbage flow.

The throwaway economy is on a collision course with the earth's geological limits. Aside from running out of landfills near cities, the world is also fast running out of the cheap oil that is used to manufacture and transport throwaway products. Perhaps more fundamentally, there is not enough readily accessible lead, tin, copper, iron ore, or bauxite to sustain the throwaway economy beyond another generation or two. Assuming an annual 2-percent growth in extraction, U.S. Geological Survey data on economically recoverable reserves show the world has 17 years of reserves remaining for lead, 19 years for tin, 25 years for copper, 54 years for iron ore, and 68 years for bauxite.

The cost of hauling garbage from cities is rising as nearby landfills fill up and the price of oil climbs. One of the first major cities to exhaust its locally available landfills was New York. When the Fresh Kills landfill, the local destination for New York's garbage, was permanently closed in March 2001, the city found itself hauling garbage to landfill sites in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia--with some of the sites being 300 miles away.

Given the 12,000 tons of garbage produced each day in New York and assuming a load of 20 tons of garbage for each of the tractor-trailers used for the long-distance hauling, some 600 rigs are needed to move garbage from New York City daily. These tractor-trailers form a convoy nearly nine miles long--impeding traffic, polluting the air, and raising carbon emissions.

Fiscally strapped local communities in other states are willing to take New York's garbage--if they are paid enough. Some see it as an economic bonanza. State governments, however, are saddled with increased road maintenance costs, traffic congestion, increased air pollution, potential water pollution from landfill leakage, and complaints from nearby communities.

In 2001 Virginia's Governor Jim Gilmore wrote to Mayor Rudy Giuliani to complain about the use of Virginia for New York City's trash. "I understand the problem New York faces," he noted, "but the home state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York's dumping ground."

Garbage travails are not limited to New York City. Toronto, Canada's largest city, closed its last remaining landfill on December 31, 2002, and now ships all its 750-thousand-ton-per-year garbage to Wayne County, Michigan.

In Athens, the capital of ancient and modern Greece, the one landfill available reached saturation at the end of 2006. With local governments in Greece unwilling to accept Athens's garbage, the city's daily output of 6,000 tons began accumulating on the streets, creating a garbage crisis. The country is finally beginning to pay attention to what European Union environment commissioner Stavros Dimas, himself a Greek, calls the waste hierarchy, where priority is given first to the prevention of waste and then to its reuse, recycling, and recovery.

One of the more recent garbage crises is unfolding in China, where, like everything else in the country, the amount of garbage generated is growing fast. Xinhua, a Chinese wire service, reports that a survey using an airborne remote sensor detected 7,000 garbage dumps, each larger than 50 square meters in the suburbs of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing. A large share of China's garbage is recycled, burned, or composted, but an even larger share is dumped in landfills (where they are available) or simply heaped up in unoccupied areas.

These examples of China's waste problems are disturbing by themselves. But a broader analysis of potential consumption patterns in China in the near future shows why the existing western economic model as a whole will fail.

For almost as long as I can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent of the world's people, consumes a third or more of the earth's resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes more basic resources than the United States does.

Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a third more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is nearly double that of the United States. It uses three times as much steel.

These numbers reflect national consumption, but what would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to that of the United States? If we assume that China‚s economy slows from the 10 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent, then before 2030 income per person in China will reach the level it is in the United States today.

If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2030 China's 1.46 billion people will consume more paper than the world produces today. There go the world's forests.

If we assume that in 2030 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The world currently has 860 million cars. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area comparable to what it now plants in rice.

By 2030 China would need 98 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 85 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world's oil reserves.

What China is teaching us is that the western economic model--the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy--is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2030 may have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American dream." And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either.

The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy--one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. Can we build it fast enough to avoid a breakdown of social systems?

Adapted from Chapter 1, "Entering a New World," and Chapter 6, "Early Signs of Decline," in Lester R. Brown's Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, available for free download and purchase from the Earth Policy Institute.

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In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become the world’s third largest food aid donor.

The key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade—in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.

While hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, the number of people in developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today. Part of this recent rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic crisis. In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.

Dealing with this problem requires addressing the long-term trends leading to growth in demand for food outpacing growth in supply. One key to the threefold expansion in the world grain harvest since 1950 was the rapid adoption in some developing countries of high-yielding wheats and rices (originally developed in Japan) and hybrid corn (from the United States). The spread of these highly productive seeds, combined with a tripling of irrigated area and an 11-fold increase in world fertilizer use, tripled the world grain harvest. Growth in irrigation and fertilizer use essentially removed soil moisture and nutrient constraints on much of the world’s cropland.

Now the outlook is changing. Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use, rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists are now being thoroughly challenged.

The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide. Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From 1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually. This is partly because the yield response to the additional application of fertilizer is diminishing and partly because irrigation water is limited.

This calls for fresh thinking on how to raise cropland productivity. One way is to breed crops that are more tolerant of drought and cold. U.S. corn breeders have developed corn varieties that are more drought-tolerant, enabling corn production to move westward into Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Kansas, the leading U.S. wheat-producing state, has used a combination of drought-resistant varieties in some areas and irrigation in others to expand corn planting to where the state now produces more corn than wheat.

Another way of raising land productivity, where soil moisture permits, is to increase the area of multicropped land that produces more than one crop per year. Indeed, the tripling in the world grain harvest since 1950 is due in part to impressive increases in multiple cropping in Asia. Some of the more common combinations are wheat and corn in northern China, wheat and rice in northern India, and the double or triple cropping of rice in southern China and southern India.

The spread in double cropping of winter wheat and corn on the North China Plain helped boost China’s grain production to where it rivaled that of the United States. Winter wheat grown there yields five tons per hectare. Corn also averages five tons. Together these two crops, grown in rotation, can yield 10 tons per hectare per year. China’s double cropped rice annually yields eight tons per hectare.

Forty years ago, North India produced only wheat, but with the advent of the earlier maturing high-yielding wheats and rices, wheat could be harvested in time to plant rice. This wheat/rice combination is now widely used throughout the Punjab, Haryana, and parts of Uttar Pradesh. This practice yields a combined five tons of grain per hectare, helping to feed India’s 1.2 billion people.

A concerted U.S. effort to both breed earlier maturing varieties and develop cultural practices that would facilitate multiple cropping could substantially boost crop output. If China’s farmers can extensively double crop wheat and corn, then U.S. farmers could do the same if agricultural research and farm policy were reoriented to support it.

Elsewhere, Western Europe, with its mild winters and high-yielding winter wheat, might also be able to double crop more with a summer grain, such as corn, or with a winter oilseed crop. Brazil and Argentina have an extended frost-free growing season that supports extensive multicropping, often wheat or corn with soybeans.

In many countries, including the United States, most of those in Western Europe, and Japan, fertilizer use has reached a level where using more has little effect on crop yields. There are still some places, however, such as most of Africa, where additional fertilizer would help boost yields. Unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa lacks the infrastructure to transport fertilizer economically to the villages where it is needed. As a result of nutrient depletion, grain yields in much of sub-Saharan Africa are stagnating.

One encouraging response to this situation in Africa is the simultaneous planting of grain and leguminous trees. At first the trees grow slowly, permitting the grain crop to mature and be harvested; then the saplings grow quickly to several feet in height, dropping leaves that provide nitrogen and organic matter, both sorely needed in African soils. The wood is then cut and used for fuel. This simple, locally adapted technology, developed by scientists at the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry in Nairobi, has enabled farmers to double their grain yields within a matter of years as soil fertility builds.

Despite local advances, the overall loss of momentum in expanding food production is unmistakable. It will force us to think more seriously about stabilizing population, moving down the food chain, and using the existing harvest more productively. Achieving an acceptable worldwide balance between food and people may now depend on stabilizing population as soon as possible, reducing the unhealthily high consumption of animal products among the affluent, and restricting the conversion of food crops to automotive fuels. It also calls for a concerted effort to raise water use productivity, similar to the gains achieved for land use, and to stabilize climate to avoid crop-withering temperatures and more frequent droughts. These efforts combined can help put us on the path to ensuring enough food for all.

