Posted on September 2, 2010
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The population of England and Wales took a record leap upwards last year, official estimates showed yesterday. The number topped 55million - a rise of more than 400,000 on the 2008 figure. The 0.74 per cent rise was the highest percentage annual increase since the Sixties. It also meant that the population for the UK as a whole will have surpassed the 62million mark.
The latest population estimates published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics brought warnings from MPs and critics of immigration policy yesterday. Tory MP James Clappison said: ‘These are alarming and unsustainable figures which imply that a UK population of 70million will be reached sooner rather than later. The Government must address this issue as a matter of urgency, and bring the population under control by controlling immigration, which is the major driver of population growth.’
Sir Andrew Green, of the thinktank Migrationwatch, said: ‘This is yet more evidence that the population of England is growing at a completely unacceptable-rate, two-thirds of it due to immigration. It is time that the political parties came out of denial about population and took serious measures to get its growth down to a sensible level.’
Last year’s 404,000 jump in the population of England and Wales is greater than that recorded in other recent years of fast growth. Until 2000, the annual rise was below 200,000. A spokesman for the Home Office said yesterday: ‘Introducing a limit on those from outside the European Union who come to work is one of the ways by which we will reduce net migration back to the levels of the 1990s, to the tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands. While it is necessary to attract the world’s best talent to the UK, we need to balance the needs of business with the impacts and costs of migration.’
It was confirmed last week by the House of Commons Library that England has become the most crowded country in Europe, barring only Malta.
More: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1308190/Record-population-increase-biggest-Sixties.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz0yNcyLnYg
Posted on September 2, 2010
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Look out wildebeest, here come the cars. Tanzania’s government plans to build a commercial road in the north of Serengeti National Park, cutting through the migratory route of 2 million wildebeest and zebra. The road would cut the animals off from their dry-season watering holes, causing the wildebeest population to dwindle to just a quarter of current levels, says the Frankfurt Zoological Society in Germany. It could also be a collision zone for humans and animals, leading to casualties on both sides, and there is a risk that transported livestock would spread disease, the society adds.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has written to Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete to voice its concerns. While praising Tanzania’s commitment to conservation, noting that 38 per cent of its land is already protected, the IUCN recommends carrying out a full assessment of the road’s environmental impact. Meanwhile, the African Wildlife Foundation is campaigning for the road’s path to be altered so that it passes south of the park, avoiding the migration route.
Despite the ongoing campaign, the road is set to go ahead, with construction kicking off in 2012. In a recent speech, Kikwete said the best he could do was to leave the part of the road that crossed the migratory route unpaved.
More: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727763.800-road-to-cut-off-serengeti-migration-route.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=environment
Posted on September 2, 2010
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When students return to the classroom at Bopolu Central High School this year, there will be something not seen at the school since it reopened after Liberia’s long civil war: senior-class women. Marking a milestone for a school struggling with a gender gap, eight girls are expected among Bopolu’s 24 seniors. While Bopolu’s primary grades are more gender-balanced, school attendance falls sharply after the mandatory first six years of instruction, most drastically among young women. “I’m telling you that a single female has not graduated from this school,” said John V. Lombeh, the vice principal for instruction. “The good thing is that we are proud to announce to you that we will be having our first batch of females graduating from secondary school this new academic year.”
In a nation with Africa’s only female president, Liberian girls are outpaced by boys in educational enrolment, retention and completion rates from the earliest grades through university. Nationally, for every 10 boys in primary school there are nine girls; for every 10 boys in high school, there are fewer than seven girls, and in some rural high schools like Bopolu, there are none at all. Only 18 percent of girls who make it to high school graduate, compared with 25 percent of boys.
Girls also have few role models in school. Just 12 percent of primary school teachers are women, and they account for five percent of junior high and three percent of high school educators, according to the Ministry of Education.
The Liberian government and international donors such as the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, are trying to improve educational conditions and opportunities for girls through special learning opportunities and inducements. Female education is listed as a priority in the government’s 2010 Education Sector Plan, with calls for erasing gender disparities within a decade.
More: http://allafrica.com/stories/201009010008.html
Posted on September 2, 2010
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A global fund to help poorer countries switch to green industrial technology is vital in any new international pact to battle global warming, Switzerland’s top climate change negotiator said on Wednesday. The official, Franz Perrez, was speaking at a news conference on the eve of a two-day gathering of environmental ministers and experts from some 45 countries to discuss how to reach agreement on a funding deal. “An agreement on viable long-term financing is one of the very important building blocks for a new convention to combat the challenge of climate change,” said Perrez, whose country has organised the informal meeting together with Mexico.
In December, Mexico is to host a new formal effort to clear the way for a convention. A United Nations summit in Copenhagen at the end of last year ended in serious disarray. Developing nations say billions of dollars are vital to help them start acting to slow global warming by shifting from fossil fuels, and to cope with challenges created by climate change ranging from droughts and floods to rising sea levels. Big emerging economies like China, India and Brazil say they should not be hog-tied by environmental rules unless the West - which they blame for global warming - helps pay the cost.
It was agreed in Copenhagen that what Perrez dubbed a “fast-track” financing of some $30 billion was needed for the years 2010-2012 to create confidence, but the larger goal is to ensure by 2020 that $100 billion a year can be mobilized.
Environment ministers hope for progress on financing when they gather in Cancun from November 29 to December 10, despite austerity programmes adopted by rich nations in the wake of the world economic and financial crisis of 2008-09.
More: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6803YP20100901?
Posted on September 2, 2010
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Photo: Nomadic Communities Trust
In the remote and rural district of Samburu, northern Kenya, where paved roads are scarce and motorised transport hard to come by, reaching the mostly pastoralist and nomadic inhabitants with HIV/AIDS services requires an unusual approach.
John Lokolale, 21, a Samburu Moran (warrior), said he did not know what the word condom meant until recently. “Now I know a condom because I have seen it,” he told IRIN/PlusNews. “These days, when I get a girl I tell her I will use a condom because I have a stock in my house. They brought it here with a camel, and I kept many for myself.”
The Nomadic Communities Trust (NCT), a community-based health services organization, started using camels to reach the Samburu people with mobile clinics in 2006. “We realized we had to be innovative … and we looked around; we are glad camels have come in handy in [delivering] not only condoms but also drugs and other reproductive health services,” said Rose Kimanzi, an NCT field coordinator.
The camel clinics offer family planning services, antenatal care, palliative care, HIV testing and condoms. NCT has trained 45 local people to provide information about HIV and condoms and they have so far reached more than 68,000 people. According to the 2007 Kenya AIDS Indicator Survey, Samburu district has an HIV prevalence of 6.1 percent, slightly lower than the national average of 7.4 percent. “When people come to places where we have set up camp they can receive all the services,” said Kimanzi. “We have witnessed comparatively wide acceptance of condom use and family planning services.”
More: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=90351
Posted on September 2, 2010
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The old stereotype of the gold-digging hussy who gets pregnant to trap a man into marriage seems to have faded, probably because women are not as economically dependent on men as they once were. But that’s not to say that pregnancy is no longer being wielded as a weapon: researchers who work in family planning and with victims of domestic violence say it is women who are now being threatened with pregnancy by their partners.
Reproductive coercion, as it’s known, takes several forms. Partners may verbally or physically threaten women if they use birth control or seek abortions, or they may throw away or damage birth control and remove condoms during sex. It usually takes place within an already abusive relationship, especially those that are emotionally abusive.
“It’s another way a male partner tries to control a female partner,” says Elizabeth Miller, associate professor of pediatrics at the U.C. Davis School of Medicine, who has led much of what little research there is on the issue. “Women say their partner tells them he wants to leave a legacy or have them in his life forever.”
In a study Miller published in January, involving about 1,300 female patients ages 16 to 29 at family-planning clinics in Northern California, about a third of those who reported being in violent relationships said they had experienced reproductive coercion. But while the problem seems to be most acute among the young, it isn’t exclusively so. In a study Miller co-authored in April, as many as 75% of women between the ages of 18 and 49 who had a history of being in an abusive relationship also reported some form of reproductive coercion.
More: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2014901,00.html#ixzz0yNVZtvRB
Posted on September 1, 2010
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A woman is given a contraception injection
A record low in teenage pregnancy figures could signal a brighter future for the region’s children according to health chiefs. The high teenage pregnancy rate was highlighted as a key area of concern in the region’s 2009 health report. But a boost in Long Acting Reversible Contraception procedures following a promotional campaign from the region’s Teenage Pregnancy Partnership appears to have triggered a 27 per cent drop in cases.
Councillor Stuart Wilson, lead member for health at North Lincol shire Council, said: “In our role with the Teenage Pregnancy Partnership we have been pushing Long Acting Reversible Contraception (LARCs) and the take-up has been extremely high. “While some teenagers will choose to get pregnant and for very good reasons, it is important we give young people as much control over their lives as possible and the LARCs are a great way of doing that.”
The region’s Teenage Pregnancy Partnership is run jointly between North Lincolnshire Council and NHS North Lincolnshire. With the Primary Care Trust set for closure in 2013, Mr Wilson stated the work carried out so far meant the council was in a strong position to carry on reducing the number of teenage conceptions. He said: “With public health issues it is important to be pro-active rather than re-active. We have worked very well with NHS North Lincolnshire in this respect in recent years, to get the message out there you need everyone singing from the same hymn sheet. The council will obviously take a much greater responsibility once the PCT is abolished, and we are confident with the work we have undertaken already we will be able to make a smooth transition.”
The news comes a week after Department of Health figures revealed levels of obesity and smoking have plummeted in North Lincolnshire over the past year. The areas have all been targeted in a bid to reduce health inequalities across the region, after the 2009 health report revealed North Lincolnshire is in the bottom 25 per cent in the UK for life expectancy gaps between rich and poor.
Mr Wilson said: “Tackling these health inequalities is obviously a major priority and bringing down the number of teenage conceptions is a crucial part in that. The affect an unwanted pregnancy can have on a young person’s hopes and aspirations can be devastating.
More: http://www.thisisscunthorpe.co.uk/news/Bright-future-region-s-children/article-2589963-detail/article.html
Posted on September 1, 2010
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The U.N. panel of climate scientists will look at the costs of “second best” ways of fighting global warming amid doubts that all countries will sign up to U.N.-led action, a leading expert said on Tuesday. Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the U.N. working group looking at the economics of global warming, said the last U.N. report in 2007 had assumed that all countries would take part and that new technologies for curbing greenhouse gases would be available.
The next reports in 2013-14 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is facing calls for an overhaul of its management and better fact-checking after errors in the 2007 assessment, will include other options. “We intend to carry out ’second best’ scenarios, where we assume we have a fragmented climate regime, where we have limited availability of technologies, to describe a much more realistic policy space,” Edenhofer told Reuters by telephone.
More: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67U4OX20100831?
Posted on September 1, 2010
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Surging wheat prices drove international food prices up five percent last month in the biggest month-on-month increase since November 2009, FAO announced. The FAO Food price Index (FFPI) averaged 176 points in August, up nearly nine points from July, FAO said in its latest update on the global cereals supply and demand situation. The increase - five percent - brought the Index up to its highest level since September 2008, but still 38 percent down from its peak in June 2008.
The FFPI surge mainly reflected the sudden sharp rise in international wheat prices following drought in the Russian Federation and the country’s subsequent restrictions on wheat sales. But other drivers included higher sugar and oilseed prices.
FAO’s update said that the forecast for world cereal production in 2010 has been lowered by 41 million tonnes to 2 238 million tonnes from 2 279 million tonnes reported in June. However, even at this lower level, world cereal output in 2010 would be the third highest on record and above the five-year average. Among the major cereals, wheat accounted for most of the cut, reflecting mainly smaller crops in the leading producers in the CIS due to adverse weather.
Under the present forecast world cereal utilization would slightly exceed production in 2010/11. This would trigger a two percent contraction in world ending stocks from their 8-year-high opening levels and a small decline in world cereal stocks-to-use ratio. At 23 percent, however, the ratio would still remain well above the 19.5 percent low witnessed in the 2007/08 food crisis period.
More: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/45006/icode/
Posted on September 1, 2010
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The Renewable Fuels Agency says it is disappointed that the vast majority of biofuels sold on UK forecourts do not conform to environmental standards. The body said fuel suppliers were meeting legally binding volume targets but some were falling “well short” on achieving voluntary green standards. But since biofuels have had to be mixed into forecourt fuel, there had been a reduction in emissions, it added. The figures are based on 2009/10 data, which will be finalised in early 2011.
The Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA) is the UK’s independent regulator for biofuels, and is responsible for the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO), which requires a percentage of fuel sold on forecourts to be biofuels.
In the first year of the RTFO, 2008/09, the target was 2.5%, and it is set to gradually increase until 2013/14 when 5% of all fuel sales have to be from a renewable source. Provisional figures for the second year of the obligation showed that almost 1.6bn tonnes of biofuels had been sold, primarily as a blend with traditional transport fossil fuels (petrol and diesel). This equated to 3.33% of total sales, exceeding the government’s target of 3.25%.
However, a RFA spokesman said that, despite the volume target being achieved, the agency was “disappointed that more companies did not source more fuel that was produced according to a recognised environmental standard. We believe that sustainable biofuel is available, in sufficient volume, should these companies wish to procure it,” he told BBC News.
