Population adds to planet's pressure cooker, but few options

Richard Ingham AFP Yahoo News 27 Mar 12;

The world's surging population is a big driver of environmental woes but the issue is complex and solutions are few, experts at a major conference here say.

Answers lie with educating women in poorer countries and widening access to contraception but also with reforming consumption patterns in rich economies, they say.

The four-day meeting on Earth's health, Planet Under Pressure, is unfolding ahead of the Rio+20 Summit in June.

Scientists taking part have pinpointed population growth as a major if indirect contributor to global warming, depletion of resources, pollution and species loss.

But they also mark it as an issue that has disappeared almost completely off political radar screens.

This is partly because of religious sensitivities but also because of traumatic memories of coercive fertility controls in poorer countries in the 1970s that no-one wants to repeat.

Diana Liverman, a professor at the University of Arizona, said the link between population growth and environmental damage arose in the mid-20th century.

"The 50 years from 1950 to 2000 were a period of dramatic and unprecedented change in human history," she said.

During that time, the planet's human tally doubled from three billion to six billion. It now stands at seven billion, and by some estimates could reach around nine billion by 2050.

The good news is that the fertility rate -- the number of children a women is likely to have -- has halved from five to 2.5 since 1950 and will fall below the replacement rate of 2.1 around 2025, Liverman said.

"It means that there is a strong probability that population growth will level off around nine billion and may in fact fall thereafter," said Liverman.

Others caution that raw statistics mask many complexities.

"The world's carrying capacity isn't a single headline figure but depends on lifestyle, technology, and so forth," said Lord Martin Rees of the Royal Society, whose report on demography and the environment will be issued next month.

The population is stabilising or falling in rich countries.

But these economies remain -- in per capita terms -- by far the biggest sources of environmental damage, with for instance greenhouse gas emissions per head that are double or quadruple those in a developing country.

The big population growth will happen in developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

These countries bear least responsibility for climate change but will be hit worst by it, because they lack money and skills to adapt. Thus the higher their population, the more of their people who will be hit by drought, storms, rising seas and floods.

Strategies for working on the demographic drivers of environmental damage are essentially two-pronged, said specialists.

One is to change consumption patterns, so that the rich countries -- and the emerging giants rushing to catch up with them -- use energy and resources more sustainably.

The other is to protect women's rights, education for women and their access to jobs and contraception.

"If you have economic development and you educate women, and women get labour market opportunities, they tend not only to reduce the number of children but crucially to delay when they start having children," said Sarah Harper, director of the Institute of Population Ageing at the University of Oxford.

"And if you delay the start of having children, you tend to have smaller families."

Such changes can have a "surprisingly fast" effect on reducing birthrates, said Stephen Tyler, who works with group called the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN). He gave the fast-shrinking families in India as an example.

On Sunday, a group of scientists and policymakers that have won the Blue Planet Prize, a top environmental award, made a pre-conference appeal to intensify green action.

Looking at demography, they said more than 200 million women in developing countries still have unmet needs for family planning.

But funding for access to contraception fell by 30 percent between 1995 and 2008, "not least as a result of legislative pressure from the religious right in the USA and elsewhere," they said.

Cities on front line of climate change
Richard Ingham AFP Yahoo News 27 Mar 12;

The world's cities face the brunt of climate change but some are starting to respond vigorously to the threat, experts say at a conference here staged ahead of the June Rio summit.

More than half of the world's population of seven billion currently lives in cities and by 2050, this is expected to increase to 70 percent, or around 6.4 billion, according to UN figures.

More than 60 percent of the increase will occur in Asian cities -- and nearly half of the growth will happen in cities that currently have 500,000 inhabitants or fewer.

It means that cities will face unparalleled challenges when climate change starts to bite, scientists said Monday at a meeting on the world's environment ahead of the June 20-22 summit.

"Cities are emerging as first responders. They are on the frontline, both in the cause and effect of climate change," said Cynthia Rosenzweig, who heads the Climate Impacts Group at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The hazards facing cities are many.

By 2100, or sooner, heatwaves, droughts, storms and floods are expected to become more frequent and last longer. Cities built on deltas or on the coast will face rising seas, which threaten homes and drinking water.

