How to Avoid Hunger and Environmental Catastrophe

A new report has just been issued on the threats to our food supply and environment. ABC News has the story about the report, which comes from the Food and Land Use Coalition. I had not heard of them until today, but I see that two of the partners in the coalition are IIASA and the World Resources Institute--both of which are very high quality organizations to whom we should pay attention.

The report comes out now to coincide with the United Nations Climate Action Summit, which will be held in New York beginning next week, and here are two key background notes:

The world’s food supply largely relies on just five countries – the United States, Argentina, Brazil, China and India – for 60% of its calories. Additionally, much of the world’s food supply depends mostly on four crops – rice, wheat, potatoes and maize, a concentration that leaves the food supply vulnerable to risk.

Food and land use systems are currently responsible for up to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report. The emissions from the agricultural system alone will heat the environment beyond the level that scientists have warned about.

And here are two things that are important for the world to do:

The report outlines ways in which money can be better spent to reforest land, and promote biodiversity, and how land can be used more efficiently at local levels to produce a greater diversity of food crops.

Diversifying crops would mean a change in diet for many people in the developed world. To remain sustainable, the world will have to look to more diverse sources of protein and sharply reduce meat consumption. Experts say these changes will lead to healthier, more varied diets.

The important thing here is that we have to act now. We are spending a lot of money on agricultural subsidies and on growing food for animals rather than people. We need to change how we think about agriculture, the environment, and our diet. Not an easy project, but it beats the alternative. 

Cultural Demography of Environmental Activism

Not everyone views the environment in the same way, as we famously know in the differences between those who believe that climate change is occurring and is a consequence of human activities, and those who either choose to ignore the evidence of climate change and/or think that humans have nothing to do with it. These cultural views of the environment are more complex than that example suggests, however, and the linkages between world views--expressed especially through religion--and the way people perceive the environment is the subject of a week-long cyberseminar from 15 May through 19 May hosted by the Population Environment Resource Network at Columbia University. Even if you don't have time to join the cyberseminar, I encourage you to download the background paper on "Religious belief and environmental challenges in the 21st century." There's a lot in there, but this passage jumped out at me:

Acknowledging the absence of a sociological theory accounting for White’s (1967) link between belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible and low levels of environmental concern, (Greeley 1993) found that this correlation is driven by denomination-specific beliefs such as belief in a gracious God and shows that this relationship does not hold for Catholics. Thus, it is not necessarily religious belief per se which causes individuals to be less likely to engage in environmentally-friendly behaviour, but a rigid mind set (exemplified by a literal biblical interpretation) characteristic among more conservative Christian traditions which drives these results. Differences in theology also make a significant difference in beliefs vis-à-vis personal responsibility for environmental issues and environmental outcomes (Bookless 2008). Testing White’s hypothesis that the Christian tradition breeds a belief in human domination over nature, Chuvieco et al. (2016) find that predominantly Christian countries perform better across a range of environmental indicators when controlling for per capita income and Human Development Index scores. However, it could be argued that more affluent Christian nations “export” their environmental problems by importing goods from more polluting (and secular) countries such as China.  

These are themes that you will find in Chapter 11 of my text, and, if you are a user of my text and have downloaded the Powerpoint slides that go with the book, you will recognize the following slide, drawing upon a seminal paper by James Proctor at Lewis & Clark University in Oregon:

When I put this slide up, I can always see light bulbs going on. Difference in religion and related cultural views permeate this slide, and you really can't understand approaches to the environmental issues of our time without working your way through all of these paths.

Earth Day 2017

I participated in the very first Earth Day back in 1970 and it has become my tradition in this blog to revisit the talk I gave that day and see how things have changed (or not) over time. At the time I was just finishing my doctorate in demography at UC Berkeley and I accepted the invitation to drive down to Fresno State for their Earth Day festivities (and it was a very nice celebration). At the time the world's population was estimated to be 3.7 billion--a bit less than half of what it is today--but the growth rate was the highest the world had ever recorded. My message to the audience 47 years ago (yikes--has it really been that long!!) was not much different than it would be today:

It seems likely that if we don't change our ways the ultimate creditors of the world--our food resources, our water, our air, the quality of human life--all those things from which we have been so heavily borrowing, may just foreclose on us. Frankly, there are just too many people around, and if you don't think so now, you can wait another 30 years when there may well be twice as many people on this planet.