More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11112837
Posted on September 1, 2010
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The ice may not retreat as much as feared this year, but what remains may be more rotten than robust. Last September September, David Barber was on board the Canadian icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, heading into the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska. He was part of a team investigating ice conditions in autumn, the time when Arctic sea ice shrinks to its smallest extent before starting to grow again as winter sets in.
Barber, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, went to sleep one night at midnight, just before the ship was due to reach a region of very thick sea ice. The Amundsen is only capable of breaking solid ice about a metre thick, so according to the ice forecasts for ships, the region should have been impassable. Yet when Barber woke up early the next morning, the ship was still cruising along almost as fast as usual. Either someone had made a mistake and the ship was headed for catastrophe, or there was something very wrong with the ice, he thought, as he rushed to the bridge in his pyjamas.
On the surface, the situation in the Arctic looks dramatic enough. In September 2007, the total extent of sea with surface ice shrank further than ever recorded before - to nearly 40 per cent below the long-term average. This low has yet to be surpassed. But the extent of sea ice is not all that matters, as Barber found. Look deeper and there are even more dramatic changes. This is something everyone should be concerned about because the transformation of the Arctic will affect us all.
The record low in 2007 cannot be blamed on global warming alone; weather played a big role too. That year saw a build-up of high pressure over the Beaufort Sea and a trough of low pressure over northern Siberia - a weather pattern called the Arctic dipole anomaly. It brings warm, southerly winds that increase melting. The winds also drive sea ice away from the Siberian coast and out of the Arctic Ocean towards the Atlantic, where it melts.
More: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727751.300-arctic-ice-less-than-meets-the-eye.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=environment
Posted on September 1, 2010
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Kenya announced on Tuesday its population stands at 38.6 million after a national census conducted last year, marking an increase of around 10 million since the last census in 1999. Planning Minister Wycliffe Oparanya said the increase of about one million people per year puts pressure on resources and he urged for more investment and family planning to improve the welfare of the 38,610,097 Kenyans.
“This high rate of population growth has adverse effects on spending on infrastructure, health, education, environment, water and other social and economic sectors,” Oparanya said while announcing the census results. “Investment will be required in family planning services. In fact we are launching aggressive family planning programmes this year… to improve the welfare of Kenyans,” he added.
Only 30 percent of Kenyans — mainly those in urban areas — have access to piped water, with other water sources being streams, dams and boreholes, while 74.5 percent use the bush as toilets. The new figures also showed a 50-50 split between men and women and its five most populous ethnic groups being the Kikuyu, Luhya, Kalenjin, Luo and Kamba.
Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ix_3hHQ0olTbebtyjJ7TS7I5truw
Posted on September 1, 2010
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Pharmacists are renewing calls for the ‘morning-after pill’ to be available over the counter. At present, women who wish to take emergency hormonal contraception require a prescription from a doctor.
The Irish Pharmacy Union (IPU) said its members have the skills to dispense such drugs and provide appropriate advice and counselling to patients. It is important that patients get timely access to emergency hormonal contraception and many often find it difficult to get a prescription at the weekend,” said spokesperson Kathy Maher, a pharmacist in Co Meath. Pharmacists should be able to provide such a service and this could be done with appropriate advice, counselling and within agreed protocols.”
Ms Maher emphasised that the morning-after pill “should never be the only form of contraception used” and said pharmacists could also refer patients back to their GP where appropriate.
The IPU represents about 1,500 community pharmacists throughout the country.
Posted on August 31, 2010
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The round the world record holder explains why she has turned her back on the sea to crusade for the planet.
Article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/sailing/7966301/Ellen-MacArthur-I-cant-live-with-the-sea-any-more.html
which concludes: Though she loves children – the Ellen MacArthur Trust is dedicated to helping those with cancer – she says it is “not in her mind” to start a family of her own. “But I don’t know where I’ll be in three years’ time. This may be the rest of my life – but then I said that with sailing.”
Posted on August 31, 2010
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Automobiles are parked for roughly 95% of their lifetimes yet we know little about how parking spaces affect the environment. Using five different approaches, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, US, determined that there are between 105 million and 2 billion parking spaces in the US for roughly 300 million vehicles. The energy consumed and polluting gases emitted when constructing and maintaining these infrastructures, as well as by roadside paved areas, becomes important when considered along with the environmental impact of vehicles themselves.
More: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/43569
Posted on August 31, 2010
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Afghan authorities are keeping a close eye on world wheat prices as they seek to boost strategic stocks ahead of winter and ensure that demand is met as some traditional suppliers halt exports. Afghanistan is among the most vulnerable countries in the world for food supply, according to the Food Security Risk Index 2010, compiled with the UN’s World Food Programme. The country, one of the world’s poorest, faces a shortfall of 700,000 tonnes of wheat, the mainstay of the Afghan diet, the agriculture ministry said.
Afghanistan usually imports most of its annual shortfall from Russia, Pakistan and Kazakhstan. Devastating natural disasters — floods in Pakistan, drought in Russia — meant Kabul would rely on Kazakhstan this year, said Majidullah Qarar, ministry spokesman. “This year’s output of wheat is predicted at 4.5 million tonnes while the need for wheat this year is 5.2 million tonnes, which means we need 700,000 tonnes of wheat to make up for the shortfall in production,” he told AFP.
While the world has plenty of wheat this year, thanks to good harvests and high stockpiles in major producers such as the United States and Australia, prices spiked on the back of Russia’s decision to ban exports. Russia, the world’s third-largest wheat exporter, has banned grain exports until December due to drought and fires that have destroyed millions of hectares (acres). Russia also slashed its 2010 grain harvest forecast to 70-75 million tonnes, compared with a harvest of 97 million tonnes in 2009.
Last year Russia exported 21.4 million tonnes of grain and observers had already warned exports could be sharply lower this year. The move stung world wheat markets, sending prices to two-year highs and sparking worries of a crisis in global food supplies.
More: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gY0o3pJD4LlRcEsV-pQFHyCJemHg
Posted on August 31, 2010
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The number of teenage mothers [in Australia] has jumped after decades of steady decline and NSW has had the most significant increase. The teen fertility rate in NSW rose 15 per cent from 2007 to 2008, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Nationally, the number of teenagers giving birth rose 10 per cent, from 11,204 to 12,326.
While the increase concerns some health professionals, others say it is in line with the overall baby boom. Dr Patricia Weerakoon, co-ordinator of the University of Sydney’s graduate program in sexual health, said teenagers were becoming sexually active earlier and putting themselves at risk of sexually transmissible illnesses and unplanned pregnancies. ”The rates of sexually transmissible infections in young people are rising because they are having unprotected sex. That is also reflected in the rising number of teenagers having babies.”
While young people are reaching puberty earlier, their brains do not fully develop until they are in their late teens or early 20s. ”Their hormones are saying they are ready to become sexually active but their brains won’t fully mature for another few years,” Dr Weerakoon said. ”Young teenagers do not have a well-developed control mechanism which is why they engage in risky behaviour. They don’t think about the long-term consequences of their behaviour. They go for instant gratification first and don’t worry too much about the long-term consequences of having an unplanned pregnancy.”
More: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/teenage-baby-boom-sparks-call-for-better-sex-education-20100828-13wvc.html
Posted on August 31, 2010
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Beijing has urged parents to register the birth of their second child before Nov 1 — if they don’t, they will be liable to pay fines, a media report said Monday. China’s family planning policies encourages urban residents to limit their family size to one child. Families who register their second child now will face minimal fines, while those who fail to inform about the newborns will get no government benefit to raise them, China Daily reported. ‘However, the revised penalties will be less than usual fines, which were often eight or nine times the average annual household income,’ said Xi Kaili, spokesperson for the Beijing Municipal Commission of Population and Family Planning. Unregistered children will also lose citizenship.
According to the Beijing Statistics Bureau, the average annual wage in the capital last year was 30,000 yuan ($4,413). The minimum penalty for breaking the policy is 90,000 yuan. ‘The circumstances have been rare for authorities to fine families by the minimum penalty, except in cases of families in extreme difficulty,’ said Xi.
Last year, around 100,000 babies were born in the capital but officials have said the real number may be much higher because some parents have had more than their single child permitted under the rules but have not reported the births to authorities to avoid penalties. Beijing is encouraging people to register their unregistered children as part of the nationwide census that is held every 10 years and is being carried out this year.
More: http://sify.com/news/beijing-asks-parents-to-register-second-child-news-international-ki4puddgfaa.html
Posted on August 31, 2010
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Women in Qatar are delaying getting married and having fewer children, as education and career now play a bigger role in their everyday lives. The recently published Millennium Development Goals in Qatar 2010 (MDG Qatar 2010) report shows that the fertility rate of Qatari women has decreased from 5.7 children per woman in 1999, to 3.8 children in 2009. In 2004, the total fertility was 4.2. Total fertility rate states the total number of children an average woman would most likely bear during her lifetime if she were to have children throughout her reproductive years.
According to a previous study, the average general fertility rate in 2005 was 87.90 per 1000, but decreased to 77.98 in 2008. The general fertility rate is the number of live births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.
Qatar is not seeking to reduce its population growth due to the already small size of its population. For Qataris, the average fertility rate was 111 in 2008, compared with 66.59 among non-Qataris. In 2004 the rate was 122.50 for Qataris and 71.60 among non-Qataris, Qatari daily The Peninsula said.
MDG Qatar 2010 attributes the fertility decline to changes in Qatari social attitudes, particularly in delaying female marriages to a later age. This is mainly to enable women to concentrate on education and allow them to have a career. It can be seen in the fact that the average child-bearing age for a woman in Qatar has increased from 29.70 to 30.20, in four years. Adolescent birth rates amongst Qatari women have also fallen due to an increased proportion of women being enrolled in education.
More: http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/qatari-women-are-delaying-getting-married-and-having-fewer-children-1.674739
Posted on August 31, 2010
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From the Malaysia Star:
Pregnancy in adolescence, i.e. in a girl aged between 10 and 19 years, is increasingly becoming a problem in many developed and developing countries. This phenomenon has been influenced by the decreasing age of the first period (menarche) and schooling.
The former has been decreasing at a rate of about two to three months per decade in developed countries in the previous century, so much so that the overall decrease has been about three years in many countries. The latter has meant that many adolescents spend their time in school with more independence from parental supervision and influence. This has lead to increasing pre-marital relations and an increase in adolescent pregnancies.
As there is much difference between a 12- or 13-year-old and a 19-year-old, it is the practice to make a distinction between adolescents aged 10 to 14 years from adolescents aged 15 to 19 years. The transition from childhood to adulthood takes place during adolescence. Although the rate of transition is variable in individuals, there are many factors that have to be in place before a person attains the physical and mental maturity necessary for motherhood.
More: http://thestar.com.my/health/story.asp?file=/2010/8/29/health/6935477&sec=health
Posted on August 31, 2010
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Coastal megacities like Shanghai, and low-lying regions of countries such as Pakistan (above) are most at risk from rising sea levels Photo: AP
The world is heading for the next major climate change conference in Cancun later this year on course for global warming of up to 3.5C in the coming century, a series of scientific analyses suggest. The failure of last December’s UN climate summit in Copenhagen means that cuts in carbon emissions pledged by the international community will not be enough to keep the anticipated warming within safe limits.
Two analyses of the Copenhagen Accord and its pledges, by Dr Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and by the Climate Action Tracker website, suggest that, with the cuts that are currently promised under Copenhagen, the world will still warm by 3.5C by 2100. Such a rise would be likely to have disastrous effects on agricultural production, water availability, natural ecosystems and sea-level rise across the world, producing tens of millions of refugees.
A month ago, in its annual State of the Climate report, published in conjunction with the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) listed 10 separate indicators of a warming planet, seven of them rising – ranging from air temperature over land and humidity to sea level – and three of them declining: Arctic sea-ice, glaciers, and spring snow cover. “The scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable,” NOAA said.
Cancun, or “COP 16″ as it is officially known, will again see ministers and officials from nearly 200 nations grapple with the politics of global warming, but no one thinks they will be able to close a widening breach in the world’s defences against dangerously rising temperatures – the “gigatonne gap”.
More: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/why-failure–of-climate-summit-would-herald-global-catastrophe-35-2066127.html
Posted on August 30, 2010
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Leucadia Quispe, a 60-year-old mother-of-eight, was born and raised in Botijlaca, a settlement that sits in the foothills of the Chacaltaya and Huayna Potosí mountains in Bolivia. High above, the Chacaltaya glacier is retreating at an unexpected pace: three times as fast as predicted ten years ago. It will be gone in a generation.
Seven out of her eight children have already migrated to other parts of the country, Leucadia says, “because there is no way to make a living here”. Because of the dwindling water supply, she must spend hours hauling water in five-litre containers, one in each hand. The scarcity of this precious resource makes it hard to find fodder for her llamas and sheep, and some of her llamas have starved to death.
Women such as Leucadia are on the front line of the struggle against climate change, according to Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute. But her plight as a mother dramatises an issue that was largely ignored at the UN summit in Copenhagen last December and is also missing from the agenda of the UN summit in Mexico (COP16), scheduled for late this year. It is the problem of human numbers.