That raises mighty questions about water supplies, drainage and flood defences and the resilience of homes, offices, factories and transport systems.

In 2003, one of the hottest summers on record killed around 35,000 people in Europe. Some climate scientists predict that by the 2040s, more than half of the continent's summers will be warmer than that of 2003.

Alex de Sherbinin of the Earth Institute at New York's Columbia University pointed to a dangerous phenomenon called the urban heat island.

Cities can hold pockets of heat that are up to four to six degrees Celsius (7.2-10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) greater than in the surrounding countryside.

The warmth comes from the reflected radiation from treeless streets sealed in heat-trapping black tarmac; from buildings in "street canyons" which block cooling breezes; and from heat discharged by air conditioning ducts.

Those most at risk are the elderly, battling heat stress and air pollution, and the poor, who cannot afford to cool their homes or or move elsewhere, he said.

All cities will be challenged by shifting climate, but some will be more exposed or cope better than others, said Stephen Tyler, working with a group called the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN).

He sounded the alarm for cities that are middle-sized today but will soon face a double whammy -- heavy migration that can lead to slums, and the impact of climate change.

"The middle cities are often ignored by governments, yet they are also the primary target for poor people who leave the countryside and aim for the nearest urban centre," said Tyler.

"But in terms of coping, it's not the city's size which counts, but its ability to provide the services, the infrastructure."

Far from being sitting ducks, many cities are working to shore up their climate defences and ease their greenhouse-gases, said Rosenzweig. Around 70 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions can be attributed to city needs.

Initiatives include painting roofs white to reflect sunlight, having porous pavements that allow rainwater to replenish the aquifer, planting trees and parks to alleviate heat islands and regulating traffic pollution, which has benefits for health and carbon mitigation.

Hospitals and neighbourhood groups are also asked to watch out for old people who may be struggling in a heatwave. Cities that are set to expand can plan their zoning laws, urban density, energy use and traffic system accordingly, which saves having to expensively fix things afterwards.

Rosenzweig, who co-authored a report by a group called the Urban Climate Change Research Network into how global warming will hit urban dwellers, said local governments had powers and the ability to act.

Municipalities are moving into the vacuum left by the UN or national governments, whose work on climate change has marked time since the ill-fated 2009 Copenhagen Summit, she explained.

In 2005, the so-called C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group was set up, and this was followed five years later by the World Mayors Council on Climate Change. It has 60 cities on its roster, swapping ideas and networking.

"City leaders are practical and responsive," she said. "They are there day after day, and they have experience in climate-related disasters."

2C warming target 'out of reach' - ex UN climate chief
Richard Ingham AFP Yahoo News 27 Mar 12;

The UN's former climate chief on Tuesday said the global warming pledge he helped set at the Copenhagen Summit little more than two years ago was already unattainable.

"I think two degrees is out of reach," Yvo de Boer, former executive secretary of the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said on the sidelines of a conference here on June's Rio+20 summit.

The UNFCCC's 195 parties have pledged to limit the rise in global average temperatures to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

The target was set by a core group of countries in the final stormy hours at the Copenhagen Summit in December 2009 and became enshrined by the forum at Cancun, Mexico a year later.

But more and more scientists are warning that the objective is slipping away without radical, early cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. Some consider the goal to be a dangerous political mirage, for Earth is now on track for 3C (5.4 F) of warming or more.

"The two degrees is lost but that doesn't mean for me we should forget about it," de Boer said in the interview with AFP.

"It is a very significant target, it's not just a target that was plucked out of the air, it refers to trying to limit a number of impacts."

He added: "You shouldn't forget about it, in the sense that you are ignoring the fact that you've gone through the trouble of formulating a goal and then not met it because of lack of policy action.

"The process therefore should be all about how can we get as close to 2C as possible, not to say 'start all over again and formulate a new goal,' having forgotten that we've been through this very recently."

Copenhagen marked a high-water line in the global climate forum.

Its disappointments, together with the financial and fiscal crunch that have hit western countries, have made many advanced economies mark time or even retrench their action against carbon emissions.