Fortunately, the birth rate did drop somewhat faster than we were expecting at that time and so 30 years later, in 2000, the population had increased "only" to 6.1 billion--not a doubling, but still a significant increase creating even more issues in terms of environmental impacts and questions of sustainability.

Population growth is not unilaterally responsible for pollution, but make no mistake, every additional person born into the world aggravates existing pollution problems and makes solutions more costly to  achieve.

Something must be done to check population growth and the sooner that goal is realized, the better off we will be both in the short and in the long run. Now, I have read letters-to-the-editor in the newspaper and I have talked to individuals who say that the will of God will prevail and that if we have faith we will avoid disaster; others place their faith in science fiction rather/or in addition to God and argue that, as in the past, future technological advances will spring us out of trouble. To these people I say that they may be correct, but I am not willing to wait and find out when there are things that I as an individual can do right now to actively encourage and support population control. 

The obvious issue was to lower fertility rates around the world, and I championed the cause not just of making birth control more accessible, but more importantly to create a social environment in which people preferred smaller families.  

We should definitely advocate for the immediate removal of all discriminatory barriers against women in education [remember that this was the first year women had been admitted to Princeton University] and in the professions. If you can get a woman out of the house and reward her with financial gain and social and economic prestige, then the social and economic costs of having additional children are going to increase for that woman and she is far more likely than ever before to prefer a small family. 

To be sure, there are plenty of reasons besides just the demographic ones for the existence of gender equality, but this is still a compelling issue in more parts of the world than we might wish to think about.

In the end, Earth Day is really about people, not the Earth. The earth will survive without us, but we can't survive without it. 

U.S. Safety and Science Under Threat

It has become clear that the Trump administration has a world view that disparages the discussion of global issues while also denigrating science. Two stories help to illustrate this troubling trend. Public Radio International today aired a story about the fact that positions at the U.S. State Department are going unfilled, and the Trump budget proposes a huge cut to the department. 

One of those empty chairs at State once belonged to Thomas Countryman, who served in the US foreign service for 35 years. His most recent post during the Obama presidency was assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation. Countryman says there are two possible explanations for why the White House is leaving so many State Department slots unfilled. One is benign, and one is more sinister.

"The benign explanation is that it's difficult to find somebody who has perfect, unthinking loyalty to Mr. Trump and who also is minimally qualified for the job that they would have to do and would need Senate confirmation. Those two groups of people may not intersect at all," he says. "The more difficult explanation, [which] unfortunately, I believe to be true, [is] that there's a deliberate policy on the part of the White House to let the State Department and other agencies atrophy to ensure that there remains a vacuum in the analytical and leadership capabilities of State and other agencies."

Countryman says vacancies at State mean fewer voices might speak out to challenge the snap decisions emanating from the White House.

The second story comes from here in San Diego, but is being repeated in many places in the country. It relates to the concern of scientists that the Trump administration will actively try to destroy data related to climate and other environmental change. The San Diego Union-Tribune reveals that scientists at the University of California, San Diego are trying to make sure that their data are preserved.

The situation at UC San Diego resembles efforts by scientists, librarians, environmental activists and others across the country to preserve climate data housed at colleges and on government websites. Representatives of places such as the University of Michigan and MIT said they’re worried that President Donald Trump and his team could suppress information that’s central to policy discussions, international treaties and business regulations.

The president has repeatedly denied the existence of global warming or cast doubt on it. He has called climate change an “expensive hoax” and said, “I am not a great believer in man-made climate change.” 

And Scott Pruitt — head of the Environmental Protection Agency, the federal government’s leading enforcer on climate-change issues — said Thursday that he doesn’t believe carbon dioxide is a “primary contributor” to climate change.

These are very unsettling developments and we need to do what we can to keep safety and science at the top of the national agenda.

Non-Human Animals Are Declining in Number--Humans Are to Blame

The World Wildlife Federation and Zoological Society of London have just released the latest Living Planet Report (the 2016 version), and its conclusions are dismal, at best. The Independent has this headline: "World facing first mass extinction since the dinosaurs as wildlife populations plunge by 67 per cent in 50 years" and a very nice illustrative video to go with that. The BBC is a little more reserved in its coverage, but there is nothing encouraging here.