It is predicted that, if the global population continues to grow at the present rate, the world will need the resources of a second earth to sustain it by 2050. Today, there are 6.9 billion people on the planet; in 40 years, this figure will reach 9.2 billion. Most political leaders, however, are reluctant to examine the matter. The term “population control” has connotations too sinister for many, even though it can simply mean sensible family planning.
It is estimated that nearly 40 per cent of all pregnancies around the world are unintended; addressing this could make a vital difference. Research from the Optimum Population Trust, whose patrons include the environmentalists David Attenborough, James Lovelock and Jonathon Porritt, suggests that, for every $7 (£4.50) spent on basic family planning services over the next 40 years, global CO2 emissions could be reduced by more than a tonne. It would cost a minimum of $32 (£20.50) to achieve the same result with low-carbon technologies.
Between now and 2050, meeting the world’s family planning needs could save up to 34 gigatonnes of CO2 - nearly 60 times the UK’s annual total. As Unicef reported as far back as 1992: “Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology available to the human race.”
This hasn’t escaped the notice of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), whose latest State of World Population report - written by Engelman - revealed that there are more than 215 million women across the world wanting but unable to get contraception. The logic goes that if more resources were poured into fixing this, fewer unwanted babies would be born - and it would be better both for the women involved and for mankind as a whole, because it would lead to lower carbon emissions.
More: http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2010/08/world-population-family-women
Posted on August 30, 2010
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Japan’s compulsory emissions trading scheme is set to start in April 2013 and cover large CO2 emitting companies, a draft of the government’s proposals showed on Monday, but several issues are still open to debate. The draft, obtained by Reuters, will be presented on Tuesday to an expert committee at the Environment Ministry, which aims to finalize its proposal for Japan’s cap-and-trade scheme by the end of this year.
Issues to be discussed later include how CO2 emission quotas should be allocated and how big they should be, who should be responsible for CO2 emissions from electric power generation, and whether to link the scheme with similar ones abroad, the draft showed. It also showed compliance companies would be able to emit more by using carbon offsets at home and from abroad.
Similar grants can be given to companies facing international competition, those whose CO2 emissions per unit of product are relatively high, and those whose products help cut CO2 emissions globally, such as solar panels and hybrid cars, the draft said.
More: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67T1CC20100830?
Posted on August 30, 2010
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2-minute video report: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11128089
Posted on August 30, 2010
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Photograph: Juan Carlos Ulate/Reuters
European Union countries must drop their biofuels targets or else risk plunging more Africans into hunger and raising carbon emissions, according to Friends of the Earth (FoE). In a campaign launching today, the charity accuses European companies of land-grabbing throughout Africa to grow biofuel crops that directly compete with food crops. Biofuel companies counter that they consult with local governments, bring investment and jobs, and often produce fuels for the local market.
FoE has added its voice to an NGO lobby that claims local communities are not properly consulted and that forests are being cleared in a pattern that echoes decades of exploitation of other natural resources in Africa. In its report “Africa: Up for Grabs”, the group says that the key to halting the land-grab is for EU countries to drop a goal to produce 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020.
“The amount of land being taken in Africa to meet Europe’s increasing demand for biofuels is underestimated and out of control,” Kirtana Chandrasekaran, food campaigner for FoE in the UK, said. “Especially in Africa, as long as there’s massive demand for biofuels from the European market, it will be hard to control. If we implement the biofuels targets it will only get worse. This is just a small taste of what’s to come.”
A number of European companies have planted biofuel crops such as jatropha, sugar cane and palm oil in Africa and elsewhere to tap into rising demand. But the trend has coincided with soaring food prices and ignited a debate over the dangers of using agricultural land for fuel.
Producers argue they typically farm land not destined, or suitable for, food crops. But campaigners reject those claims, with FoE saying that biofuel crops, including non-edible ones such as jatropha, “are competing directly with food crops for fertile land”.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/30/biofuels-land-grab-friends-of-the-earth
Posted on August 30, 2010
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One of the UK’s most radical environmental policies – requiring all new homes from 2016 to be “zero carbon” – is set to be scaled back amid pressure from the housebuilding industry. Builders claim the proposals would be too expensive and impossible to implement for many flats, and would result in a slump in the rate of homes built. Now tThe Guardian has learned that the government is ready to water down the target, a move environmentalists have said would be a “travesty”.
A “zero carbon home” requires a 150% reduction in carbon emissions, a target which includes emissions from household appliances, heating and lighting. The plan was to achieve these savings from improved energy efficiency and on-site renewables. Housebuilders argued this was too ambitious and agreed a compromise where only 70% of the reduction would be on-site. The rest would be achieved by housebuilders paying £4,500 a house into a community energy fund, to finance small renewable energy projects or energy-efficiency measures.
Now housebuilders say even this is too ambitious. The Home Builders’ Federation says buyers would not be prepared to pay the 20% premium for a home. The Zero Carbon Hub, set up to co-ordinate policy, has begun final testing of the target and will make recommendations to ministers this year.
But the Guardian has learned that policymakers and senior figures at Communities and Local Government accept the target is too high and more emissions will have to be “offset”.
Simon McWhirter, homes spokesman from charity WWF, said: “David Cameron said this would be the greenest government ever but we are already seeing a potential weakening of one of the most progressive environmental policies which would be a travesty.”
Housing minister Grant Shapps said: “We need to set a realistic benchmark for carbon emissions in building regulations which also takes account of costs.”
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/29/new-houses-carbon-emission-targets-reduced
Posted on August 29, 2010
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Photo: CORBIS
A review of the practices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been conducted in response to intense criticism of the body, whose reports are used by governments to inform policy decisions on global warming. The findings of the review are due to be handed to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon tomorrow.
Conducted by a committee of representatives from the world’s leading scientific bodies, the analysis is expected to recommend a number of changes to the way the IPCC compiles and checks its extensive 1,000 page reports. The committee, which is made up of scientific organisations that form the InterAcademy Council, is also expected to recommend changes to help the IPCC keep its reports, which take around six years to complete, more up to date with current science. Evidence given to the committee has also called for a tightening of the way facts and references are checked before the reports are published.
The IPCC has been under scrutiny after it admitted making an error in its 2007 report, that stated Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 – a statement that was wrong by over 300 years. The panel has also been criticised over the sources of information it used to compile the report after a number of statements were found to be based on information taken from reports by environmental lobby groups, magazine articles and student dissertations.
Climate change sceptics have seized upon the mistakes and non-scientific sources of information, using it to question the validity of the IPCC’s conclusions that humans are causing the climate to change.
Climate scientists insist the conclusions are still robust.
More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7969460/UN-climate-change-panel-to-be-warned-over-reports.html
Posted on August 29, 2010
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China’s decision to slash export quotas of rare earth elements was a necessary step to protect the country’s environment, commerce minister Chen Deming said following criticism from Japanese officials. “Mass extraction of rare earth will cause great damage to the environment and that’s why China has tightened controls over rare earth production, exploration and trade,” Chen was quoted by state news agency Xinhua as saying on Saturday.
China issued export quotas for 30,258 tonnes by the end of July, down 40 percent compared to last year, following a nationwide campaign to consolidate the sector and clamp down on illegal production. China has been steadily reducing export quotas since 2005 for rare earth elements, which consist of 17 metals used in crucial new green technologies like hybrid cars, wind turbines and superconductors, as well as in missile guidance systems and mobile phones.
Overseas buyers have expressed concern about China’s policies to restrict rare earth exports, which have driven up global prices, but Chen said China had no choice and its own market would also suffer as a consequence. Rare earths are in increasingly short supply as world demand surges, with industry officials predicting a global shortfall of 30,000 to 50,000 tonnes by 2012.
China invested heavily in rare earth extraction technology in the 1990s and now controls more than 95 percent of recoverable reserves, mostly in the vast northern region of Inner Mongolia. It has sought to strengthen its control over the global market, urging its biggest producer, the Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare Earth 6000111.SS to build strategic stockpiles. China’s leading rare earth miners are also discussing setting a unified pricing mechanism in order to boost China’s global pricing power.
Source: http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFTOE67S00A20100829
Posted on August 29, 2010
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A few diehards in the City still think sustainability is just for sandal-wearers. But how we deal with the major ecological and social challenges facing the world will have enormous implications for the global economy and for the prospects of the UK’s leading companies. It will also have an impact on the pension savings and the purse strings of virtually every household in Britain. The BP oil spill, which wiped billions of pounds off the value of pension funds, is evidence that no investor, large or small, can afford to ignore the environment, or the issue of how we manage our resources.
The Observer has commissioned in-depth research from the Co-operative Asset Management into how the UK’s leading companies might be affected by five key sustainability issues: resource depletion, climate change, pollution, demographics and resource distribution. Its analysis suggests that 56%, or more than half of the FTSE 350 by weight, will suffer negative financial effects from depleting resources, climate change and pollution. Only 10% stand to gain by providing solutions.
This is a warning of testing times ahead for both business and society. It also presents a major challenge for the pensions industry, which needs to ensure its investments will be able to provide people with retirement incomes. Business should care about ecological sustainability because of the increasing scientific evidence that human society is overshooting its limits. Sources of food, energy and water are being exploited at rates that cannot be sustained for long, and many pollution sinks are overfilled. This is likely to jeopardise economic activity and growth, and leaves us at risk of a sharp contraction.
Both climate change and oil production are inextricably linked to food, energy and water systems. Oil depletion, for example, would have significant effects on food supplies, as many fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides are oil-based. Biofuels may compete with food for land use and oil use drives climate change, which adds pressure to the water, food and living systems.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/29/good-companies-guide-2010
Posted on August 29, 2010
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There are only eight northern white rhinoceroses left in the world, but the Frozen Zoo hopes to boost the population. Photograph: Benedicte Desrus / Alamy/Alamy
The inside of a metal box filled with liquid nitrogen and frozen to -173C (-280F) is hardly the ideal habitat for a large African mammal. But, as a test tube is fished out of the frigid container amid a billowing cloud of white gas, a note written on its side is unequivocal about its contents. “This is a northern white rhino,” says Scripps research scientist Inbar Ben-Nun as she reads out the label and holds the freezing vial with thick gloves that look like industrial-grade oven mitts.
Ben-Nun is holding no ordinary scientific sample. For the frozen cells in that test tube could one day give rise to baby northern white rhinos and help save the species from extinction. They would be living specimens of one of the most endangered species on Earth, who after a few months would be trotting into wildlife parks, and maybe, just maybe, helping repopulate their kind on the African grasslands. No wonder that the place where the sample came from is called the Frozen Zoo.
The Frozen Zoo was founded in 1972 at San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research as a repository for skin-cell samples from rare and endangered species. At the time that the first samples were collected and put into deep freeze it was not really known how they would be used and genetic technology was in its infancy. But there was a sense that one day some unknown scientific advance might make use of them and it was better to be safe than sorry. Now, thanks to a team at the nearby Scripps Research Institute, that day has come a lot closer.
Genetic scientists at Scripps, working from an anonymous-looking building in a business park in San Diego’s northern suburbs, have succeeded in taking samples of skin cells from the Frozen Zoo and turning them into a culture of special cells known as induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells. Stem cells are a sort of all-purpose building block of life that can then become any other sort of cell. By creating IPS cells from a species it is now theoretically possible to use them to create egg cells and sperm cells. Those two could then be combined via in vitro fertilisation to form a viable embryo. And long-deadanimals whose species are almost extinct could create new life. The breakthrough, so far, has come with creating IPS cells for the silver-maned drill monkey, a primate native to just a few parts of West Africa and which is the continent’s most endangered monkey. On 1 June this year, the stem cells morphed into brain cells, proving their viability.
“The Frozen Zoo was a wonderful idea. They just thought: ‘Well, something might happen, so we should preserve some samples for the future’,” says Dr Jeanne Loring, who is leading the Scripps team of which Ben-Nun is a part. “This is the first time that there has been something that we can do.”
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/29/frozen-zoo-san-diego-rhino
Posted on August 28, 2010
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Cassiterite, wolframite, coltan: they might be the spoiled offspring of celebrity parents, or characters from an unfamiliar fairytale. The truth is much more prosaic. They are the minerals on which laptops and mobiles and even the tin of tomatoes in the cupboard depend. Cassiterite in the main component of tin oxide. Wolframite is a source of tungsten, used in many electrical applications. Coltan makes mobile phones work.
There are two reasons why it is necessary to know about these otherwise apparently esoteric minerals. First, the rich world has a capacious appetite for them, and second, it is fuelling conflict in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rape of more than 150 women and children earlier this month in Luvungi, North Kivu, in the DRC’s mineral heartland is probably (it is not yet proven) directly connected with the exploitation of the mines from which these minerals come.