And the high price of oil and gas has prompted emerging economies to power their growth with coal, the dirtiest of the major fossil fuels, driving up atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2).

At the UNFCCC's annual get-together in Durban, South Africa last year, countries agreed to wrap up a new climate agreement in 2015 that would take effect in 2020, placing rich and poor for the first time under common legal constraints.

De Boer said he hoped the Fifth Assessment Report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due in 2014, would spur momentum for the 2015 deadline.

The four-day London conference, Planet Under Pressure, aims at delivering a snapshot of the world's environment before the June 20-22 20-year followup to the Rio Earth Summit.

On Sunday, 20 winners of the Blue Planet Prize, one of the world's most prestigious green awards, said there was only a "50-50" chance of limiting warming to 3 C (5.4 F).

There were "serious risks" of a 5 C (9.0 F) rise, a temperature last seen on the planet 30 million years ago.

"We have to be honest with each other that we will not reach the two degrees target," former IPCC head Bob Watson, now a scientific advisor to the British government, said on behalf of the laureates.

The UNFCCC's 2 C target has been widely criticised as inadequate, given that it fails to identify a date for achieving this goal or the stepping stones towards it.

The UNFCCC -- officially at least -- even holds to the possibility of limiting warming to 1.5 C (2.7 F), which is the demand of the world's poorest economies and small-island states.

They have most to lose from drought, floods, storms and rising seas driven by climate change.

The 2 C goal will be subject to a review in 2015, to see whether it should be brought down to 1.5 C.

Sprawling Cities Pressure Environment, Planning
Nina Chestney PlanetArk 28 Mar 12;

Expanding cities threaten to eat up a swath of land the size of France, Germany and Spain combined in less than 20 years, putting the world under even more environmental pressure, experts said at a climate conference on Tuesday.

Cities are growing to accommodate a rising global population and as countries like China, India and Brazil pursue fast economic growth.

The world's cities are currently on track to occupy an extra 1.5 million square kilometers by 2030 - equivalent to France, Germany and Spain combined - spelling growing greenhouse gas emissions and resource demand, experts said at the "Planet Under Pressure" conference in London.

"The way cities have grown since World War II is neither socially or environmentally sustainable and the environmental cost of ongoing urban sprawl is too great to continue," said Karen Seto, associate professor of the urban environment at Yale University.

"The North American suburb has gone global, and car-dependent urban developments are more and more the norm."

The United Nations sees global population rising to 9 billion people by 2050 from 7 billion now, adding around a million people each week.

Most of the growth is expected to come in urban centers with migration from rural areas potentially adding another 1 billion people to cities. That would increase the total urban population to 6.3 billion people by 2050 from around 3.5 billion today.

OPPORTUNITIES

Over 70 percent of current carbon dioxide emissions already come from cities. Urban emissions are forecast to grow to 36.5 billion metric tonnes by 2030 if no action is taken, from 25 billion in 2010 and 15 billion in 1990.

Urbanization cannot be stopped, but climate experts argue there is plenty of scope for improving the way cities are planned, developed and run.

"Everything being brought into the city from outside - food, water, products and energy, need to be sourced sustainably. We need to rethink the resource flow to cities," said Sybil Seitzinger, executive director of the international geosphere-biosphere program at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

New cities offer an opportunity to rethink urban planning while established ones can become more efficient through technology such as time-adjusted toll systems to cut traffic congestion, said Shobhakar Dhakal, executive director of the Tokyo-based Global Carbon Project.

Congestion wastes fuel, time and causes pollution.

It costs world economies an estimated 1 to 3 percent of gross domestic product and costs New York alone around $4 billion a year in lost productivity, experts said.

Utility meters and sensors that monitor power generation network capacity and electricity supply and demand can also help conserve energy.

Urban planners can also target more efficient land use, better building standards and policies to promote public transport over car use.

Some cities have made efforts to improve their green credentials, such as Iceland's capital Reykjavik, which depends on geothermal energy and hydro electricity for its energy needs.

Vancouver in Canada sources 90 percent of its energy from renewable sources like wind, solar and tidal energy and has developed a 100-year sustainability plan.