Climate Change Putting Populations at Risk

The latest report from the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is out and it isn't pretty. A warming planet is melting polar ice and the subsequent rise in sea level could devastate coastal areas in general and do tremendous damage to a country like Bangladesh, as the NYTimes reported a couple of days ago. 

In an analysis of decades of tidal records published in October, Dr. Pethick [John Pethick of Newcastle University in the UK] found that high tides in Bangladesh were rising 10 times faster than the global average. He predicted that seas in Bangladesh could rise as much as 13 feet by 2100, four times the global average. In an area where land is often a thin brown line between sky and river — nearly a quarter of Bangladesh is less than seven feet above sea level — such an increase would have dire consequences, Dr. Pethick said.

“The reaction among Bangladeshi government officials has been to tell me that I must be wrong,” he said. “That’s completely understandable, but it also means they have no hope of preparing themselves.”

“There is no doubt that preparations within Bangladesh have been utterly inadequate, but any such preparations are bound to fail because the problem is far too big for any single government,” said Tariq A. Karim, Bangladesh’s ambassador to India. “We need a regional and, better yet, a global solution. And if we don’t get one soon, the Bangladeshi people will soon become the world’s problem, because we will not be able to keep them.”

Mr. Karim estimated that as many as 50 million Bangladeshis would flee the country by 2050 if sea levels rose as expected.

This is probably the reason why the latest UN Population Division projections (the 2012 revision) suggest that Bangladesh will lead the world in outmigration between 2015 and 2050. This is not a pleasant prospect for the country and its citizens, nor for the countries that will wind up making room for these folks.

Visualizing Global Migration Flows

Global migration flows are clearly important elements of modern demographic trends. We can probably all "see" the flows in our mind, but those are going to be fuzzy images. Thanks to Justin Stoler for pointing out to me that researchers at the Vienna Demographic Institute have now brought these flows into a quantitative graphic:

As migration flow data are often incomplete and not comparable across nations, we estimate the number of movements by linking changes in migrant stock data over time. Using statistical missing data methods, we estimate the five-year migrant flows that are required to meet differences in migrant stock totals. For example, if the number of foreign-born in the United States increases between two time periods, we estimate the minimum migrant flows between the US and all other countries in the world that are required to meet this increase.

For each country of birth, we estimate the minimum number of migrant flows required to match differences in stocks by assuming that people are more likely to stay than to move. This estimation procedure is replicated simultaneously for all 196 countries to estimate birthplace specific flow tables, resulting in a comparable set of global migration flows. Alterations are made to the migrant stock counts to control for births and deaths during the period. This allows our country-specific net migration flows to closely match the net migration estimates published by the United Nations.

This is obviously complex! and so you need to study their instructions for interpreting the graphic. In addition, they provide the data that they have put together, so you can see the numbers behind the visualization. I appreciate this, in particular, because I am currently trying to do something similar, albeit on a much smaller scale, for a paper that I will be presenting in April at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers in Tampa.

Don't Let Congress Cut NSF Funding

Here's an important message I received today that needs to be passed on, before Congress acts on it:

This is a time sensitive request. You are receiving this message because your Representative serves on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

The Committee is expected to mark up the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology Act of 2014 (H.R. 4186), or FIRST Act in the next two weeks. The bill serves as reauthorization legislation for the National Science Foundation (NSF), an important source of federal funding for population scientists. There are a number of problematic provisions within this bill and we ask that you contact your Representative and register your opposition to the bill.

Of greatest concern to PAA members is the proposed cut to NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) Sciences. The bill, as introduced, cut the SBE directorate by over 40 percent, from $257 million in fiscal year 2014 to $150 million in FY 2015. An amendment in subcommittee restored $50 million, but still leaves SBE unacceptably underfunded. SBE is one of only two directorates targeted for budget cuts. Geoscience, the other directorate targeted for cuts, funds research on climate change.

PAA and APC join the broader science community in opposition to the bill’s attempts to authorize funding levels by directorate at NSF. Even if funding for SBE is restored, the broader science community is unlikely to support the bill. Therefore, we will focus on the issue of authorizing by directorate in your message to your Representative. Authorizing by directorate reduces the flexibility of the agency and prevents the scientist reviewers for NSF from determining which grants to fund based on what they identify to be the very best science. Furthermore, it has not been the practice for numerous decades.

In addition, while the authors of the bill state that the legislation is not intended to interfere with the NSF merit review process, which they recognize as the internationally recognized gold standard, we believe that it will have an impact. After being selected by the peer review process, each grant will be evaluated on its ability to serve the national interest. While this is an important goal for the NSF, it is difficult to define at the individual grant level as opposed to within the context of the broader NSF portfolio.