Adapted from Chapter 9, “Feeding Eight Billion Well,” in Lester R. Brown's Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free download and purchase at the Earth Policy Institute. 

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James Lovelock speaking at the World Nuclear Association Symposium in 2007Courtesy Jon and Lu via FlickrWhat is it with Preeminent Thinkers and intensely bleak public lectures? Two weeks ago Earth Institute economist Jeffrey Sachs, in an address at the Asia Society in New York, argued that climate change cannot be averted without massive use of unproven carbon-capture and sequestration technology and that China will provide little to no political help in curbing emissions.

On Monday night at Seattle’s Town Hall, British scientist James Lovelock gave a prediction of the effects of climate change that was even more dire. Efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions are just fine, he said. They just won’t amount to much.

“Our main task, should the earth continue to heat, is to adapt and learn how to survive,” he said. “We’re unlikely to become extinct by global heating, but we may be cut back to one billion people or less.”

That’s approximately a seventh the world’s current population.

Lovelock, who turns 90 next month, made his name in the early 1970s by putting forth the Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth’s physical and biological processes are self-regulating and sustaining, not sentient but in some sense a cohesive “being.” I’m not up-to-speed on Gaia’s complex influence on the scientific establishment, but it’s been ridiculed and dismissed as more metaphysics than science, yet also influential among biologists and ecologists.

In more recent books—The Revenge of Gaia and The Vanishing Face of Gaia—Lovelock has turned his attention to “global heating,” his preferred term because “warming” sounds too benign. He alluded to what Gaia has to say about global heating, though he never really spelled it out.

“The Earth does not just accept climate change passively,” he said. “It responds to what we’re doing to it, and that response is far more frightening than what we’re doing.”

Despite the futility of trying to avoid all of the effects of global heating, Lovelock recommended a few measures. He said nuclear and solar thermal power were the only sensible clean energy responses, and that the U.S. might learn from France about safe handling and disposal of nuclear waste. That rankled a number of audience members who pointed out the problem-riddled waste handling project at the Hanford Nuclear Site in eastern Washington.

Lovelock also seemed open to trying a number of geoengineering climate fixes. One man asked him about injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect solar heat away from the Earth.

Lovelock compared such approaches to dialysis for failing kidneys. “It will buy you time, but it’s not a cure,” he said. “Then again, if your kidneys fail, you never refuse dialysis.”

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"The main driving forces of future greenhouse gas trajectories will continue to be demographic change, social and economic development, and the rate and direction of technological change," according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Emissions Scenarios. Two of these drivers - development and technology - have been the focus of a great deal of discussion among the international community as they continue to work toward a new international climate change agreement in Bonn this week. The third, demographic change, has been conspicuously absent.

Country delegations and NGOs have put forth numerous proposals to increase living standards in the developing world without following the fossil fuel-intensive example set by the industrialized world. Other proposals outline how transfers of technology and greater support for development activities among vulnerable communities will better enable them to adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change.

However, demographic change has not come up in the context of these discussions. This is strange, because demographic change is likely to shape our world in significant ways over the next several decades.

In its latest round of projections, the UN Population Division indicates that the world's population will grow from today's 6.7 billion to somewhere between 8.0 and 10.5 billion by 2050.

During informal conversations with country delegates and colleagues at other civil society organizations, I have found near universal agreement that population growth will affect greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2050. And for those who are thinking critically about how vulnerable communities will adapt to increasing water scarcity or diminishing agricultural production, they know that rapid population growth will further threaten human survival. Researchers at Population Action International have highlighted the importance of population trends for climate change mitigation and adaptation in a new working paper and fact sheet.

The UN presents a wide range for population in 2050 because population growth is sensitive to the conditions of the world around us. For example, more education for girls and economic opportunities for women lead to lower birth rates. Expanding access to reproductive health care and family planning services can have an even more direct and immediate impact.