The figures suggest that animals living in lakes, rivers and wetlands are suffering the biggest losses. Human activity, including habitat loss, wildlife trade, pollution and climate change contributed to the declines.

Dr Mike Barrett. head of science and policy at WWF, said: "It's pretty clear under 'business as usual' we will see continued declines in these wildlife populations. But I think now we've reached a point where there isn't really any excuse to let this carry on. "We know what the causes are and we know the scale of the impact that humans are having on nature and on wildlife populations - it really is now down to us to act."

The BBC science writer notes that there are criticisms of the methods used in the report, since many parts of the world don't have good data on animal populations. But even taking those limits into account, the animal population is in decline, we are the cause, and this is not a good thing. 

China Consumes More Pork, and Latin Americans Pay the Environmental Price

I've written before about the environmental impact of feeding more people, especially in China, the world's most populous country and second largest economy. A new report out from Boston University tries to gauge this impact on Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. China has become a huge trading partner with Latin America, but China mainly buys agricultural and mineral resources, while selling manufactured goods. As the report notes, this is essentially a backward step for Latin America.

LAC is, in effect, exporting water and importing carbon. Overall, LAC’s boom in exports to China has driven the region’s production into carbon- and water-intensive sectors. At the same time, LAC’s boom in imports from China has further increased the region’s environmental footprint on both fronts.

Contrary to the hypothesis of the environmental Kuznets curve, primary production is more environmentally sensitive than manufacturing in LAC: it creates more net greenhouse gas emissions and uses or contaminates more water per million dollars. So it is not surprising that LAC exports to China are more environmentally sensitive than other LAC exports. Given these risks associated with this important new economic relationship, LAC governments would be wise to approach it with reinforced emphasis on setting environmental safeguards that meet the needs of their development strategies.

Although the focus of the report is not on any specific Latin American country or countries, we in the U.S. are obviously especially interested in Mexico. One of the features of the current presidential campaign in the U.S. is Donald Trump's insistence that NAFTA was one of the worst trade deals ever signed. Admittedly, it didn't turn out as well as expected, but that was not the fault of those who designed the deal. I was one among many demographers who testified before Congressional committees and caucuses back in 1993 as Congress was debating the bill. My recollection is that we were all in agreement that good jobs in Mexico would raise wages in that country, thus cutting down migration to the U.S., while also offering cheaper goods for sale in the U.S.--a genuine win-win. NAFTA was, however, undermined by the fact that East Asian countries (principally China and South Korea) offered companies even lower wages than were prevailing in Mexico, and jobs wound up going to Asia rather than Mexico. My sense is that these global dynamics are not well understood by the current crop of American politicians.

Gases That Cool Us and Our Food Heat Up the Planet--We've Got to Stop These Guys!

...And a new global treaty is aimed at doing just that. Yesterday in Kigala, Rwanda, 170 nations reached a legal agreement to cut the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)--gases that are used extensively in refrigeration and air conditioning. As the NYTimes notes:

HFCs are just a small percentage of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but they function as a sort of supercharged greenhouse gas, with 1,000 times the heat-trapping potency of carbon dioxide.

The Kigali deal was seven years in the making, and is a compromise between rich nations and poorer, hotter ones, including some where rising incomes are just starting to bring air-conditioners within reach. Wealthier nations will freeze production of HFCs more quickly than poorer countries, though some nations, including those in Africa, elected to phase the chemicals out more rapidly than required, citing the grave threats they face from climate change.

Refrigeration and air conditioning have been around for only a few decades--within my lifetime, but they have revolutionized how and where we live. This wouldn't be a huge problem for the planet except for the fact that the population has tripled in size over this period of time, and almost everyone has more income than they used to. This latter point is a good thing in the abstract, but it means that the demands on resources have been growing even faster than the population, leading to the global worry about key side-effects such as global warming. 

The deal is an amendment to the Montreal Protocol, the landmark 1987 pact designed to close the hole in the ozone layer by banning ozone-depleting coolants called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. That means the Kigali amendment maintains the legal force of a treaty, even if that treaty was ratified by the Senate during the Reagan administration.