The bill could be taken up by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee at any moment. Please write to your Representative today and ask that they oppose the FIRST Act.

Send an Email

You can read about the bill http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/4186/text?q={%22search%22%3A[%224186%22

Demography Trumps Policy Once Again in China

I discuss in Chapter 6 the fact that fertility was already dropping quickly when China implemented its one-child policy and, given the rapid fertility decline among its East Asian neighbors, there is every reason to think that fertility would be at the same level today in China with or without that policy. Yet, the government has been very slow to scale the program back. This week's Economist provides another example (which I discuss in Chapter 9) of the how demography trumps government policy--this time in terms of urbanization. Everywhere in the world the percentage of the population living in cities is increasing and China is no exception, despite the fact that Mao wanted to keep people down on the farm and out of the potentially westernizing influences of cities. For that reason, back in the 1950s the government instituted the hukou system of household registration designed to keep you and your progeny where you were back then--rural people in the countryside and the then relatively small urban population in the cities. Over time, of course, job opportunities and wages have been higher in the cities than in the countryside, and so there has been a huge wave of "undocumented" migration to the cities.

Even migrants who have lived in cities for many years, or the urban-born children of such migrants, are given far less access to government-funded health care and education than other city dwellers. This is because their rural hukou is often impossible to change.

But last week the government quietly announced a gradual loosening of the rules:

By 2020, according to the plan, 100m migrants are to obtain urban hukou. This is a cautious target. The government admits it would still leave 200m people—by then roughly two-thirds of migrants—without city-resident status. Some state-run newspapers say it would mean, on average, that 17m migrants a year would get urban hukou. That would be a step up, but in recent years the numbers have already been rising fast, albeit from a low base. The government said last year that between 2010 and 2012 an average of 8.4m a year had been granted urban status.

Crucially, the plan does not suggest when the hukou system might be scrapped altogether. And it still allows bigger cities, which migrants prefer, to continue usinghukou barriers as a way of trying to limit population growth. In the 16 cities with more than 5m people, officials will be allowed to give hukou only to migrants who gain a certain number of points (in cities that have experimented with this, points are awarded on the basis of educational qualifications, property ownership and other factors that rule out most migrants). Even in the smallest cities only migrants with “legal and stable” work and accommodation—which many do not have—will be able to get urban hukou.

So, in effect, the policy leaves a lot of rural to urban migrants in the position of second-class citizens. This is similar to what happens to undocumented immigrants to most rich countries but the difference here is that these people are all Chinese citizens. They are in the country legally, but they are not supposed to be in cities. That tide is unlikely to be turned, and the Economist implies that the government really just doesn't want to have to pay for urban amenities for this large and growing population.

Will The US Supreme Court Continue to Defend Women's Reproductive Rights?

It was the US Supreme Court that legalized the use of birth control in the country (in 1965 for married couples and 1972 to everyone else) and abortion in 1973. Now the Supreme Court is hearing a case that challenges the government's right to insist that if a commercial company wants a government subsidy for its employees' health care, that company must allow the health plan to provide contraceptives and other reproductive health care, which could include the costs of an abortion if the contraceptives fail. It was disheartening to me that the Court even took this case on, since it seems patently obvious that a commercial firm cannot claim some religious bias. If you want to claim a religious protection, then declare yourself a religion and follow the tax code rules that allow you bypass many of the legal obligations of a firm, like Hobby Lobby, that is in business to make money, not to convert its customers to a particular religious belief. Furthermore, under the Affordable Care Act companies are not required to provide government-subsidized health care. Rather, if they want their employees to have that benefit of a government-subsidized health care policy, they have to abide by the rules that say that women need to have access to the full range of legal reproductive health rights. They could, alternatively, just pay their workers more and have them get their own private insurance, or pay fully for their employee's health care and not worry about the government subsidy. 

This is not to say that I am a fan of the Affordable Care Act. I am not. My own view is that the US needs to adopt the model of every other rich country (all of which have higher life expectancy than in the US) and implement universal health care that is not employer-based. There are, of course, four entrenched reasons why we do not move in that direction: (1) health insurance companies who make lots of money under the current system (helping to explain why we pay so much more for health care than countries with higher life expectancy); (2) physicians who are the highest paid in the world (also helping to explain why we pay so much more for health care than countries with higher life expectancy); (3) drug companies who believe that they earn more in this kind of a medical market; and (4) malpractice lawyers who also make more money in this kind of a medical market. These are the real reasons why the Supreme Court is even put in it current position of seeming to be on the verge of rolling back women's reproductive rights. Just follow the money.