CONTENTS
- The Earth and Its People
- Pollution and Health Risks
- Feeding a Future World
- Freshwater: Lifeblood of the Planet
- Oceans in Decline
- Forests: The Earth's Lungs
- Endangered Biodiversity
- Toward a Livable Future
- Improving Energy Efficiency
- Planning Cities Better
- Ending Environmentally Destructive Subsidies
- Adopting Water Resources Management
- Saving Forests
- Accomplishing a Second Green Revolution
- Managing Coastal Zones and Ocean Fisheries
- Curbing Pollution, Improving Health
- Safeguarding Biodiversity
- Stabilizing World Population
HIGHLIGHTS
- Can development be sustained?
- Scientists point to environmental distress syndrome
- Cities grow ever larger
- Global temperatures rising
- Are we setting the stage for our own extinction?
- World population must stabilize
Population Reports is published by the Population Information Program, Center for Communication Programs, The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, 111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, Maryland 21202-4012, USA
Fall 2000
Series M, Number 15
Special Topics
Curbing Pollution, Improving Health
Many steps that conserve natural resources and protect the environment also improve public health by curbing pollution. In particular, the following steps deserve attention:
- Provide safe water to the 1.2 billion people who lack access to this foundation of good health and well-being.
- Provide adequate sanitation to the 3 billion people who currently lack it. Breaking the water-borne disease cycle is fundamental to public health. In particular, curbing untreated sewage would help control the spread of water-related diseases.
- Prevent air pollution by reaching regional agreements that would improve air quality. Such agreements would give impetus to national and urban efforts to stem air pollution. One workable example is the Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Convention, endorsed by the Economic Commission of Europe (ECE), to curb acid rain and long-range pollutants.
- Adopt a globally binding treaty to eliminate POPs. Governments and NGOs can support UNEP in designing an international treaty that will phase out these dangerous chemicals as quickly as possible.
Safeguarding Biodiversity
Trying to save species one at a time is a losing strategy. Instead, conservation must focus on biodiversity hotspots—the habitats in which most species live (162, 164, 228, 252, 267) (see map). The fact that these habitats are highly concentrated suggests that species conservation is much less expensive and potentially more effective than previously thought (29, 155).
The Convention on Biological Diversity should be implemented as quickly as possible. It is the one global agreement in place that can help preserve biological diversity. The convention recognizes community rights to wild biodiversity. Signatory countries are to set up a system of benefit sharing to compensate communities for the use of biological resources and related knowledge by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and agricultural companies.
Stabilizing World Population
The last four decades have witnessed a profound change in fertility rates and world population growth. The transition from high fertility and high mortality to low fertility and low mortality (the demographic transition) has been substantially completed in the developed world and is underway in most of the developing world. Nevertheless, in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the Near East, and South Asia, population continues growing at 2% a year or faster, and the average woman bears four to seven children (182).
Thus it is important that the fertility declines that have characterized the past 40 years do not stall. Even small increases in fertility rates—which could occur if commitment to providing family planning information, supplies, and services were to diminish—would mean faster population growth. “Investments in measures to slow the rate of population growth—and thereby to reach a stable population earlier, and at lower levels, than under current trends—would significantly reinforce efforts to address the environmental challenges of the century ahead, and considerably lower the cost of such efforts,” according to Richard Benedick (11).
Today, most women and men want to plan their families (245). The extent to which policy-makers and reproductive health care providers offer good family planning information and services will determine whether people will be able to have the number of children they want, when they want them. In the balance is whether the world's population could eventually stabilize at 9 billion or less, or whether it will grow to 11 billion, and even beyond (58, 84, 243).
Timing matters. Largely because fertility has been high, in some countries young people just entering their reproductive years comprise as much as half of the population. The childbearing patterns of these 2 billion people now under age 24 will determine whether population continues growing rapidly or slows to a more sustainable pace in relation to development and the environment. (243).
Funding matters. Developing countries account for most spending on family planning and other reproductive health care (242). While the number of people needing services has risen, public spending on reproductive health care has dropped significantly since 1995—the peak year for investments in reproductive health.
 JHU/CCP Photoshare |
| In Bangladesh a field worker discusses family planning with women in their community. Fertility rates have fallen in many countries, but the world's population continues to rise rapidly. |
Most donor countries have not kept the commitments to population and reproductive health assistance that they made at the UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994. According to their commitments, developed countries should have invested US$5.7 billion a year in population programs by 2000 (242). Instead, the donor community has provided about US$2 billion annually. Currently, spending on global population programs amounts to less than half of the funding agreed to—around US$8 billion instead of US$17 billion.
Worries about a “population bomb” may have lessened as fertility rates have fallen, but the world's population is projected to continue expanding until the middle of the century. Just when it stabilizes and thus the level at which it stabilizes will have a powerful effect on living standards and the global environment. As population size continues to reach levels never before experienced, and per capita consumption rises, the environment hangs in the balance.