Chemical companies responded to the 1987 agreement by developing HFCs, which do not harm the ozone layer but do trap heat in the atmosphere.

Fortunately, the chemical industry appears to be on board, and so there is a lot of work going on to find appropriate substitute for HFCs.

Top officials from the chemical industry were in Kigali to push for the deal. “Our industry is hard at work doing the research on the HFC alternatives,” said Stephen Yurek, the chief executive of the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, an advocacy group. “Getting that right is certainly as important as reaching agreement.”

This is all very encouraging, especially in the current political environment where there are so many people who seem to want to deny that climate change is happening or, at the least, that humans have anything to do with it. 

Sea Levels Are Rising, Whether or Not You Believe in Science

Justin Gillis, and environmental science reporter, published a very informative article in the NYTimes this weekend, documenting the flooding occurring along the eastern seaboard of the U.S., as a result of the rise in the sea level generated by global climate change. The point is that whether you believe that global warming is human-caused, or is just a freak of nature, doesn't matter to communities that are being inundated along the coast.

“Once impacts become noticeable, they’re going to be upon you quickly,” said William V. Sweet, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md., who is among the leaders in research on coastal inundation. “It’s not a hundred years off — it’s now.”

Local governments, under pressure from annoyed citizens, are beginning to act. Elections are being won on promises to invest money to protect against flooding. Miami Beach is leading the way, increasing local fees to finance a $400 million plan that includes raising streets, installing pumps and elevating sea walls.

In many of the worst-hit cities, mayors of both parties are sounding an alarm.

The latter point is important. In the U.S. Congress, people have taken sides on global warming, with Republicans tending to deny its human causes, while Democrats decry the human impact but have too few votes to do much about it. 

But the local leaders say they cannot tackle this problem alone. They are pleading with state and federal governments for guidance and help, including billions to pay for flood walls, pumps and road improvements that would buy them time.

Yet Congress has largely ignored these pleas, and has even tried to block plans by the military to head off future problems at the numerous bases imperiled by a rising sea. A Republican congressman from Colorado, Ken Buck, recently called one military proposal part of a “radical climate change agenda.”

This just seems crazy. We have known for a long time that the Arctic glaciers are melting, and we can see all around us the increasing volatility in the weather. In the long-term we have to cut back on the greenhouse gases that are causing it (and, yes, that IS what is causing it--too many people using too many fossil fuels), but in the short run you don't have to know the cause to know that you have to do something to alleviate the danger and damage. 

The Economist Gets it Wrong on the Birth Rate

I have subscribed to The Economist for a long time and I generally feel that I am getting an intelligent and relatively unbiased view of what's happening in the world. However, this week's Economist has a couple of articles, and a leader article introducing them, about the fact that many couples in the world are having fewer children than they want. In the extreme case of people who are unable biologically to have a child, but would like to have a child, I don't know anyone who would argue against the idea that it would be great if an inexpensive solution could be found for that issue. However, when the Economist notes in its leader that this would avoid the situation where men attack their wives because the wife is unable to conceive a child, I say hold it! First, the problem may be the man, not the woman, and secondly, any man who would do that shouldn't be become a father.

For some reason or another, the Economist employed a firm to survey couples in 19 countries to show that, on average, couples are having fewer children than they "want." OK, we know that from Demographic and Health Surveys in developing countries, and from other surveys in richer countries. Nothing new there. What is troubling is the interpretation of these data by the Economist to mean that we should be encouraging couples to have more children. NO! We need to encourage couples to want fewer children. No matter what the writer(s) at the Economist may think, the world's population cannot just keep growing forever. We are running out of resources and the attitude that I'll just take mine now, thank you, is one of the reasons this is happening. The Economist puts down "Malthusians" who are worried about population growth, and sneers at Paul Ehrlich because the birth rate has dropped and food production has increased since he published his dire views on population growth in the Population Bomb back in the 1960s. Well, guess what? That book and the discussion he started helped to push along efforts already underway at the time to reduce the birth rate and grow more food (whether or not you like genetic modification, that was one of the solutions). But, the birth rate is still declining less quickly than the death rate and so we are on track to add 2-3 billion more people and we really don't know how we are going to feed them and find them jobs. 