Currently, more than 200 million women around the world say they would like to avoid a pregnancy, but don't have access to modern contraception-something those of us in the US take for granted. Reversing downward trends in funding for reproductive health and family planning programs could help to remedy that, and would be a good start in shooting for the lower end of the UN's population projections.

The world already agreed on a goal of universal access to these services at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994, where the US and 178 other nations signed onto this consensus. Universal access to reproductive health is also one of the Millennium Development Goals (see Target 5b). This goal from the health sector should be integrated into the world's response to climate change and its human impacts. While talking about reproductive health might be new and a little uncomfortable for climate diplomats, they should get over it - it is a universally accepted goal that has great potential to strengthen climate change solutions.

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This is the second dispatch by Population Action International from global climate change talks in Bonn, Germany.  Read the first.

A Bangladeshi woman searches for drinking water after a cyclone.Photo: Abir Abdullah/OxfamOne of the under-reported issues about climate change is its dramatic affect on women.  A side event I attended this afternoon, organized by the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA), included speakers from all around the world, representing men, women, government agencies, NGOs, North and South. But their messages were unified: women’s historic disadvantages -- limited access to resources, restricted rights, under-representation in decision making -- have made them disproportionately vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Women make up 70 percent of the world’s poorest people, pointed out Sirkka Haunia, Finland’s chief negotiator. More women die in weather-related natural disasters.

“Seventy percent of subsistence farmers in my country are women,” said William Kojo Agyemang-Bonsu, Ghana’s chief negotiator. “When climate changes rainfall patterns, they will be the ones who will be most negatively affected.”  

There is no quick fix to overcoming climate change’s sexist tendencies. As several in the meeting pointed out, it is akin to a running a marathon or climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. “It’s a sad state of affairs when only 16 percent of the scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are women,” said a female member of the IPCC, the body charged with assessing the state of climate change science for policymakers. 

But they are not just victims, the panelists pointed out. “Women everywhere in the world possess unique knowledge and skill, and are active agents of change,” said Lorena Aguilar of the World Conservation Union.  According to Khamarunga Banda, of ENERGIA in South Africa, “Women make the majority of choices about individual lifestyles and are the ones who change ‘business as usual’ -- so they will need to be central figures in reducing energy use and switching to cleaner sources of fuel.”  Building on these ideas, the GGCA’s strategy is to ensure that gender dimensions of climate challenges and solutions find a place in the text of the next climate agreement.

My organization, Population Action International, embraces the idea of greater gender equity leading to better and more lasting climate change solutions. By meeting women's needs -- including needs for adequate reproductive-health and family-planning services -- we can improve the health and well-being of women and families, increasing resilience in the face of climate change and putting the breaks on population growth that is associated with rising greenhouse-gas emissions.

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At the opening of the international climate change talks in Bonn, Germany, today, representatives from governments around the world shared their opinions on a newly released draft of a global climate treaty that will be debated and (perhaps) finalized when they meet again in Copenhagen in December.

Children herd goats in drought-ridden Ethiopia, on land that was once rich pasture.Photo: Nick Danziger/OxfamWhile representatives of the industrialized world somewhat sheepishly offered up their countries’ meager progress in slowing the pace of their rampant growth in emissions, representatives from the developing world did their best to sound the alarm.

“We need to act urgently, as the most vulnerable among us are suffering daily,” said the representative of the G77 and China. “Climate change is the defining challenge of our times.”

“Climate change is one of humanity’s greatest injustices; addressing it aggressively will determine our survival,” said the representative from the Alliance of Small Island States. “We are concerned about efforts to downplay the science for political expediency.”

“We should not forget that we are all in this together,” said the representative of Togo, “and a sinking boat is a catastrophe for all of us.”

Over the next two weeks, these delegates, who make up the climate convention’s “Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action,” will debate, expand, and refine the draft text of an agreement. They will endeavor to agree on who must cut emissions, by how much, and on what timescale. And they will discuss how the industrialized countries will help the developing world adapt to the climatic changes that are already here and are destined to get much worse before they get better.