Despite the enormity of the crime – and even though it apparently took place over several nights – news of the rapes travelled only slowly into the western media. Even the UN’s Monusco stabilisation force, based less than 20kms from the village, claims to have heard nothing. The force, due to leave in a year, has long been accused of spending too long in barracks, failing to patrol on foot, and making too little attempt to listen to the concerns of the people it is supposed to be there to protect. Partly because of its failings, Kivu, geographically and politically remote from Kinshasa, has become the killing field in what is being called Africa’s world war. Proportionally, it is a conflict that dwarfs any British war: it has already claimed 5 million lives and cruelly disrupted millions more. Yesterday, a leaked report from the UN accused neighbouring Rwanda of a genocidal spree as its Tutsi-controlled army hunted down Hutu refugees in the late 1990s. Then soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army, pushed out of Uganda, launched a series of deadly raids.
There is no easy way of bringing peace to a region that has been denied it for so long. But there are clear links between the trade in minerals and the funding of the militias – and even the Congolese national army – that fight to control the mining towns. A detailed report from Global Witness last year described a system of mutual back-scratching and callous exploitation where forced labour and rape are the daily weapons of control. The militias trade through middlemen, often based just over the border with key western allies Rwanda and Uganda – reportedly building a refinery expressly to process Congolese minerals – while China runs scores of “comptoirs”, export houses that convey the precious minerals to Asia. Bringing order to this lucrative trade may not be enough on its own to deliver peace and prosperity. But without it, it will be impossible to have either.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/28/editorial-congo-rapes-mineral-mines
Posted on August 28, 2010
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(James Lovelock is of course one of our patrons)
Photo: Corbis
Once in a generation, perhaps, you get to read a book that will change the way we see the world. But it might take a whole generation to realise by how much. My copy of Gaia is a first edition from 1979: hardback price £4.95 (and there were no discounts in those days). To re-read the original text is to be reminded, in all sorts of unexpected ways, how far we have come. Its author has since morphed from J E, an “independent scientist”, to James Lovelock, the world-famous author and speaker. The once-tentative Gaia hypothesis has become part of scientific orthodoxy and has been formally enshrined as the Gaia Theory, although in the US it has been dubbed Earth System Science.
A new generation of telescopes will soon be sweeping the nearby stars for evidence of oxygen and methane in the atmospheres of the planets that orbit them: a simple idea proposed by Lovelock 40 years ago during the hunt for life on Mars, and at the time no doubt dismissed as a bit too simple.
The Gaia hypothesis, as it then was, is simply put. Life may be the product of blind chance and opportune circumstance, but once it has established itself on a planet, it takes over. It manages the planet in ways that continue to sustain life in more or less optimum circumstances. That is why it may be a mistake to call Earth the Goldilocks planet: not too hot, not too cold, but just right. In fact, Earth’s average temperature may be just right because life, by unconsciously manipulating the planet’s oceanic and atmospheric chemistry, sets the thermostat that keeps its Earthly home within a temperature range that is comfortable for life.
At the time of publication, this idea seemed either thrilling or preposterously New Age, and sometimes both. Biologists in particular were annoyed because they see evolutionary forms as having adapted to their environments through natural selection, blindly and without purpose or direction. This remains true, but it is also true that having found an ecological niche, all creatures – elephants, ants, orchids and economists – tend to maintain their environments to their own advantage, and it now looks as though collectively, the whole assortment that we call life has got a good grip on Earth, has dug in, so to speak, and made itself at home.
Lovelock won over first his readers and then his fellow scientists by asking questions that might not have been obvious to any of us at the time. Where did the nitrogen in the atmosphere come from? Why was the proportion of atmospheric oxygen just within the safety zone? Why wasn’t the sea far more salty? Why hasn’t all that water boiled off into space? From such questions, he patiently built up an argument that began to sound increasingly interesting: that life is an agent in its own survival. At the time, some of us admired the book enormously, and still do, for its provocation, for its daring, for the huge sweep of the ideas that unfold.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/aug/27/james-lovelock-gaia
Posted on August 28, 2010
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The highlands of southwestern Ethiopia should be ideal for growing coffee. After all, this is the region where coffee first originated hundreds of years ago. But although coffee remains Ethiopia’s number one export, the nation’s coffee farmers have been struggling.
The Arabica coffee grown in Ethiopia and Latin America is an especially climate-sensitive crop. It requires just the right amount of rain and an average annual temperature between 64 degrees Fahrenheit and 70 degrees Fahrenheit to prosper. As temperatures rise — Ethiopia’s average low temperature has increased by about .66 degrees F every decade since 1951, according to the country’s National Meteorological Agency — and rains become more variable, Ethiopian coffee farmers have suffered increasingly poor yields. Last year was especially bad, with exports dropping by 33 percent. Some have moved their coffee trees to higher elevations, while others have been forced to switch to livestock and more heat-tolerant crops, such as enset, a starchy root vegetable similar to the plantain.
Now, there is evidence that a warming climate may be linked to one of the major threats facing the coffee industry in Ethiopia and elsewhere: A tiny insect known as the coffee berry borer beetle has been devastating coffee plants around the world, and new research suggests even slight temperature increases promote the spread of the pest.
The beetle is a relatively recent problem in Ethiopia and Latin America, where most Arabica coffee is grown. A field survey of Ethiopia’s coffee-growing regions conducted in the late 1960s found no trace of the beetle, but in 2003 researchers reported that the pest was widespread. Drought and heavy rains during harvest time may be the prevailing problems for coffee growers in Ethiopia and other countries; but the lack of an effective treatment for the coffee berry borer is cause for concern, especially given new research findings tying the spread of the beetle to rising temperatures.
Coffee may not be a basic food crop, such as wheat, but it is arguably one of the most important agricultural products. Valued as high as $90 billion a year, coffee, which is grown in more than 70 countries, is one of the most heavily traded commodities in terms of monetary value. Seventy percent of the world’s coffee comes from small, family-owned farms and more than 100 million people are dependent on the crop for their livelihood. Researchers estimate that the coffee berry borer causes more than $500 milllion in damages each year, making it the most costly pest affecting coffee today. Coffee growers have tried various tactics to stop the beetle, but to little avail. Pesticides don’t help, and even if they did, they are an unfavorable option, given their negative effects on coffee quality.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/27/coffee-threatened-beetles-warming
Posted on August 28, 2010
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The U.S. birth rate has fallen to its lowest level in at least a century as many people apparently decided they couldn’t afford more mouths to feed. The birth rate dropped for the second year in a row since the recession began in 2007. Births fell 2.6 percent last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show. “It’s a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before,” said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report.
The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That’s down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families. The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than any other year in the nation’s history. The recession began that fall, dragging down stocks, jobs and births.
“When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we’re seeing that in the Great Recession today,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University. “It could take a few years to turn this around,” he added.
More: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100827/ap_on_he_me/us_med_birth_decline
Posted on August 28, 2010
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When fifteen-year-old Maria Victoria Urquizo tends to the potato-field in front of her brother’s house in the indigenous community of Guanilchig, she has a stunning view of the majestic, snow-capped Chimborazo—Ecuador’s highest mountain. At 3,500 meters (about 11,500 feet) above sea level, the morning air in this Western range of the Andes is crisp. The sunlight reflects the bright colours of the traditional indigenous textiles Maria wears, but the story she tells is dark. One September day, when she was just 14 years old, she was raped by an acquaintance who worked alongside her in the field. “I had met him only once before,” she recalls. Two months after the attack, she realized she was pregnant. “I was afraid of going to the police. I only wanted to cry,” she said. On June 28, she gave birth to a girl.
Now, she lives with her brother and his family and combines working in the field with caring for her infant daughter who still hasn’t been given a name. Sometimes Maria’s sister in-law or her nieces will help carry the unnamed child. “We estimate that every day, two adolescents become pregnant [in this province],” said Rosa Elena Lara who is responsible for the Ecuadorean government’s adolescent pregnancy prevention programme in the Chimborazo province—a mountainous area that is home to nearly half a million people. “But there is terrible under-reporting of sexual abuse,” she adds.
But teen pregnancy does not necessarily fit a specific stereotype and is certainly not only a rural phenomenon.
More: https://www.unfpa.org/public/cache/offonce/home/news/pid/6533;jsessionid=962A8C255B42976B9562CB2E82D4814E
Posted on August 28, 2010
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According to the data collected for many years by different countries, in particular the CIS states, population challenges that have a direct impact on an economic growth, competitiveness and stability of states and, ultimately, the welfare of citizens is urgent in the modern world. Taking this fact into account, the UN agencies identified strategic support to national efforts in the sphere of population as one of their objectives.
These challenges were the focus of the seminar on interagency cooperation on population and development issues initiated by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Ashgabat. The main goal of the seminar was to present the experience of the CIS countries, in particular Kazakhstan, Moldova and Russia, in on interagency cooperation in developing and implementing the national population and development concepts.
In his opening remarks Mr. Lenny Montiel, UN Resident Coordinator in Turkmenistan, UNFPA Representative stressed that “the population is a broad concept assuming that political goals should be measured not in terms of size, but rather in terms of human capital. It is not occasional that the theme of this year’s World Population Day celebrated under the aegis of the UNFPA was ‘Everyone counts’. It reflects a new approach of the international community to the population issues: people, human rights, life quality for all citizens, but not just the population size and reproduction. One of the mechanisms for implementing the population and development policies is interagency commissions designed to coordinate efforts of all government and public institutions to effectively implement the population policy.”
More: http://www.turkmenistan.gov.tm/_en/?idr=5&id=100826a
Posted on August 28, 2010
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Nigerien women have an average of seven children. Photo: Catherine Lune-Grayson, IRIN
The population of Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, is growing at an unsustainable rate, according to the authorities and civil society groups. If current growth rates of 3.3 percent per year remain unchanged, by 2050 Niger’s population will have reached 50 million. The current population is 15.2 million - and even at this level there is widespread malnourishment. It has been nearly 25 years since Niger identified population control as a priority in its fight against poverty, said senior Ministry of Social Development and Population official Barra Bahari. But convincing people to have fewer children by marrying later and using contraception is not an easy task.
“This is a humanitarian emergency. We have no future without birth control,” said Idé Djermakoyé, president of a local NGO involved in family planning, the Nigerien Organization for the Development of Human Potential (ONDPH). “The government cannot cope. The population is poor, the health system is weak and there is no land for farming. We are already unable to feed and educate our population.”
National statistics are grim. Nearly 60 percent of the population survives on less than a dollar a day. A woman dies every two hours while giving birth. Nearly one child in five dies before the age of five. Almost one in three does not attend primary school.
More: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=90299
Posted on August 27, 2010
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Wales has become one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, figures reveal. It has more people per square kilometre than Northern Ireland, Poland, France and Spain. The figures also show that England has become the most densely populated large country in Europe – overtaking Holland, traditionally the most highly populated. Researchers from the House of Commons Library have revealed Wales is the ninth most populated with 145.6 people per square kilometre. It compares with 402.1 people in England, 230 in Germany and 99.4 in France.
The research is based on figures from the Office for National Statistics and the EU’s Eurostat. It comes after the coalition Government vowed to cap the level of immigration in Britain next year to bring it in line with 1990s levels.
Professor Terry Marsden, director of the Sustainable Places Research Institute at Cardiff University, said a high population density in Wales presents an opportunity. He said: “A high population density does not necessarily lead to overcrowding. It all depends on how you manage it. In Wales we need to have effective planning systems in place to manage the rises in immigration. The figures do raise questions about pressures on infrastructure, transport and housing provision. This gives more emphasis on the need for effective planning and management.”
Professor Marsden added that the current system of managing population growth in Wales needs to become more flexible. “We need to have a rethink about the current system and the links between town and countryside. Obviously it is important to protect the landscape, but we need to think about economic regeneration in rural areas. It is too simple to say ‘that is a green area and therefore cannot be touched’.”
Professor Marsden added that Wales wants to be recognised as an internationally attractive location, and said increased migration and immigration would be a good thing for the Welsh economy.
More: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2010/08/27/wales-dense-population-could-have-economic-benefits-researchers-say-91466-27146567/
Posted on August 27, 2010
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The UK population swelled by nearly 200,000 last year - one of the largest increases during Labour’s 13 years in power. There were 196,000 more immigrants than Britons leaving for abroad, according to official figures released on Thursday. That meant the overall population of Britain rose by the equivalent of a city the size of Portsmouth.
‘Net migration’, the number of immigrants in excess of the number of people leaving the country, was 20 per cent up on 2008 - defying predictions that the recession would reduce the figure.The population is now set to hit the sensitive 70 million barrier two years earlier than expected.
It had been projected Britain’s population would reach 70million by 2029 - which some analysts say will put pressure on transport, housing, water, power and other services. At the last year’s migration rates, this symbolic figure will be reached two years earlier, 17 years from now. England is already the most crowded country in Europe, bar tiny Malta, according to figures given to MPs this week.
More: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1306323/Number-immigrants-living-UK-long-term-soars-20-1-year.html
Posted on August 27, 2010
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The world is planting a vigorous new crop: “agro-pessimism”, or fear that mankind will not be able to feed itself except by wrecking the environment. The current harvest of this variety of whine will be a bumper one. Natural disasters—fire in Russia and flood in Pakistan, which are the world’s fifth- and eighth-largest wheat producers respectively—have added a Biblical colouring to an unfolding fear of famine. By 2050 world grain output will have to rise by half and meat production must double to meet demand. And that cannot easily happen because growth in grain yields is flattening out, there is little extra farmland and renewable water is running short.