This was a completely irresponsible Op-Ed published as news by the Economist and I am very disappointed. I noticed in the comments published on the Economist website that some people were ready to unsubscribe and I saw too that Sir David Attenborough, the force behind Population Matters in the U.K., weighed in with a short but to the point comment: “All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder — and ultimately impossible — to solve with ever more people.”

Finally, the Economist claims that family planning programs need to pay more attention to infertility issues, not just providing birth control. In fact, every family planning program of which I am aware does both. However, most can only provide medication to deal with STDs that prevent a woman from conceiving. Almost everything else is too expensive. A dose of reality on these issues is what we need, not uninformed and incorrect statements presented as facts.

Will Bats Instead of Pesticides Help to Sustain Food Production?

The single biggest issue facing the world is whether or not we can feed ourselves. This discussion takes us right back to Malthus, and forward to the various ways by which we have so far managed to keep food production in line with population growth. Part of the problem moving forward, however, is that the use of pesticides to increase production comes at high--and almost certainly unsustainable--environmental costs, not to mention the threat to the health of humans and other animals. I discuss this in some depth in Chapter 11 and have talked about it repeatedly over the years, including this one four years ago.

So, I was naturally taken by a story on Agweb.com a few days ago extolling the virtues of bats as natural pesticides. The focus of the story is on saving farmers money, but there is no question that this could help save the environment.

Bats are a precious, but unheralded friend of farmers, providing consistent crop protection. Take away the colonies of pest killers and insect control costs would explode across farmland. And just how much do bats save agriculture in pesticide use? Globally, the tally may reach a numbing $53 billion per year, according to estimates from the University of Pretoria, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), University of Tennessee, and Boston University.

Bats are a precious, but unheralded friend of farmers, providing consistent crop protection. Take away the colonies of pest killers and insect control costs would explode across farmland. And just how much do bats save agriculture in pesticide use? Globally, the tally may reach a numbing $53 billion per year, according to estimates from the University of Pretoria, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), University of Tennessee, and Boston University.

Cryan coauthored a seminal 2011 paper, Economic Importance of Bats in Agriculture, suggesting the loss of bats would cost U.S. agriculture at least $3.7 billion per year. “We’re typically scared of the dark, but bats shouldn’t be a part of that association. They’re such a beneficial and important part of the environment and farmland protection.”

There is a threat here, however, in that a disease called "white nose syndrome" is attacking bat populations. This is a fungus that spreads among bats in caves and poses a real threat to the survival of bats. We have to save the bats, so that they can help to save our crops without artificial pesticides.

Is Increasing Tallness a Sign of Societal Well-Being?

As I discuss in Chapter 11 of my text, the health and mortality transition in the world is associated with larger people. This means that as the population grows, our improved health is associated partly with a better diet and, in turn, the demand for food grows faster than the population is growing. Majid Ezzati at Imperial College London, along a large group of collaboraters, has just published an analysis of global trends in human height over the 100 year span from the beginning of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century. The abstract sums up the main points:

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5–22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3–19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8–144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries.

The Economist Espresso pulled together a graph from the data that provides a nice picture of a century of growth in height among the tallest people in the world, who are Europeans:

Now, in the interest of full-disclosure, I am 6' 2" so I may pay more attention to the tallness issue than might otherwise be the case, but the societal correlation between changes in average tallness and changes in average well-being is compelling.

Ozone Layer is Healing: Global Collective Action Actually Works!

It is genuinely rare to get good environmental news, but we just received some regarding the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica--it's getting smaller. A team of scientists in the U.S. and the U.K. just published these findings in Science magazine. The paper is behind a subscription, but Vox.com gives us an overview.

A new study in Science finds evidence that the Earth's protective ozone layer is finally healing — all thanks to global efforts in the 1980s to phase out CFCs and other destructive chemicals.

This is one of the great environmental success stories of all time. Back in the 1970s, scientists first realized that we were rapidly depleting Earth's stratospheric ozone layer, which protects us from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

The culprit? Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a chemical widely used in refrigerators and air conditioners. These chemicals had already chewed a massive "hole" in the ozone layer above Antarctica, and the damage was poised to spread further north.

Think for a moment about the importance to modern life of refrigeration and air conditioning and you can appreciate the consternation caused by the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer as a byproduct of ever more use of these technologies.