While the official country delegations hammer out these details, those of us with NGO observer status sit in the back of the room listening to simultaneous translation through headsets, furiously typing notes, and exchanging knowing glances when Australia says something disastrous but predictable.

Throughout these two weeks, we will come together in various strategic working groups and alliances, determining strategies for injecting, protecting, or jettisoning specific language in the text that relates to our various missions and goals. The hallways outside meeting rooms resonate with animated conversations. Reports and fact sheets fly off tables in the exhibit area. A full schedule of fascinating side events clamors for our attention.

And we'll use the opportunity of this gathering to network and communicate new or under-reported issues. My organization, Population Action International, is here because we believe population issues are critical in the climate change equation. And we believe that there are some great population-related policies -- like expanding access to reproductive health and family-planning programs to the millions of women around the world who want it but don't have it -- that can and should be part of a comprehensive solution to climate change. Not many people are talking about this. We're working to change that -- in Bonn, Copenhagen, and beyond.

Read a second dispatch from Kathleen Mogelgaard of Population Action International.

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Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change

Q. Dear Umbra,

You once replied to a request for some simple things all environmentally concerned individuals should do by pointing them toward some "Top Ten lists" for eco-minded people. Without a doubt, hands down, the number 1 action that should be followed for anyone concerned with the environment is to limit your procreation to 1 child per individual (2 per couple), i.e., replace yourself only. This dwarfs anything you might do in other areas, like using compact fluorescents or choosing paper over plastic, or weatherizing your home.

Stan B.
Williamsburg, Mich.

A. Dearest Stan,

The ten-foot pole gives reproduction another poke. In '03 and '05, the Royal We tickled all our reproductive clocks with brief reminders to consider childbearing and childrearing as ecologically significant acts. Since then I have followed my own advice and borne seven children, all of whom have grown up to work for Environmental Defense.

The right to bear arms ... and legs.iStock

As you know, this is a hot topic, and there's a reason I poke at it only occasionally. I'm almost hesitant to do so now, but I feel strongly about one aspect, so here goes.

Environmentalists tend toward believing that our goal is preservation of the environment as it currently exists, with extra credit if we improve anything already destroyed by humans. Humans are the problem in this picture, and hence new humans are seen by some as an additional difficulty. The connection between population pressures and environmental degradation are logical and documented. People use natural resources to live, which is in part why we have deforestation, extinction, soil depletion, water supply problems, and excess greenhouse gases. High population growth is environmentally significant in areas with poor resource management, poor government, and poverty; it is also significant in areas with excess wealth and high resource consumption.

I'm not going to say too much about our personal reproduction today. Instead, I want to talk about a crucial role environmentalists should play in our local, national, and global communities.

It is very important for us to advocate for accessible family planning programs, for decent education for girls and women, and for women's rights. We have all heard about the cause and effect of equal status for women. Women bear fewer children when we have access to affordable contraception and understand how to use it. We delay childbearing when we receive decent education, and are also better able to care for the children we do have. When we have better if not equal social status and rights, childbearing can be a choice.

Environmentalists need to advocate for girls and women at all levels. In our home communities, we need to be sure that girls are receiving equal opportunities, all youth are receiving substantial reproductive education, and teenagers are engaged in interesting projects rather than marking time with sex and drugs. Nationally and internationally, we need to actively advocate for family planning funding, the eradication of bogus abstinence-only programming, and policies that enrich the lives of women of all ages.

Social justice is inextricably linked with the natural environment. Choosing to limit the amount of children we have needs to be a realistic option for women worldwide.

Adieu, ten-foot pole!

Javelinly,
Umbra

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PARIS—Surging population growth, climate change, reckless irrigation and chronic waste are placing the world’s water supplies at threat, a landmark U.N. report said on Thursday.

  Compiled by 24 U.N. agencies, the 348-page document gave a grim assessment of the state of the planet’s freshwater, especially in developing countries, and described the outlook for coming generations as deeply worrying.

  Water is part of the complex web of factors that determine prosperity and stability, it said.

  Lack of access to water helps drive poverty and deprivation and breeds the potential for unrest and conflict, it warned.