The world has been here before. In 1967 Paul Ehrlich, a Malthusian, wrote that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over… In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” Five years later, in “The Limits to Growth”, the Club of Rome (a group of business people and academics) argued that the world was running out of raw materials and that societies would probably collapse in the 21st century.
A year after “The Limits to Growth” appeared, however, and at a time when soaring oil prices seemed to confirm the Club of Rome’s worst fears, a country which was then a large net food importer decided to change the way it farmed. Driven partly by fear that it would not be able to import enough food, it decided to expand domestic production through scientific research, not subsidies. Instead of trying to protect farmers from international competition—as much of the world still does—it opened up to trade and let inefficient farms go to the wall. This was all the more remarkable because most of the country was then regarded as unfit for agricultural production.
The country was Brazil. In the four decades since, it has become the first tropical agricultural giant and the first to challenge the dominance of the “big five” food exporters (America, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the European Union).
Even more striking than the fact of its success has been the manner of it. Brazil has followed more or less the opposite of the agro-pessimists’ prescription. For them, sustainability is the greatest virtue and is best achieved by encouraging small farms and organic practices. They frown on monocultures and chemical fertilisers. They like agricultural research but loathe genetically modified (GM) plants. They think it is more important for food to be sold on local than on international markets. Brazil’s farms are sustainable, too, thanks to abundant land and water. But they are many times the size even of American ones. Farmers buy inputs and sell crops on a scale that makes sense only if there are world markets for them. And they depend critically on new technology. As the briefing explains, Brazil’s progress has been underpinned by the state agricultural-research company and pushed forward by GM crops. Brazil represents a clear alternative to the growing belief that, in farming, small and organic are beautiful.
More: http://www.economist.com/node/16889019?story_id=16889019&fsrc=nlw|hig|08-26-2010|editors_highlights
Posted on August 27, 2010
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The extreme heatwave, which caused a severe drought and wildfires in Russia, might be over, but both officials and consumers are now busy calculating its cost and trying to work out its consequences. Russian deputy economy minister, Andrei Klepach, said earlier this week that the drought would take up to 0.8% off this year’s economic growth, “or maybe even more than that”. The 0.8% official figure equals 313bn roubles ($10.1bn, £6.6bn at the current exchange rate), but is smaller than the 1.0-1.5% range some experts have come up with recently.
And it is not just about the annual economic growth rate being slower than expected. In the first two full weeks of August, consumer prices in Russia rose by 0.4%, the same increase seen during the whole month of July. Mr Klepach thinks that the August inflation rate will be about 0.5% “at best”. While for 2010, it will definitely exceed the earlier forecast of 6-7%, it will be lower than the previous year’s level of 8.8%, he suggests.
Some smaller dairy farmers have had no choice but to start slaughtering cattle, due to rocketing fodder prices they cannot afford. Bigger agricultural holdings are in a better position as still have a supply of fodder from last year and are using this year’s poor crops to feed their cows. The agriculture ministry estimates that the sector lost some 32.7bn roubles, as more than a quarter of crops have been destroyed. But some experts believe the loss figure might be several times higher, if you include other factors such as lower agricultural machinery sales.
More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11084236
Posted on August 26, 2010
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IT IS time to start asking the hard questions. Countless people in flood-stricken Pakistan have lost families and livelihoods. Who can they hold responsible and turn to for reparations?
Less than a decade ago, these questions would have been dismissed outright. “Many scientists at the time said that you can never blame an individual weather event on climate change,” says Myles Allen of the University of Oxford. But a small meeting of scientists in Colorado last week - organised by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, among others - suggests the tide is turning.
The aim of the Attribution of Climate-Related Events workshop was to discuss what information is needed to determine the extent to which human-induced climate change can be blamed for extreme weather events - possibly even straight after they have happened.
Assigning blame in this way is not without precedent. In 2004, Allen and his colleagues showed to a high level of confidence that human greenhouse gas emissions had at least doubled the risk of the European heatwave of 2003 occurring.
The basic idea in producing such a figure is straightforward. Run thousands of simulations of the climate as it is and as it would have been without human influences, then compare the number of times a given event occurs in each scenario. In 2004, technological limitations made it impossible to run simulations for long enough to reproduce the 2003 heatwave, so the analysis involved making certain assumptions. “With the tools we have today we can do much better,” says Allen. His team is now using borrowed computing space from thousands of PC owners to run simulations for recent devastating weather events, though their results are not yet in.
More: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727754.200-time-to-blame-climate-change-for-extreme-weather.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=environment
Posted on August 26, 2010
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Fifty years ago, a billion people were undernourished or starving; the number is about the same today. That’s actually progress, since a billion represented a third of the human race then, and “only” a sixth now. Today we have another worry: roughly the same number of people eat too much. But, says Julian Cribb, a veteran science journalist from Australia, “The era of cheap, abundant food is over.”
Like many other experts, he argues that we have passed the peak of oil production, and it’s all downhill from now on. He then presents evidence that we have passed the peaks for water, fertilizer and land, and that we will all soon be made painfully aware that we have passed it for food, as wealthy nations experience shortages and rising prices, and poorer ones starve.
Much of “The Coming Famine” builds an argument that we’ve jumped off a cliff and that global chaos — a tidal wave of people fleeing their own countries for wherever they can find food — is all but guaranteed. The rest of the book concentrates on catching an outcropping of rock with a finger and scrambling back up. The writing is neither personality-filled nor especially fluid, but the sheer number of terrifying facts makes the book gripping.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/books/25book.html?_r=1
The book: THE COMING FAMINE: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It, By Julian Cribb, 248 pages. University of California Press. $24.95.
Posted on August 26, 2010
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Two youths, ethnic Russian Maxim, 9, and Kyrgyz Sumat, 10, left, walk through debris as they search for food in the ransacked market in Osh, southern Kyrgyzstan. Photo: AP
The United Nations says more than one-quarter of the households in Kyrgyzstan do not have enough food, and that the problem is expected to get worse in the coming months. That figure represents about 1.5 million people. The World Food Program said Tuesday it is preparing to bolster its operations in the country, where almost 350,000 others may soon be in need of food. The U.N. agency said the threat stems from rising foods prices, a poor harvest, the onset of winter and the inter-ethnic violence that ravaged southern Kyrgyzstan in June.
The World Food Program said it conducted an assessment which found that food insecurity was especially high in the cities of Osh and Jalalabad, where the ethnic clashes broke out. The agency warned the situation remains volatile. Reuters quotes an agriculture ministry official as saying one big problem is that the border with Kazakhstan has been closed since the violence, affecting the ability to trade food and farming supplies.
Meanwhile, the International Crisis Group said in a report that without what it called “prompt, genuine and exhaustive measures,” Kyrgyzstan risks another round of violence. The group urged the international community to press the Kyrgyz government to address the root cause of the violence, including ongoing ethnic tensions.
The fighting took place between ethnic majority Kyrgyz and minority Uzbeks. More than 350 people were killed.
Source: http://www.voanews.com/english/news/asia/UN-Food-Insecurity-in-Kyrgyzstan-to-Grow-Worse—101389464.html
Posted on August 26, 2010
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Lack of rainfall can lead to poverty, food shortages, disease and gender inequality in rural areas. Climate change may further exacerbate the situation. Managing water resources better might help communities adapt to future climate change but this requires understanding of the hydro-climatic system in a given area. For example, we need to better understand how local or regional rainfall patterns affect climate models.
A case in point: many subsistence farmers in Orongo village in the Kisumu district of Kenya – a lowland floodplain area that relies on water from Lake Victoria, which is mainly rain-fed – will appear to use more or less water depending on whether a small or large land area is considered in the analysis. One potential consequence of such projections is how engineers design water-retention ponds for irrigation purposes.
More: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/43566
Posted on August 26, 2010
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All populations, like all individuals, must address issues of age. Unlike people, however, populations can stay young indefinitely and can even grow younger with time. This report is about the ages of populations, how age is structured within populations, why that matters, and how governments and societies can influence population age structure.
The Shape of Things to Come presents evidence that certain age structures in populations can support governments’ efforts to create and maintain political stability, and that others can impede such efforts. This report identifies for the first time four main types of age structures present in current populations: very young, youthful, transitional and mature. Chapters for each structure type describe their basic demographic parameters and the common development challenges and opportunities faced. A quantitative analysis shows that each structure has distinct traits in vulnerability to civil conflict, governance and economic growth.
http://www.populationaction.org/Publications/Reports/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come/SOTC.pdf
Source: http://www.populationmedia.org/2010/08/25/the-shape-of-things-to-come/
Posted on August 26, 2010
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In some cases it was their sheer beauty that led to development, in others economic potential. Whatever the causes, coastal regions today host almost half of the inhabitants of EU countries with a sea border. They host homes and workplaces, industries, holiday destinations and recreation areas. With an immense variety of habitats, ranging from salt-adapted scrubs and grasslands, cliffs and rocky shores, sandy beaches and tidal areas, estuaries and lagoons, they are also home to numerous species, many a key source of food and economic prosperity for Europe.
Ninth in the series of ‘10 messages for 2010′, the European Environment Agency’s new assessment on coastal ecosystems presents key findings on the state of biodiversity in coastal zones and explores the main causes of coastal ecosystem degradation.
As transition zones between land and marine environments, coastal zones are affected by changes and pressures from both sides. Truly sustainable coastal management can only be achieved using an integrated and ecosystem approach, with coordinated action at global, regional and local levels, taking into account the pressures and socio-economic realities both on land and at sea.
Key findings:
- The main causes of changes to coastal ecosystems are coastal erosion; sprawling economic sites and infrastructure linked to urbanisation and tourism; and creating and managing forests as well as water bodies.
- Coastal erosion is largely caused by sediment starvation as a consequence of river dams, although intensive development and sand mining can also contribute to coastal habitat destruction.
- Half of Europe’s coastal wetlands are expected to disappear (approximately 4500 km2) as a result of sea level rise linked to climate change. About 10 % of Europe’s coastline is already protected by sea defences.
- Climate change is also expected to affect river flows and species in coastal wetlands and estuaries. Higher water temperatures might also shift the balance in favour of invasive alien species.
- Urbanisation put Mediterranean coastal wetlands under constant pressure in the period 1990–2000, particularly in Spain and southern Italy.
- High nitrate and phosphate loads in water environments lead to blue-green algae blooms, which can choke all other aquatic life through high oxygen consumption and threaten human health in bathing areas.
- Increasing exploitation of sand and gravel from coastal zones or over-exploitation of fish stocks also put considerable pressure on coastal ecosystems.
- More than two thirds of coastal habitat types and more than half of species typical of coastal ecosystems have an ‘unfavourable’ conversation status.
More: http://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/europe2019s-coasts-reconciling-development-and-conservation?utm_source=EEASubscriptions&utm_medium=RSSFeeds&utm_campaign=Generic
Posted on August 26, 2010
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By: Dr Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, chief executive officer of Fanrpan
One week from now, 200 agricultural experts from across Africa and around the world will meet in Namibia at the annual regional food security policy dialogue of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (Fanrpan) to discuss some of the most pressing issues facing the African continent.
One month from now, a UN summit will take place in New York to discuss the upcoming five-year deadline for achieving the millennium development goals (MDGs), the successes gained so far and the new priorities that must be supported. However, in today’s world these discussions need not, and should not, be confined to those in Namibia or New York. This is why I am asking readers of this website to create their own dialogue here about the issues we are addressing and the potential solutions available.
Food security in Africa is still only an aspiration. With one-quarter of the world’s arable land, Africa produces only 10% of its total global output. More than 265 million people are still chronically hungry, yet Africa is estimated to hold 60% of the world’s remaining uncultivated farmland. The potential for agriculture to boost rural livelihoods, reduce poverty and underpin other sectors of the economy is well established. Agriculture is the most important source of livelihood throughout Africa, accounting for more than 70% of total employment. And 65% of that figure is made up of women farmers.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine/katine-chronicles-blog/2010/aug/24/africa-katine-farming
Posted on August 26, 2010
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The number of infants born in South Korea declined for the second straight year in 2009 as a result of a fall in the population of women of childbearing age and the number of marriages, government data showed Tuesday. The number of newborns stood at 445,000 last year, down 4.5 percent from a year before, according to the Statistics Korea data.
The decrease can be attributed to the shrinking population of women aged between 20 and 39, considered as the major age group of childbearing. Their number had gradually dropped from 8.45 million in 2000 to 7.57 million in 2009, the data said. The declining number of marriages also contributed to the falling birthrate, the data said. Marriages held in 2009 totaled to 310,000 compared with 332,000 reported in 2000.
The average childbearing age continued its rising trend, to stand at 31 in 2009. The number of women giving birth over the age of 35 saw gradual growth, from 59,600 in 2008 to 60,700 in 2009.
Source: http://tantaonews.com/?p=42607
Posted on August 26, 2010
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The site of a village in the reserve that has been razed for cash crops
The world’s largest tiger reserve, in the wilds of northern Burma, is being rapidly eroded as a businessman with links to the junta replaces trees with cash crops, according to a report published yesterday. The Hukaung Valley Tiger Reserve in Kachin State was created in 2001 with the support of the Wildlife Conservation Society. When it was expanded in 2004, the society hailed it as “the biggest tiger reserve in the world”.