Fortunately, this apocalyptic scenario never came to pass. Scientists uncovered the problem in time. And under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, world leaders agreed to phase out CFCs, despite industry warnings that abolishing the chemicals would impose steep costs. The hole in the ozone layer stopped expanding. The global economy kept chugging along.

Granted, just because the world banded together and saved the ozone layer doesn't ensure that we’ll also do the same for future environmental problems, like global warming. It will almost certainly be harder to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels than it was to curtail our use of CFCs. (For one thing, the DuPont chemical company developed easy substitutes to CFCs fairly quickly.) But the ozone case remains the best example of international cooperation to halt a slow-moving ecological disaster. And it worked.

We have to come away from this positive experience with renewed commitment to global action on climate change because we can see that huge problems associated with more people living at higher standards of living can be dealt with. We know how to do it, as I've discussed before.  

Chinese Government Understands the Health and Climate Impact of Eating Too Much Meat

The Chinese are not the biggest meat-eaters in the world on a per-person basis, as I noted a few months ago, but the country has so many people that they actually are the biggest meat consumers in the world, and the overall consumption has been rising quickly. Fortunately for the world, it seems that the Chinese government has realized that this is a huge problem both for the climate and for health, and is trying to do something about it, according to Brad Plumer of Vox.com.

Here in the US, the Obama administration has been reluctant to encourage people to eat less meat for health and environmental reasons. The 2015 US Dietary Guidelines, for instance, remained fairly muted on the topic after fierce lobbying by the meat industry.

But in China, where livestock emissions are soaring and obesity is on the rise, officials are being far less circumspect. The Chinese Nutrition Society (CNS) is now enlisting celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, director James Cameron, and actress Li Bingbing in a nationwide campaign urging people to cut their meat consumption in half — in line with new dietary recommendations. 

The campaign, taglined "Less Meat, Less Heat, More Life," will tout the climate benefits of lower meat consumption and feature PSAs on billboards and televisions across China.

Government campaigns of this kind have been helpful in reducing smoking in the U.S. and elsewhere, and we can hope that this campaign in China will not only be successful, but will set a trend for other countries to follow. 

Urban Air Pollution in India is Among the World's Worst

India is about to overtake China as the world's most populous country (6 years from now, in 2022, according to UN demographers), and most of that increase is showing up in the cities--as is true all over the globe. We've heard a lot about the terrible air pollution in China, especially Beijing, as I've mentioned in the past. But Delhi's air pollution may even be worse. I discussed this last year, but new reports have just come out with more details about the deadliness of India's urban air. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal defines the air in Delhi as the worst in the world, and suggests that living there cuts several years off your life expectancy.

Living in India’s capital city New Delhi could shorten your life by six years because of the intensity of the air pollution there, a new report says.

Inhaling tiny air pollutants reduces the life expectancy of Indians by an average of 3.4 years, with Delhi residents losing 6.3 years, the most of all states, according to a new study by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.

Those living in West Bengal and Bihar, which have high levels of air pollution, face a reduction in life expectancy of 6.1 years and 5.7 years respectively.

This analysis is based on population modeling combining data from the 2011 Census of India with air particulate data. More information about the specific causes of the pollution appeared in a separate story published yesterday by Nature.com. 

The pollution, which comes mainly from combustion of wood, coal, gas, diesel and crop residue, is worst in the winter, when wood-burning peaks and cold-weather inversions trap pollutants close to the ground and cause spikes in the daily average of above 600 μg m−3. Late last year, the levels prompted the Delhi High Court to declare the city a “gas chamber”.

The Nature article notes that India has been working to improve the problem, following in the famous steps of Los Angeles and Mexico City, but continued population growth compounds the problem at every step. 

Melinda Gates Ramps Up the Emphasis on Contraception

Thanks to Debbie Fugate for linking me to an article about the Code Conference a few days ago at which Melinda Gates reemphasized her support for contraception.

Melinda Gates is on a mission to help women around the world decide when and if they have children.

"What I'm trying to do is bend the curve," the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said in an interview with Walt Mossberg at the Code Conference on Wednesday morning, joined by her husband, Bill Gates.

