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By Manipadma Jena Scientific and diplomatic discussions have steered clear of the contentious question of population growth and greenhouse gases. UNFPA’s 2009 State of the World Population report tackles the question head-on and asserts that smaller families means less people and less greenhouse gases
The latest issue of State of the World Population 2009, the annual report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) that takes an in-depth look at current global issues in relation to population dynamics, was released on November 18, 2009. The focus of the report is ‘Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate’. While the debate on climate change remains somewhat abstract and confined to technical discussions on countries’ carbon emissions, State of the World Population 2009 (SWPR) shifts the focus to how human beings -- from individuals to communities and world populations -- can both influence and be affected by a warming of the earth’s atmosphere. Climate change is about people, it says. People cause climate change. People are affected by climate change. People need to adapt to it; only people have the power to stop it. And it is equity between the genders and equity between rich and poor within a country and within countries that will help control climate change. The report asserts that international climate change agreements and national policies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they take into account population dynamics, the relations between the sexes in terms of family planning and women’s access to reproductive healthcare and equal opportunities in all spheres of life. The logic is simple: smaller families, less people, less greenhouse gases. The connection between population growth and greenhouse gases has barely featured in scientific and diplomatic discussions so far. One reason for this, SWPR argues, is that population growth and what, if anything, should be done about it is a difficult, controversial and divisive topic. The report claims that fear of appearing supportive of population ‘control’ has, until recently, held back any mention of population in the climate change debate. In a broader sense, climate change is partly the result of an approach to development and economic growth that has proven to be unsustainable. Halting climate change requires a fresh, more equitable approach to the way we live, produce and consume. An indisputable fact today is that the poor, particularly in developing countries, are likely to face the major brunt of climate change even though the carbon footprint of the poorest 1 billion people is just 3% of the world’s total footprint. The poor are likely to live in ‘risky’ areas vulnerable to floods, storms and rising seas. They are more likely to depend on agriculture and fishing for a livelihood; they have the least means to fall back on and adapt, and therefore will go hungry or lose their livelihood when climate change-related disasters strike. In its overview, the report looks at the fundamentals of climate change: the different greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) in the atmosphere that are responsible for the climate we experience today, which is already 0.74 degrees Celsius warmer since the late-1800s. That’s not so much, you could say, but the impacts we already feel could have catastrophic consequences if temperatures continue to rise by as much as 6.4 degrees Celsius by 2100. As the greenhouse effect heats the earth’s surface and atmosphere, Leucadia Quispe (60) in a little village in Bolivia, in the icy foothills of the Andes, spends hours fetching water in five-litre cans from further up the slope for her shrinking patch of potato and oca, and her last surviving llamas. Over the past 20 years, the Chacaltaya glaciers have been reduced to just a chunk of snow and ice nestled below the 18,000-foot summit. Women will bear the brunt of climate change, warns SWPR. Melting glaciers have caused sea levels to rise 2 cm in the 18th century, 6 cm in the 19th century and 19 cm in the 20th century; a rise of 30 cm is projected for the 21st century. But, as ice sheets disintegrate, sea levels could increase by 70-130 cm per century, displacing 8 million people each in Africa and South America, 14 million in Europe and 100 million in Asia, mostly eastern China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. This would cause mass migrations, mostly within national boundaries but sometimes across them. “One of the gravest effects of climate change may be on human migration,” said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as early as 1990. A rising sea eating into people’s farmlands and homes, chronic floods, recurrent drought with adverse impacts on livelihoods, public health, food security and water availability will have a huge impact on human mobility. Recorded natural disasters have doubled from approximately 200 a year to 400 a year over the last two decades, with 7 out of 10 disasters recorded as being climate-related. The total number of people suffering their impacts has tripled over the past decade, with an average 165 million people directly affected each year. From 1998 to 2007, 2.2 billion people were affected by climate disasters compared to 1.8 billion in the 10 previous years. The most widely used estimate of the number of people who will be displaced by environmental factors, by 2050, is 200 million. Much of this, in India and other developing countries, will be rural to urban migration, exerting even more pressure on scarce natural resources like water and land. These days when Oreba Obiin (51) steps out of her home she steps into the sea. Oreba, her husband and two sons live in the atoll nation of Kiribati -- 33 atolls, tiny specks of narrow land made of coral, sand and limestone barely 3 metres above sea level in the middle of the vast Pacific ocean. Oreba has had to add sand to the floor of their home many times to keep it dry; the sea keeps rising. Soon her head will touch the ceiling! In a few years they may have to move to another country. Already, one in ten people worldwide lives in a coastal city within a few metres of the sea. Repeated flooding in large parts of Nepal has resulted in more and more men migrating from mountainous areas to newly developed cities; the women are left behind as heads of families in areas prone to flooding. Almost all net future population growth is projected to occur in or gravitate towards cities, implying a doubling of urban populations and a huge jump in the number of slumdwellers by 2050. People jostling to occupy limited land will result not only in conflict situations but also bring on growing health hazards not a little aggravated by rising temperatures. In May 2009, the medical journal The Lancet called climate change ‘the biggest global health threat of the 21st century’. The epidemiological outcome of climate change on disease patterns worldwide will be profound, especially in developing countries already vulnerable to poor health and woefully inadequate healthcare systems. Millions of additional people may be affected by malaria (and other vector-borne diseases like dengue fever and H1N1), as rising temperatures allow disease-carrying vectors to live at higher altitudes. Changing rainfall and temperature patterns will make the availability of water and sanitation more complicated, fuelling disease. HIV, AIDS and climate change share a more complicated relationship. The future course of the pandemic could hinge on rising food insecurity, among other factors. Of particular concern to organisations working with HIV/AIDS is the possibility that climate change could reduce income from natural resources like farming and fishing and drive some young and poor women to sex work, thereby increasing HIV infection rates. To combat coastal erosion, Oreba and her people plant mangrove seedlings. In Bangladesh, poorer women lost their chickens time after time as they drowned in repeated floods. Soon the women evolved a strategy that solved their problem: they gave up on chickens and raised ducks instead. Women may be vulnerable, but they are also the most innovative adapters. The report highlights adaptation strategies being adopted by communities of women in India and Bangladesh. It reproduces Keya Acharya’s report for Inter Press News Agency on a 5,000-strong women’s collective in arid Andhra Pradesh that successfully adopted chemical-free, non-irrigated organic agriculture to combat climate change. It cites the novel ways microfinance women’s groups are adapting livelihoods as climate change impacts their lives with recurrent floods and cyclones. An attempt has been made to demystify and simplify the issue of climate change without losing track of the vast web of factors that cause it, and those that result from it. The need of the hour for writers on climate change is numbers and statistics to back the claim that what they write about is climate change not just environmental degradation. SWPR crunches numbers from credible sources, explains them, and also provides a wealth of sources for those delving deeper in its last chapters for technical notes, supplemented by demographic, social and economic indicators of every country. A glossary of basic terms related to climate change as well as gender is provided. At a time when the media is going overboard on climate change, on the eve of COP 15, SWPR could be an invaluable reference point on the subject. ‘At the Frontier: Young People and Climate Change’, a 44-page youth supplement, comes in the form of seven engrossing testimonies by seven young people from different countries and callings who have already experienced or live in the midst of situations that will be impacted by changing climate. Their stories are examples of what life will be like for millions more young people in the future if we fail to take action to adapt and mitigate climate change. For the full report, visit http://www.unfpa.org/swp/. (Manipadma Jena is a senior development journalist working out of Bhubaneswar) Infochange News & Features, November 2009
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