“In the northernmost stretches of Myanmar [Burma],” the society’s latest newsletter reported earlier this month, “a valley exists where tigers can just be tigers. Country officials have declared the entire Hukaung Valley a protected tiger area. With 8,452 square miles in which to roam, hunt and hopefully breed, the region’s remaining tigers have a chance too few of their kind currently enjoy”.
But according to a report by the Kachin Development Networking Group, there has been wholesale destruction of large areas of forest for mono-crop development. Yuzana, a company owned by U Htay Myint, a wealthy businessman close to Burma’s ruling generals, has taken over 200,000 acres in the south of the reserve. The Yuzana Integrated Agricultural Project began in 2007 with the junta’s blessing.
The company is building a “green zone” enclave, within the project area, containing workers’ barracks, a factory and a supermarket and surrounded by two metre-high concrete wall. Clashes have broken out between the company and villagers within the project area, and more than 160 families have been forced to move, the report said. It said with the villagers out of the way, the forest greenery was killed off with herbicide. Then Yuzana’s bulldozers and excavators dug out and hauled away the debris, leaving large swathes of flattened and denuded land.
Only the tiger reserve’s signposts remained in the cleared areas. “When there are many forests, it is a hot-spot for biodiversity,” reads one of the signs. Another sign said: “Mountains and forests are deep; the animals have a good home and food.”
More: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/plantation-linked-to-junta-is-destroying-burmese-tiger-reserve-2062205.html
Posted on August 25, 2010
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The Pakistani crisis is already one of the very first order. Some 20 million people have been left homeless, along a path of destruction of more than 600 miles. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has even compared the challenges the country now faces to those during the 1947 partition of the subcontinent in which around half a million people were killed in mass violence.
It is small wonder that Pakistani president Asif Ali Zadari has said that it will take at least three years for the country to recover from the disaster, and that he is thinking ahead to “prepare the capabilities and capacity” for the “next monsoon”. Zadari’s comments highlight the fact that one of the key questions arising from the crisis is whether the floods, the worst for at least 80 years (with one fifth of the country estimated to be under water), are linked to global warming and are thus likely to happen again.
The danger is that Pakistan, and the Indian subcontinent in general, will become the focus of much more regular catastrophic flooding with the problems this would bring for a state at the centre of the campaign against terrorism. This is not just therefore a question of better protecting against natural hazards, but also one with profound implications for geopolitics and international security.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/24/pakistan-floods-deluges-after-the-deluge
Posted on August 25, 2010
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Independent MPs are today meeting to discuss whether action on climate change should be a condition of any king-making deal with Labor or the Liberal-led coalition as horse-trading begins in the wake of Saturday’s inconclusive Australian election. Rob Oakeshott, Bob Katter and Tony Windsor are aiming to decide what demands should be presented to the two parties in the likely event of a hung parliament. Climate change policy is reportedly a key part of their agenda.
At the latest count Labor was hopeful of holding 73 seats in the 150-seat parliament, while the coalition holds 70, both short of the 76 seats needed in the lower house to form a government.
Greens MP Adam Bandt and independent Andrew Wilkie are not taking part in the meeting, but are also said to be weighing up their options. Bandt is widely expected to align himself with the Labor party, but Wilkie has said that he could support either of the two main parties. Oakeshott, who has emerged as a key negotiator in the group of three independents, yesterday called for action on climate change to form part of any deal. “That is one example of what we may be able to deliver for this country, which the last parliament couldn’t do,” he told ABC news.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/24/australian-climate-change-position
Posted on August 25, 2010
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Rising temperatures in the past decade have reduced the ability of the world’s plants to soak up carbon from the atmosphere, scientists said [on Thursday 19 August]. Large-scale droughts have wiped out plants that would have otherwise absorbed an amount of carbon equivalent to Britain’s annual man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.
Scientists measure the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed by plants and turned into biomass as a quantity known as the net primary production. NPP increased from 1982 to 1999 as temperatures rose and there was more solar radiation.
But the period from 2000 to 2009 reverses that trend – surprising some scientists. Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running of the University of Montana estimate that there has been a global reduction in NPP of 0.55 gigatonnes (Gt). In comparison, the UK’s contribution to annual worldwide carbon dioxide emissions was 0.56Gt in 2007, while global aviation industry made up around 0.88Gt (3%) of the world total of 29.3Gt that year, according to UN data.
More: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/43565
Posted on August 25, 2010
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Come Dec. 31, about 68 countries are expected to complete the arduous task of taking an accurate head count of the number of people living within their geographical borders. The demographic census, which traditionally takes place every 10 years in different countries in different time frames, will this year cover nearly half the world’s population of 6.7 billion people. The countries undertaking the 2010 census include the United States, Russia, China, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Cape Verde, Finland, Argentina, Bolivia and Zambia, among others.
But Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country and the biggest in South America, has stolen a march over most others by conducting its first-ever paperless, all-digital fully-computerised nationwide census. The Brazilians say their 2010 Census, which began Aug. 1, will be “the most accurate, comprehensive and technologically sophisticated undertaking - since the country’s first count in 1872 - and arguably in world history.”
At least four other countries, Oman, Cape Verde, Uruguay and Colombia, have gone all-digital, according to the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA). But in magnitude and geographical reach, the Brazilian census is expected to be demographically formidable - judging by the country’s current population of 194.3 million spread across a territory of some 8.5 million kms.
The statistics are staggering: 58 million households and 5,565 municipalities to be surveyed; 240,000 persons earmarked for census-taking and logistical support; 225,000 hand-held personal digital assistants (PDAs) and notebooks equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers; and about 8,400 laptop computers. The census takers will transmit the data via the PDA device to over 7,000 regional data collection centres across the country.
Continuing its passion for the digital, Brazil also provides the option of filling out the census questionnaire via the internet. But this is valid only after a visit by the census-taker who will personally provide a sealed envelope with a code giving access to the questionnaire on a secure website. The total cost of the four-month-long census is estimated at over 900 million dollars and the preliminary figures are expected to be released Nov. 27. The initial preparations began in 2007 with pilot test runs in 2009. The final results will be released in 2011.
More: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52573
Posted on August 25, 2010
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In a list of the top places to spend the summer, a motorway just outside Beijing beneath a pall of smog and battered by ferocious heat would probably not feature. But some have little choice. For five days, thousands of Chinese motorists have been stuck in the world’s worst traffic jam that stretches for 60 miles. And even worse, the 10-day queue is expected to remain backed up until at least the end of the month.
The mother of all road works have spawned a temporary and very slow-moving community. Truck drivers, their vehicles packed with coal from Inner Mongolia, wash themselves in the scorching heat by the roadside, play cards to pass the time, and sleep beneath their lorries. Occasionally they get back into the vehicles to move forward a few inches – then turn off the engines and get out again.
The ultimate driving nightmare has led to authorities posting 400 police officers in the area to prevent the frustrations of drivers from boiling over and to try to prevent criminals taking advantage of stationary vehicles to rob motorists. “One night, around eight robbers attacked six trucks and cars, and ran away with a total 60,000 yuan (£7,000). One of the old drivers we know was even injured and the windshield of his truck was broken,” a woman with the surname Ding, the wife of one of the drivers, told the Beijing Morning Post.
Many of the drivers are remarkably resigned to such huge tailbacks as China’s double-digit economic growth played havoc with the country’s infrastructure. They are accustomed to long delays – though not quite this long. Some have been stuck in the jam for five days, China Central Television reported.
Road construction projects are struggling to keep up with the demands put upon them by the country’s need for raw materials to be moved around the country. There is no sign of things getting better anytime soon. Major road construction under way means that this stretch of highway could be backed up until the end of the month. In one section of the jam, vehicles can move little more than a half a mile a day, according to Zhang Minghai, the director of Zhangjiakou city’s traffic management bureau.
More: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-tenday-traffic-jam-driving-china-mad-2061184.html
Posted on August 24, 2010
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin travelled beyond the Arctic Circle on Monday to look into evidence for climate change after a record heatwave ravaged central Russia this summer. Putin, who has in the past displayed a light-hearted approach to global warming by joking Russians would have to buy fewer fur coats, flew to a scientific research station in the Samoilovsky island at the delta of Siberia’s Lena River. “The climate is changing. This year we have come to understand this when we faced events that resulted in fires,” Putin told climate scientists working at the station, opened in 1998 to study the melting Siberian permafrost.
The two-month heatwave, Russia’s worst on record, killed 54 people in forest fires, destroyed a quarter of the grain crop and shaved at least $14 billion off the economy. Putin, who has sought to burnish his action-man image flying firefighting planes and facing angry fire victims, was clearly stunned by the extent of the natural disaster, likening it to Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union.
Though experts say it is impossible to link individual weather events to climate change, the heatwave has shown signs of shifting perceptions of global warming risks among northern nations such as Russia, Canada and the Nordic countries.
Putin, dressed in a warm jacket, told the scientists on the barren tundra that he was still waiting for an answer whether global climate change was the result of human activity or “the Earth living its own life and breathing.” He argued that the end of the Ice Age which forced woolly mammoths to seek refuge in Samoilovsky and other Arctic islands ten thousand years ago was not mankind’s fault and sought advice on how to handle climate change. “Which islands should we be fleeing to?” he asked.
Scientists blame global warming on emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. Putin, keen for Russia to retain position as one of the leading exporters of oil and gas, has spoken dismissively of alternative energy sources. Russia’s own greenhouse gases emissions are well within its Kyoto goal of keeping them below 1990 level by 2012, but are set to rise as the country bids to develop manufacturing.
More: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67M3G920100823?
Posted on August 24, 2010
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Dr. Archana R. Khade, left, and a nurse, Sunita Laxman Jadhav, right, explained incentives to delay childbirth to a new bride near Satara this month.
Sunita Laxman Jadhav is a door-to-door saleswoman who sells waiting. She sweeps along muddy village lanes in her nurse’s white sari, calling on newly married couples with an unblushing proposition: Wait two years before getting pregnant, and the government will thank you.
It also will pay you. “I want to tell you about our honeymoon package,” began Ms. Jadhav, an auxiliary nurse, during a recent house call on a new bride in this farming region in the state of Maharashtra. Ms. Jadhav explained that the district government would pay 5,000 rupees, or about $106, if the couple waited to have children. Waiting, she promised, would allow them time to finish their schooling or to save money.
Waiting also would allow India more time to curb a rapidly growing population that threatens to turn its demography from a prized asset into a crippling burden. With almost 1.2 billion people, India is disproportionately young; roughly half the population is younger than 25. This “demographic dividend” is one reason some economists predict that India could surpass China in economic growth rates within five years. India will have a young, vast work force while a rapidly aging China will face the burden of supporting an older population.
But if youth is India’s advantage, the sheer size of its population poses looming pressures on resources and presents an enormous challenge for an already inefficient government to expand schooling and other services. In coming decades, India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, and the critical uncertainty is just how populous it will be. Estimates range from 1.5 billion to 1.9 billion people, and Indian leaders recognize that that must be avoided.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/world/asia/22india.html?_r=1&ref=india
Posted on August 24, 2010
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The Jakarta branch of the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) revealed the city’s population had reached 9.5 million, or 4 percent of the country’s total population of 237.6 million. “The total population in the city is 9,588,198 people, with 3 percent more males in the ratio of male to female,” agency head Agus Suherman told The Jakarta Post over the telephone on Wednesday. The figure exceeds a prediction of 8.9 million people in 2010 published on the Jakarta BPS’s official website. It even surpasses the city’s predicted 2025 population of 9.2 million.
The census, if accurate, reveals a 14.4 percent growth on the 8.3 million people tallied in the previous nationwide census in 2000. That figure had only grown by 1.8 percent from figures collated in 1990. Agus said Jakarta’s 662-square-kilometer area had a population density of 14,476 people per square kilometer. He said of the five municipalities, excluding the Thousand Islands regency, Central Jakarta has the highest density with 18,676 people per square kilometer. Central Jakarta, however, was home to the fewest people, with a population of only 898,883, compared to East Jakarta with 2.6 million people.
Agus said detailed analyses for the cause of the high population had not yet been made available. “We will finish all analyses, including demographic structures and housing conditions, by December,” he said.
Meanwhile, a senior researcher from the University of Indonesia’s Demography Institute, Djainal Abidin, said the city’s soaring population was likely caused by a lower mortality rate thanks to improvements to healthcare, a higher birth rate and increased urbanization. “The most dominant factor is urbanization. As people from other parts of the country migrate to Jakarta, they also build families here, increasing the population,” he said.
More: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/08/19/jakarta%E2%80%99s-population-surpasses-15year-forecast.html
Posted on August 24, 2010
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The Royal Bank of Scotland might at first seem an unusual focus for climate change activists’ ire. But since last Thursday, members of Climate Camp have been campaigning outside their headquarters in Edinburgh. The reason? They are protesting over the huge loans the bank has provided to oil companies, oil being one of the biggest culprits in contributing to climate change. Climate Camp wants us to stop burning fossil fuels and look for green alternatives for our energy. But what are the alternatives and will we be able to establish a sustainable network of environmentally friendly energy providers to replace our reliance on fossil fuels? There is more to green energy than wind and solar power; in fact, there is a plethora of innovative and intriguing ideas around and forward-thinking scientists are finding solutions from unconventional sources.