That curve represents the pace of getting 110 million more women around the world access to birth control, which given current trends would take until 2035. Melinda Gates says the foundation is trying to shorten that to 2020.

"I have really gone all in on family planning," she said. If a woman has voluntary access to contraception and can choose when she becomes pregnant, "you don’t commit her to a life of poverty."

If you saw my post about the Gates Foundation CEO's report, then you know that I am very happy with this confirmation of the Foundation's goals. Contraception can save the lives of children already born, and can save the lives of mothers themselves. Indeed, a report published in the Lancet a few months ago noted that the global drop in maternal mortality was well short of the UN goals. Unplanned and unwanted pregnancies represent one reason for this, especially if they end up leading to an unsafe abortion. Preventing births and saving lives go together, and they are part of the long-term recipe for saving the planet.

The World's Demographic Divide

Two tweets today provided an illustration of the world's demographic divide--the gap between the low birth and death rate rich countries and the not as low birth and death rate not so rich countries. For a nice overview of the issue, I recommend you read the PRB Bulletin by Mary Kent and Carl Haub published more than a decade ago. This is not an issue that is going away. Here are the contrasts from today's social media. First was a tweet from PopulationGeography (@PopGeog) referring to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about how declining populations are challenging (meaning harmful) to the rich.

Shrinking populations in the advanced world is one of the biggest single challenges to global economic growth, according to the former chief executive of the Australian Government Future Fund. Mark Burgess, now chairman of Jamieson Coote Bond's advisory board, said on Tuesday that governments and central banks needed to start tailoring policies to fit the reality of slowing or negative population growth and shrinking workforces. "The thing about demographics, just to be absolutely clear about this, is that we've never in history run sophisticated economies with sophisticated financial systems through declining populations," he told an investment conference in Sydney. "It is a truly unique event." He said shrinking populations "affected all asset prices in strange ways".

At nearly the same time came a tweet from the Population Reference Bureau (@PRBdata) referring back to a 2015 report by demographer Monica das Gupta in which she lays out the problems of countries on the other side of the demographic divide trying to feed their growing populations.

The global problem of climate change poses the greatest threat to the least developed countries even though they have contributed relatively little to the current stock of emissions causing the problem. 

Much of the developing world will experience climate-change induced declines in agricultural output, poorer health outcomes, disruption of rainfall patterns, and more frequent natural disasters, rendering some areas less habitable or inhabitable, and hinder poverty reduction and economic growth.

When you look at the graph she prepared (see below) of possible food growth scenarios, the single most important thing to jump out at you is that the trend in food production in the recent past has been essentially flat, yet a growing population demands more food. 

So, the rich worry about the price of their assets, and the not rich wonder if they will have enough to eat. 

Will a SuperBug Get You?

For all of us born since the end of WWII, the likelihood of dying from bacterial diseases has dropped dramatically because of the widespread use of antibiotics. The news resurfaced recently that we are overdoing it on antibiotics, and even scarier news emerged yesterday with the announcement that a woman in the U.S. was attacked by a bacterial disease resistant to what health scientists call the "last antibiotic." This was obviously a big story, covered by BBC and the NYTimes, among many others.

American military researchers have identified the first patient in the United States to be infected with bacteria that are resistant to an antibiotic that was the last resort against drug-resistant germs.

The patient is well now, but the case raises the specter of superbugs that could cause untreatable infections, because the bacteria can easily transmit their resistance to other germs that are already resistant to additional antibiotics. The resistance can spread because it arises from loose genetic material that bacteria typically share with one another.

The bacteria are resistant to a drug called colistin, an old antibiotic that in the United States is held in reserve to treat especially dangerous infections that are resistant to a class of drugs called carbapenems. If carbapenem-resistant bacteria, called CRE, also pick up resistance to colistin, they will be unstoppable.

What I found particularly interesting is that the gene for resistance to colistin was first noticed just this past November in China, where it is used in pig and poultry farming--exactly the problem associated with overusing antibiotics. We can attribute this almost directly to the rise in the standard of living in China and its associated increase in demand for pork among the Chinese, as I noted a couple of months ago. 

Are GMO Crops Good or Bad?