  “Water is linked to the crises of climate change, energy and food supplies and prices, and troubled financial markets,” the third World Water Development Report said.

  “Unless their links with water are addressed and water crises around the world are resolved, these other crises may intensify and local water crises may worsen, converging into a global water crisis and leading to political insecurity at various levels.”

  The report pointed to a double squeeze on fresh water.

  On one side was human impact. There were six billion humans in 2000, a tally that has already risen to 6.5 billion and could scale nine billion by 2050.

  Population growth, especially in cities in poor countries, is driving explosive demand for water, prompting rivers in thirsty countries to be tapped for nearly every drop and driving governments to pump out so-called fossil water, the report said.

  These are aquifers that are hundreds of thousands of years old and whose extraction is not being replenished by rainfall. Mining them for water today means depriving future generations of liquid treasure.

  Fuelling this is misuse or abuse of water, through pollution, unbridled irrigation, pipe leakage and growing of water-craving crops in deserts.

  Applying pressure from the other side is climate change, said the report.

  Shifts to weather systems, unleashed by man-made global warming, will alter rainfall patterns and reduce snow melt, scientists say.

  The water report was first issued in 2003 and is updated every three years.

The latest issue, entitled “Water in a Changing World,” is published ahead of the fifth World Water Forum, taking place in Istanbul from March 16 to 22.

  The mammoth document made these points:

  —DEMOGRAPHIC GROWTH is boosting water stress in developing countries, where hydrological resources are often meager. The global population is growing by 80 million people a year, 90 percent of it in poorer countries. Demand for water is growing by 64 billion cubic metres (2.2 trillion cubic feet) per year, roughly equivalent to Egypt’s annual water demand today.

  —In the past 50 years, EXTRACTION from rivers, lakes and aquifers has tripled to help meet population growth and demands for water-intensive food such as rice, cotton, dairy and meat products. Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of the withdrawals, a figure that reaches more than 90 percent in some developing countries.

  —ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION from water pollution and excessive extraction now costs many billions of dollars. Damage in the Middle East and North Africa, the world’s most water-stressed region, amounts to some $9 billion a year, or between 2.1-7.4 percent of GDP.

  —The outlook is mixed for key UN MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS, which in 2000 set the deadline of 2015 for halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. The target on drinking water is on track but the tally of people without improved sanitation will have decreased only slightly by 2015, from 2.5 billion to 2.4 billion.

  —Water stress, amplified by climate change, will pose a mounting SECURITY CHALLENGE. The struggle for water could threaten fragile states and drive regional rivalry.

  “Conflicts about water can occur at all scales,” the report warned, adding: “Hydrologic shocks that may occur through climate change increase the risk of major national and international security threats, especially in unstable areas.”

  —Between $92.4 billion and $148 billion are needed annually in INVESTMENT to build and maintain water supply systems, sanitation and irrigation. China and developed countries in Asia alone face financial needs of $38.2-51.4 billion each year.

  —CONSERVATION and reuse of water, including recycled sewage, are the watchwords of the future. The report also stressed sustainable water management, with realistic PRICING to curb waste. It gave the example of India where free or almost-free water had led to huge waste in irrigation, causing soils to be waterlogged and salt-ridden.

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The population of West African chimpanzees in Cote d'Ivoire has declined 90 percent in the last 18 years, according to a new study published in Current Biology. In the 1960s, the West African country was home to about 100,000 of the apes; in 1989-1990, scientists counted 8,000 to 12,000, which they estimated to be half the remaining population of the species. The most recent count turned up 800 to 1,200 chimps. "We were not expecting such a drastic decrease," says lead author Geneviève Campbell. Researchers attribute the chimp decline to a 50 percent jump in Côte d'Ivoire's human population since 1990, as well as civil unrest that has been simmering since 2002. Hunting and deforestation have skyrocketed; one national park has lost a full 93 percent of its forest cover since 2002. And more bad news may be ahead: External funding for Taï National Park, where chimpanzees are holding strong, is scheduled to end in 2010.

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