More: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/fuel-of-the-future-the-new-power-generation-2060056.html
Posted on August 23, 2010
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Climate scientists believe extreme weather events like the recent flooding in Pakistan will become more frequent. Photograph: Mohammad Sajjad/AP
At the weekend, Saturday 21 August to be precise, the world as a whole went into “ecological debt”. That means in effect that from now until the end of the year, humanity will be consuming more natural resources and producing more waste than the forests, fields and fisheries of the world can replace and absorb. By doing so, the life -support systems that we all depend on are worn ever thinner. Farms become less productive, fish populations crash and climate regulating forests decline. All become less resilient in the face of extreme weather events.
The date is arrived at by comparing our annual environmental resource budget with our ecological footprint – the rate at which we spend it. The more we overshoot the available budget, the earlier in the year we start to go into the ecological red. Collectively we started to live beyond our means in the 1980s. Since then the date has crept earlier and earlier in the year. Improved measurement and data bring the latest date forward by a whole month in comparison with last year’s date. It now takes about 18 months for the planet to generate what we consume in just 12.
The worse news is that this also assumes that the whole of nature is there for human exploitation. Any farmer or ecologist will tell you that for ecosystems to function healthily fallow portions and periods are essential. In a worst case economic scenario, like the banking crisis, governments can, and did, intervene to ensure that money still comes out of the cash machines. But if ecosystems crash, they cant print more planet.
The same data used to produce the date above also reveal a creeping vulnerability for the UK. We have become more dependent on both food and fuel imports. Worsening self-sufficiency carries a high economic cost as the price of both essentials is rising. But it also undermines national security in other ways. It was only two years ago that we lived through another food and fuel crisis when prices for both rose suddenly and dramatically. At the time, the severity of the bank failures distracted many from the long-term signals.
Increased competition for declining oil reserves and a global agricultural system increasingly vulnerable to climatic upheaval, mean that such events are likely to become much more common. The price of oil is now again on an upward curve (and events in the Gulf of Mexico lay bare the difficulties of extracting the remaining, more marginal oil fields). Significant crop failures this year have triggered a rise in “food nationalism”.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/aug/22/global-resources-deficit-land-water-oil
Posted on August 23, 2010
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Photograph: H Taillard/Corbis
It’s summer, and off the coast of Britain anglers are enjoying a blue-grey abundance of mackerel. Barbecued, smoked, or baked in cider, this firm favourite provides a seasonal guilt-free treat, certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). But in a dispute echoing the cod wars of the 1970s, Britain and the EU are on the brink of a mackerel war with Iceland and the Faroe Islands, who have ripped up agreed quotas, unilaterally awarding themselves the lion’s share of north Atlantic stock.
UK fishermen are furious; the EU is condemnatory. Those in the industry, meanwhile, claim that the dispute puts at risk not only the future of Britain’s pelagic fishing industry, but the future of mackerel itself as a healthy, sustainable fish. Last week 50 fishermen blockaded Peterhead port in Aberdeenshire, physically preventing the Faroese vessel Jupiter from offloading 1,100 tonnes of the fish to a processing plant.
Now a prominent Scottish MEP is calling for sanctions against Iceland and the Faroes, an island group situated between Britain and Iceland and an autonomous province of Denmark. Labelling them “modern-day Viking raiders” engaging in a free-for-all, Struan Stevenson, the senior vice-president on the European parliament’s fisheries committee, says only the threat of sanctions can bring the two nations to heel.
“Negotiations are ongoing. But what will it take short of announcing we are going to institute a trade war? That is what I am actually suggesting now. We should use that as threat. We should follow the example of the fishermen in Peterhead. We should threaten to close all the EU ports to Faroese and Icelandic vessels, block all imports from these countries, and show them that we mean business,” he said.
It should be a key issue in Iceland’s EU accession talks, he said. “Here is a nation coming to the table to become a member of the EU. Yet, what have they given us? A volcanic ash cloud. Financial problems with their referendum and refusing to pay the debts they owe Britain. And now they are acting in this extraordinarily aggressive fashion over fish stocks. “What they are doing is effectively illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing.”
Part of the problem would seem to be climate change, with mackerel seeking colder waters. Seeing such abundance, cash-strapped Iceland has hiked an agreed quota of 2,000 tonnes up to 130,000 tonnes. The Faroes, which along with the EU and Norway is a signatory to the Coastal Waters Agreement, did likewise, arbitrarily increasing their 25,000-tonne quota to 85,000 tonnes. If maintained, said WWF Scotland, the combined 2010 mackerel quota would result in the fish being exploited 35% above the scientific recommendation set by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, and spell a “death sentence” for precious fish stock.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/22/britain-iceland-faroe-islands-mackerel-war
Posted on August 23, 2010
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One by one, Ali Kassim pulls out the weeds that have grown in his rice paddy. It’s surprisingly rare in Africa, but he is cultivating African rice - once close to extinction after it was pushed aside centuries ago for a higher-yield imported Asian variety.
Researchers hope to see more and more farmers like Kassim, who is 32 and among about 100 people in Togo’s central Atakpamey region to take part in an experimental programme led by the Africa Rice Centre (AfricaRice), based in neighbouring Benin. In the small west African country, experts are seeking to change the farming habits of a whole continent by reintroducing African rice, or Oryza glaberrima, in the hope of scaling down food crises. Cultivated for about 3,500 years and then close to extinction, African rice was abandoned by most farmers in favour of the Asian variety, Oryza sativa, which has a higher yield and has been imported for about 450 years.
But the local rice is more nutritious and researchers are currently working on ways of producing a strain with a higher yield that could enable an increase in production across the continent, which imports most of its rice. “The principal objective (…) is to achieve self-suffiency in Africa in the matter. We are therefore giving priority to the yield, so that the new African rice can be more competitive against its Asian kin,” said Moussa Sie, head of the research programme.
With production largely outdone by growing demand, Africa imports 40 percent of the rice it consumes, at the cost of 3.6 billion dollars (2.8 billion euros) in 2008, according to the Africa Rice Centre report for that year. Africa’s dependency poses risks such as during the global food crisis of 2008, when a hike in the prices of basic commodities caused food shortages and riots all over the world.
More: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/africas-ambitious-return-of-ancient-rice-2059548.html
Posted on August 23, 2010
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The visitors: tens of thousands of tourists flock to the Galapagos Islands every year. AFP/Getty Images
Eco-tourism. Is this now-fashionable concept basically a contradiction in terms – on a par, as cynics might say, with “business ethics” or “compassionate conservatism”? “Adventure travel” is, of course, a concept as old as the hills, even if some of our greatest adventurers, such as Captain Scott, took great pains to proclaim their serious scientific purposes.
Nowadays, much “adventure travel” is given a deliberately green tinge. Organisations like Earthwatch send young (and increasingly frequently old) people to the four corners of the earth to study and protect endangered wildlife of every sort and, yes, to enjoy themselves in doing so.
But just how realistic is it to imagine that increasing numbers of people can visit the wild places of the earth, and the animals, trees and plants that live there, without destroying them? Oscar Wilde famously wrote that “each man kills the thing he loves”. Have we reached, or are we approaching, the limits of sustainable wildlife tourism? Should there be a strict rationing of visitors in sensitive areas? Should “return visits” be banned? Should there be total no-go zones?
There are no easy answers to such questions, but it is important that they should be asked. Take the Galapagos Islands, for example. Historically, British visitors have formed the second largest group. Even with the recession, there were still 14,000 British visitors last year.
More: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/endangered-spaces-can-our-wildest-places-survive-tourism-2059272.html
Posted on August 22, 2010
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Photo: Tatan Syuflana/AP
Speculation that government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about “peak oil”. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is also refusing to hand over policy documents about “peak oil” – the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then declines – under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, despite releasing others in which it admits “secrecy around the topic is probably not good”.
Experts say they have received a letter from David Mackay, chief scientific adviser to the DECC, asking for information and advice on peak oil amid a growing campaign from industrialists such as Sir Richard Branson for the government to put contingency plans in place to deal with any future crisis. A spokeswoman for the department insisted the request from Mackay was “routine” and said there was no change of policy other than to keep the issue under review. The peak oil argument was effectively dismissed as alarmist by former energy minister Malcolm Wicks in a report to government last summer, while oil companies such as BP, which have major influence in Whitehall, take a similar line.
But documents obtained under the FoI Act seen by the Observer show that a “peak oil workshop” brought together staff from the DECC, the Bank of England and Ministry of Defence among others to discuss the issue. A ministry note of that summit warned that “[Government] public lines on peak oil are ‘not quite right’. They need to take account of climate change and put more emphasis on reducing demand and also the fact that peak oil may increase volatility in the market.”
Those comments were written 12 months ago, but a letter in response to the FoI request written by DECC officials and dated 31 July 2010 says it can only release some information on what is currently under policy discussion because they are “ongoing” and “high profile” in nature. The letter adds: “We recognise the public interest arguments in favour of disclosing this information. In particular we recognise that greater transparency makes government more open and accountable and could help provide an insight into peak oil. “However any public interest in the disclosure of such information must be balanced with the need to ensure that ministers and advisers can discuss policy in a manner which allows for frank exchanges of views and opinions about important and sensitive issues.”
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/22/peak-oil-department-energy-climate-change
Posted on August 22, 2010
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BHP Billiton’s £28bn hostile bid for Canada’s Potash Corporation sets the scene for one of mining’s biggest takeover battles. But this is more than a clash between multinationals intent on self-aggrandisement.
Certainly, the usual arguments are wheeled out by the predator about diversification, synergies and the prospect of fatter profits, while the target company complains about the offer price being pitched too low. But behind the rhetoric is a bidding war that lays bare the global struggle for resources on a planet struggling with water and food shortages, overpopulation and pollution. And it highlights a question that overshadows the 21st century: how to provide enough food for a global population that is set to rise from 6.8 billion to more than 9 billion by 2050, according to the United Nations.
Potash Corporation, based in Saskatchewan, is the biggest producer of potash, a key component of fertilisers used to maximise the supply of healthy crops. The company also makes nitrogen and phosphate, two other primary constituents of fertiliser products. With demand for grain rising and less farmland available per person, “the need for fertiliser – especially potash – has never been greater,” says the Potash Corp website. Giles Parkinson of the Australian business news website Business Spectator says BHP’s bid is not just an attempt to diversify: it’s a major bet that rising food demand will cause a significant growth in the use of the fertiliser.
According to Potash Corp, more people are eating meat, and as incomes rise in developing nations, millions of people are switching from starch to protein-based diets. “Every pound of beef requires seven pounds of grain to produce, and this has a substantial impact on demand,” says a Potash official. Analysts agree the use of fertiliser is bound to rise in the attempt to feed the world’s growing population. A report from HSBC flagged up its growing importance as extreme weather events increasingly disrupt production. This year’s failure of the Russian wheat harvest, as well as the flooding in Pakistan, are cases in point.
Experts say crop yields are low in many regions, partly due to the historical under-application of fertiliser in many developing countries. China has 20% of the world’s population but just 6% of its arable land – which has dwindled as Chinese industry has ruined previously fertile tracts of ground through pollution and heavy industrialisation. The Fertiliser Institute in Washington says China and India use only half as much potash on their fields as American farmers.
A recent paper published by the Royal Society says there are limits on the amount of land that will become available for crops even though it estimates that global food supplies need to increase by 70% in the next 40 years. But better fertilisers and chemicals could hugely increase yields and cut water use.
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What is happening in the fertiliser sector mirrors the scramble for natural resources throughout the world, as governments and corporations jockey for position to satisfy rising consumption.
For companies, there is the lure of huge profits via consolidation. In the last week alone, there have been two big moves by resources firms. First, Agrium launched a A$1bn offer for AWB, the Australian wheat trader. Then India’s ambitious minerals group Vedanta Resources announced plans to buy a controlling stake in Cairn Energy’s Indian oil fields. It is the Indian company’s first major investment in oil and marks a milestone in its development as a diversified commodities producer.
In Africa, the Chinese are forging mining joint ventures and investments linked to China’s hunt for resources to fuel its fast-industrialising economy. Africa is also seeing a land grab that has been likened to Europe’s carve-up of the continent at the end of the 19th century. An Observer investigation earlier this year established that 50m hectares – more than double the size of the UK – had been acquired in the last few years by foreign governments and wealthy investors with state subsidies.
Ethiopia alone has approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural schemes since 2007. Saudi Arabia is thought to be the biggest buyer as it turns to Africa to meet domestic demand, a move that helps it to conserve water at home.
Charities have complained that foreign expansion has been at the expense of African smallholders and that overseas investment exacerbates hunger as land is increasingly turned over to growing crops for export. There have also been reports of evictions without compensation, bullying and rising crime.
Some of the African deals have been eye-wateringly large: China has signed a contract with the Democratic Republic of Congo to grow 2.8m hectares of palm oil for biofuels. Before it fell apart after riots, a proposed 1.2m-hectare deal between Madagascar and South Korea’s Daewoo would have included nearly half the country’s arable land.