The National Academy of Sciences has just produced a committee report on the safety of GMO crops. You can download a PDF copy for free, if you want all the details. Or, you can find a summary in the NYTimes, which points out the good news and bad news from the report. The good news is that the committee found no evidence to suggest that eating genetically modified organism foods is bad for your health. The bad news is that there is not the strong evidence that we might have hoped for that GMO foods are increasing crop productivity. 

The committee concludes that the use of crops has generally provided economic benefits for the farmers and can increase their output in certain cases, for instance, by protecting crops from insect damage. Nonetheless, it says that nationwide, the introduction of the crops does not appear to have accelerated the rate at which corn, soybean and cotton yields were already improving.

“There’s no change in the slope, at least no significant change in the slope,’’ Dr. Gould said in presenting the results Tuesday, saying the finding was somewhat puzzling. While the influence on yields could conceivably be greater in developing countries, the report questions how essential genetic engineering will be to feeding the world as the population grows.

The crops themselves are not environmentally dangerous, but the way they are planted, maintained, harvested may still be environmentally harmful, although that was not a focus of this study. The reality is that we cannot continue to use large amounts of water and pesticide without some serious environmental issues. Overall, then, as positive as this report might seem on the surface, it points to some serious work that still needs to be done if we are to find food for a continually larger global population. 

Climate Change Will Bring a Bigger Mess to the Middle East

Yesterday I discussed the fact that we now have climate change migrants in the U.S. On top of this is news that climate change could make parts of the Middle East uninhabitable, or even more uninhabitable, if you want to take account of the already large stretches of desert. Drought in Syria has been blamed for helping contribute to the civil war in that country, as I have discussed before.  But this new assessment generates concern about the fate of the entire region.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute say “very hot” days in the region have “doubled” since 1970.

"In future, the climate in large parts of the Middle East and North Africa could change in such a manner that the very existence of its inhabitants is in jeopardy," says Jos Lelieveld, Director at the Max Planck Institute and Professor at the Cyprus Institute.

Keep in mind that the Max Planck Institutes house some of the very best German researchers, so we need to take this seriously.

The study also looked at the amount of “fine particulate air pollution” in the region and found that dust in the atmosphere over Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria jumped 70 percent since the start of the century. This, they say, could be due to an increase in the number of sand storms caused by climate change.

The researchers created two models -- one in which global temperatures are capped by reductions in greenhouse gases, and another, a “business as usual” model where nothing is done to stem climate change.

Under both scenarios, the future of the region is not good, they say, adding that “climate change can result in a significant deterioration of living conditions for people living in North Africa and the Middle East, and consequently, sooner or later, many people may have to leave the region.”

So, we have a situation where drought leads people to fight over one type of scarce resource--water--while the other scarce resource in the region--habitable land--is also being undermined. These developments will severely test the world's ability to put the region back together if and when the violence ends. 

America's First Climate Change Migrants

As climates change around the globe, the ability of people to stay where they are is clearly threatened. We tend to think of this mainly in terms of developing countries, but today's NYTimes has the story about the first "official" environmental migrants in the U.S. The story's headline uses the term "refugee" but the story itself notes that the whole idea behind a planned resettlement of several dozen people in Louisiana is to keep them from becoming refugees.

Louisiana officials have been coping with some of the fastest rates of land loss in the world — an area the size of Delaware has disappeared from south Louisiana since the 1930s. A master plan that is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars envisions a giant wall of levees and flood walls along the coast.

Now, to be fair, the problem is due both to direct climate change (more weather volatility) and the very human activities that have been contributing to climate change.

For over a century, the American Indians on the island fished, hunted, trapped and farmed among the lush banana and pecan trees that once spread out for acres. But since 1955, more than 90 percent of the island’s original land mass has washed away. Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island, and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands’ sediments. Some of the island was swept away by hurricanes.

What little remains will eventually be inundated as burning fossil fuels melt polar ice sheets and drive up sea levels, projected the National Climate Assessment, a report of 13 federal agencies that highlighted the Isle de Jean Charles and its tribal residents as among the nation’s most vulnerable.

The U.S. government has set aside $48 million to move people, but so far a new location has not been finalized, and not everyone wants to move. Eventually, those who choose not to migrate will likely wind up as refugees rescued from the swamp. There is obviously no easy solution here. Younger people will clearly benefit by the move, whereas the resistance comes largely from the older generation.