It is against this backdrop that BHP’s move on Potash Corp should be viewed. Its foray is not without risks, as new technology and GM crops could also play an important role in helping to secure larger and more reliable food supplies. But that is a distant hope at the moment.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/22/bhp-billiton-potash-corp-global-crisis
Posted on August 21, 2010
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The devastating effects of excess alcohol on young women have been spelled out by a major study. Binge drinking ‘ladettes’ are 40 per cent likelier to have an abortion. And the proportion of teenage girls who blame alcohol for losing their virginity has more than doubled compared with 60 years ago.
The study, the most extensive of its kind, paints a disturbing picture of girls having casual, unprotected sex under the influence of alcohol which they often regret as soon as they sober up. It also shows that the number of people of both sexes drinking to excess has tripled in a decade. At the same time, official statistics show that the number of abortions has soared to make Britain the termination capital of Europe. Doctors, meanwhile, are seeing more and more girls wanting the morning-after pill after a night of drunken, unprotected sex.
Researchers from University College London examined the alcohol consumption and sexual activity of almost 25,000 individuals aged 16 to 44 over a ten-year period. They found that women who drank in excess – more than 14 units a week – were 1.8 times more likely to have taken emergency contraception such as the morning after pill at least once over the last year. They were also 1.4 times likelier to have had at least one abortion in the last 18 months, according to the study published in the Journal of Public Health.
The number of young girls who blame drink for losing their virginity has risen from 2.4 per cent in the 1940s to 6.4 per cent today. And official statistics show that the total number of abortions has soared in a generation to reach the highest level in Europe, with around 200,000 now carried out every year in England and Wales.
More (and some revolting pictures): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1304833/The-Legacy-ladette-binge-drinking-women-linked-rise-casual-sex-abortions-prescriptions-morning-pill.html
Posted on August 21, 2010
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Ibrahim Issa, a jovial Syrian taxi-driver who wears a blue robe over an ample belly, has nine children from two wives. He plans to marry a third wife soon. He says it is up to Allah whether more children arrive, and not for him to interfere, say, by using contraception. Like all Damascus taxi-drivers, he complains about the cost of living and how hard it is to make ends meet on the $300 a month he earns. Issa, 43, shrugs when asked if all those mouths to feed don’t make life harder for him. “No, I’m delighted,” he grins.
Syria now has a population of 20 million people, with a growth rate that remains one of the world’s highest at about 2.4 percent. But it has declined since averaging 3.2 percent from 1947-94, according to the Syrian Commission for Family Affairs. “We have a population problem, no question,” said Nabil Sukkar, a Syrian economist formerly with the World Bank. “Unless we cope with it, it could be a burden on our development.”
He said labor supply was growing about 4.5 percent a year, due to rapid population expansion in earlier decades, outpacing the capacity of Syria’s economy to create jobs for the quarter of a million youngsters arriving on the job market every year. “Too big a population means a high burden on government services, such as education, electricity and health care,” he said. “Perhaps in 20 years the growth rate will go down to 1.5 percent as in Egypt, but in the meantime we do have a problem.”
The official unemployment rate is around 10 percent, but independent estimates put it at anywhere up to 25 percent.
More: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6522FS20100603
Posted on August 21, 2010
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Every day, about 350,000 people are born and 150,000 die. Run this loop for a few decades, and the United Nations projects that we’re on track to increase global population by about one-third by 2050.
Most of that growth will happen in the poorest countries on Earth. Despite their poverty, those two billion people will add to the atmosphere at least three times the current greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S. This fact alone has given the efforts to slow population growth new urgency: the U.K.’s Optimum Population Trust has calculated that paying for contraception in the developing world is approximately four times more cost-effective per ton of greenhouse gases saved than to fund, for example, renewable energy projects.
Yet access to contraception will not solve the problem on its own. According to Werner Haug, director of the Technical Division of the United Nations Population Fund, the drivers of high fertility are economic and social inequality between the sexes, along with the lack of family planning coupled with high infant mortality, which drives people to have many children to ensure that enough will survive.
Solving these problems requires improvements in a host of circumstances, such as the availability of vaccinations, improved women’s health, better access to education for women, and the pursuit of overall economic development. Prosperity, history has shown, is the key to shifting from the high birth and death rates common to the developing world to the low rates that accompany industrialization.
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=good-riddance-overpopulation
Posted on August 21, 2010
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Photo: AFP
How best to communicate the various environmental crises – climate change, loss of biodiversity and habitats, resource depletion, watercourse contamination, to name but a few – facing us today?
It’s an open question aired frequently by environmentalists. Do you repeatedly present to the world the stark future we face if we continue to ignore these threats and, thereby, risk crying wolf? Or do you instead promote the many advantages of steering towards a more environmentally sustainable world? But how do you get this rather worthy message heard above the noise of advertising, celebrity news and football transfer gossip which leave so many of us comfortably numb?
One alternative tactic is to intentionally simplify the often complex nature of the environmental problems we face by framing them in a no-nonsense formula most people will “get”. Patronising? Possibly. Effective? Well, it certainly helps to get the media interested, which is often half the battle.
One such example is Earth Overshoot Day, which falls [today] for 2010. Based on the premise that most of us understand the concept of spending beyond our means, Earth Overshoot Day marks the day in the calendar when “humanity will have demanded an amount of ecological resources equivalent to what it takes nature 12 months to produce”. In other words, we will collectively go overdrawn in terms of our environmental resources for this year on 21 August. If we were talking about our annual income, we’d each be rightly concerned by such an overspend.
The idea for Earth Overshoot Day is said to have originally come from the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a UK-based thinktank which “inspires and demonstrates real economic wellbeing”. (NEF also does something similar with “Fish Debt Day” – this year marked in the UK on 4 August.) However, it is calculated each year by the Global Footprint Network, a California-based “environmental research organisation working to advance sustainability through use of the Ecological Footprint”.
More:
Posted on August 21, 2010
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When a man and a woman have unprotected sex, babies are quite often the result. Sexual decisions not only impact the lives of those involved, but impact the planet we all share. Currently the world’s population is growing by 80 million people every year. On a planet with finite resources this means we either take a rational approach to addressing population issues, or we ignore simple mathematics and pay the unimaginably horrific consequences. Sound bleak? Well it is. Which is why everyone needs to talk about it.
In his just-released report, “POPULATION: The Multiplier of Everything,” Post Carbon Institute Fellow and Population Media Center founder and president, William Ryerson cuts directly to the need to openly and thoughtfully address the critical issue of population growth.
In the 17-page report, Ryerson paints the big picture of population growth both in the United States and globally, details how our growing numbers impact food, water and energy supplies, addresses the belief that “technology will save us,” and explores a number of common myths and misconceptions about population growth, which are often perpetuated by the media or special interest groups.
Ryerson succinctly clears up the following common myths:
• The “Birth Dearth” Myth
• The Belief that Science and Technology will Solve All Problems.
• The Belief that there is a Problem only with Distribution of Food and other Resources
• The Belief that Religious Barriers will Prevent the Use of Family Planning
• The Myth that Economic Development is Needed to Slow Population Growth
• The Myth that Providing Contraceptives is all that is Needed
In his introduction, Ryerson lays out why the population conversation can be so difficult:
“When it comes to controversial issues, population is in a class by itself. Advocates and activists working to reduce global population growth and size are attacked by the Left for supposedly ignoring human-rights issues, glossing over Western overconsumption, or even seeking to reduce the number of people of color. They are attacked by the Right for supposedly favoring widespread abortion, promoting promiscuity via sex education, or wanting to harm economic growth. Others think the problem has been solved, or believe that the real problem is that we have a shortage of people (the so-called “birth dearth”). Still others think the population problem will solve itself, or that technological innovations will make our numbers irrelevant.
“One thing is certain: The planet and its resources are finite, and it cannot support an infinite population of humans or any other species. A second thing is also certain:
The issue of population is too important to avoid just because it is controversial.”
More: http://www.populationmedia.org/2010/08/19/press-release-new-report-on-population/
Posted on August 21, 2010
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In the face of a rising cycle of maternal deaths, Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) and abject poverty, now is the time for the men folk to show renewed commitment to family planning methods, writes Zebulon Agomuo.
A few years ago, Mike, a company driver, lost his job and life became very difficult. Before the sad development, he had six children – four males and two females. A year after Mike lost his job, his wife was delivered of the seventh child; yet, he had no means of livelihood. Consequently, he started mounting pressure on some of his friends and former colleagues, for financial assistance.
On the arrival of the eighth child, Mike’s financial situation had still not improved and he was contending with a lot of pressure. It was at that point that someone pointed out to him the need for family planning, either for himself or his wife, at which point he flared up. “Is it because I came to you for assistance that has given you the audacity to probe into my private affair? Children are gifts from God and I do not intend to stop them from coming. God who brings them knows how they will survive. Family planning is totally against the will of God,” Mike snapped. True to his threat, he neither sought medical help for himself nor his wife.
On the ninth pregnancy, the wife could not survive the complications. She had a prolonged labour and became very hypertensive during the labour session. She did not only die but also lost the baby in the process. In another instance, a lecturer with one of the nation’s polytechnics decided to undergo a vasectomy when his wife refused to submit herself for any form of family planning. Speaking with BusinessDay, the lecturer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said his decision was based on the belief that marriage demands sacrifice, even when it means death.
“After three children, I saw no reason for us to continue raising children. My wife, though she agreed with me, refused to use any family planning device. I felt we should stop at that number and focus on their education. So to avoid any mistake, I volunteered to go for the vasectomy. I had the section peacefully; it was two years ago,” the lecturer said.
Women cannot achieve sexual and reproductive health without the cooperation and participation of men. Usually, it is the men folk who usually decide on the number and variety of sexual relationships, timing and frequency of sexual activity and use of contraceptives, sometimes through coercion or violence.
Chauvinism has been taken to a ridiculous height, even in serious matters. Hiding under the erroneous belief that “it is a man’s world”, a good number of men have adopted reckless lifestyles that, not only hurt them, but also ruin their families. Many years ago, it used to be a mark of respect and heroism for men to have large families. Those were the days when polygamy thrived. However, with the economic realities of our days, it has become necessary for people to cut their coats according to their means, not necessarily their sizes.
More:http://www.businessdayonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13864:beating-the-macho-ego-in-reproductive-health-matters&catid=126:health
Posted on August 19, 2010
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Pakistan’s devastating floods highlight how climate change is having “a profound effect on global food security”. Photograph: Horace Murray/Reuters
Soaring commodity prices and natural disasters in Russia and Pakistan have combined to put African nations and conflict-ridden countries such as Afghanistan most at risk from food shortages, according to a report released today. Sharp price rises for wheat and other grains will hit the world’s neediest countries hardest, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, as they grapple with their own poor harvests and failing transport networks, according to a food security index by risk management consultancy Maplecroft.
It also says conflict is a key factor behind food insecurity and Afghanistan tops the index of threatened countries. The other nine nations categorised as “extreme risk” are all in Africa, led by Democratic Repubkic of the Congo, Burundi, Eritrea, Sudan and Ethiopia. African nations make up 36 of the 50 countries most at risk in the index.
The report highlights climate change as having a “profound effect on global food security”, with a heatwave in Russia coinciding with devastating floods in Pakistan – ranked 30th and “high risk” in the index. “Russian brakes on exports, plus a reduction in Canada’s harvest by almost a quarter due to flooding in June, are provoking fluctuations in the commodity markets,” said Fiona Place, environmental analyst at Maplecroft. “This will further affect the food security of the most vulnerable countries.”
Using 12 criteria developed with the World Food Programme, including GDP per head and cereal production and imports, Maplecroft’s index evaluated risks to the supply of basic food staples for 163 countries. Finland was least at risk, while the UK was ranked 146th.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/19/food-shortages-afghanistan-africa-pakistan-russia
Posted on August 19, 2010
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Photo: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
A proposal to build Britain’s only commercial gold mine in Loch Lomond national park has been refused after councillors decided it would “devastate” the park’s outstanding scenery. Buoyed by record gold prices, the developers had hoped to mine up to five tonnes of gold worth around £110m, and a further 20 tonnes of silver, from an unworked mine at Cononish near Tyndrum in the north-eastern corner of the park.
Despite substantial local support, the application was narrowly rejected by the park’s planning committee yesterday evening, by 12 votes to 10, after taking evidence and debating the proposal for more than five hours at a special hearing in Tyndrum village hall. The developer, Scotgold, which raised more than £4.5m from Australian private investors for the project and believed it would be welcomed by local planners, is now expected to appeal to the Scottish government.
National park officials said the decision was “very tricky”. Last week, the park’s director of planning, Gordon Watson, claimed the project was of doubtful economic viability yet its vast waste dump, a dam holding 820,000 tonnes of ground rock “tailings”, would permanently ruin the immediate area.
Mike Cantlay, the park’s convenor and chair of the Scottish tourism authority VisitScotland, voted against the proposal. He said: “Thriving communities in the national park are fundamental and this has been an especially difficult application to consider. The statutory aims of the national park are very clear: that we must give greater weight to our first aim, to conserve and enhance our natural heritage, therefore we can’t balance the potential economic benefits against the certain devastating long-term impact on this spectacular scenery.”
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/19/scottish-gold-mine-rejected
