Population // Current TV

China responds to explosive growth, pollution and water scarcity in latest five year plan

In an era of economic turmoil that has produced massive unemployment, accelerated... more

JanforGore
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What does the Arab world do when it's water runs out?

Poverty, repression, decades of injustice and mass unemployment have all been cited as causes of the political convulsions in the Middle East and north Africa these last weeks. But a less recognised reason for the turmoil in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and now Iran has been rising food prices, directly linked to a growing regional water crisis.

The diverse states that make up the Arab world, stretching from the Atlantic coast to Iraq, have some of the world's greatest oil reserves, but this disguises the fact that they mostly occupy hyper-arid places. Rivers are few, water demand is increasing as populations grow, underground reserves are shrinking and nearly all depend on imported staple foods that are now trading at record prices.

For a region that expects populations to double to more than 600 million within 40 years, and climate change to raise temperatures, these structural problems are political dynamite and already destabilising countries, say the World Bank, the UN and many independent studies.

In recent reports they separately warn that the riots and demonstrations after the three major food-price rises of the last five years in north Africa and the Middle East might be just a taste of greater troubles to come unless countries start to share their natural resources, and reduce their profligate energy and water use.

"In the future the main geopolitical resource in the Middle East will be water rather than oil. The situation is alarming," said Swiss foreign minister Micheline Calmy-Rey last week, as she launched a Swiss and Swedish government-funded report for the EU.

The Blue Peace report examined long-term prospects for seven countries, including Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and Israel. Five already suffer major structural shortages, it said, and the amount of water being taken from dwindling sources across the region cannot continue much longer.

"Unless there is a technological breakthrough or a miraculous discovery, the Middle East will not escape a serious [water] shortage," said Sundeep Waslekar, a researcher from the Strategic Foresight Group who wrote the report.

cont.Poverty, repression, decades of injustice and mass unemployment have all been cited as... more

JanforGore
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US Census Data - Mapping America: Every City, Every Block

A cool interactive map showing ethnicity and population in America provided by the US... more

EmperorThan
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Colorado River scarcity prompts basin states to examine their lifeline

The worst drought in the 105-year historical record of the Colorado River has opened a new era of water scarcity that is prompting state and federal water managers to evaluate never before considered options for increasing water supply and reducing demand.

The new ideas for managing the seven-state river basin, which supplies water to 30 million residents and thousands of farms, have attracted increasing attention from agricultural users and other big water interests, particularly in the upper basin states that counted on receiving more water under the region’s near-century-old water use agreement.

In Las Vegas last month, at the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association—the only organization bringing together stakeholders from each of the seven basin states—opponents and supporters made their views known during a speech by Doug Kenney, the director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Kenney was invited to Caesar’s Palace to share the first-year findings from his study on water governance in the Colorado River Basin. His message: in a new era of water scarcity along the river—where supply and demand lines have already crossed—traditional water management practices will need to be fundamentally changed.

New options for managing the Colorado include establishing provisions for year-to-year agreements with states and farmers to avoid shortages. They also include improvements in the efficiency of river operations, or by river augmentation, which means adding new supplies from a slew of sources—some viable, some expensive, and some fanciful: desalination, river diversions, and weather modification, respectively.

“I thought it was time for someone to stand up at that meeting and start talking about the reality.”

Kenney’s governance study is just one of several such assessments—carried out by academics and federal agencies, as well as state and regional water management authorities—suggesting the need for new ways to manage water flows. The studies are providing a new legal and scientific foundation for defining existing water rights within states, clarifying laws and regulations about how shortages on the river would be handled, and evaluating options for increasing the basin’s water supply and reducing demand.

Kenney argued that the states of the upper basin—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—are the most vulnerable if future flows are as low as predicted because the river’s legal structure gives priority to Mexico and the lower basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.

“I thought it was time for someone to stand up at that meeting and start talking about the reality,” Kenney told Circle of Blue. “That there’s just not any water left on that river.”

While there were no catcalls or rotten fruit, Kenney admits that some representatives from the upper basin states were not pleased to hear that water promised to them nearly a century ago under the Colorado River Compact would probably not be available in the coming decades.

cont.The worst drought in the 105-year historical record of the Colorado River has opened a... more

JanforGore
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World's Muslim Population Growth Will Slow Down By 2030

Falling birth rates will slow the world's Muslim population growth over the... more

sbacker
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China : Creating a city twice the size of Wales, estimated 42 million inhabitants

BEIJING: Chinese planners are reportedly proposing to merge nine cities around the... more

mark438
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Article: 8 things you can do about population

"As we zoom toward 7 billion, population growth is looking ever more hairy and... more

frankpatton
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World Population: What If Nearly 7 Billion Lived In One Megacity? [Graphic]

What if the world’s population of nearly 7 billion people lived in one giant... more

jjprojects
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Which countries match the GDP and population of America's states?

IT HAS long been true that California on its own would rank as one of the biggest... more

emarston
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World faces overpopulation 'disaster' as number of population is set to rise by 75 million EACH YEAR

Global population is expected to peak at 9.5bn in 2075. Annual rise is the equivalent... more

GoldenHeart
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Article: Food: the Population Connection

By 2050, the world’s population is likely to reach 9 billion. Most of these... more

frankpatton
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Article: Paul Ehrlich Population Strategy Meeting

"I just want to make some of the reasons why the MAHB, the Millennium Assessment... more

frankpatton
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Online USA News: California's population gains not enough for another seat in Congress

Census data show the fastest growth continues to be in the West and South, but places... more

newsfuse [removed]
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Chinese Census shows 1 Billion, and counting...

What does it take to count more than one billion people in China? Six-and-a-half... more

CarolineS
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Analysis: Despite a Drying and Flooding Planet, Cancun Climate Negotiators Anticipate Scant Progress

On November 29 representatives from 190 countries will be in Cancun, Mexico for the 16th Conference of the Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Late last week, following a two-day Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate in Washington, the Obama administration’s chief climate negotiator told reporters not to expect too much.

More than 125,000 demonstrators convened in the streets of Copenhagen last year, hoping their cheers and compelling testimonies would encourage swifter, more comprehensive action from negotiators.“I would describe myself right now as neither an optimist nor a pessimist,” said Todd Stern, the State Department’s special envoy on climate, adding that there won’t be any “enormous leaps forward” in Cancun but “real and concrete steps” can be made.

Exactly what those could be has not come into focus, though Stern and other negotiators also noted that unless something tangible occurs at the Cancun meeting, the credibility of the UN process will weaken. “The process can’t continually stalemate and remain the locus of activity,” Stern said.

A year ago, of course, global anticipation of a diplomatic breakthrough was high enough to attract the American president, the Chinese premier, and over 100 other heads of state to the Copenhagen climate summit. More than 125,000 people from all over the world marched for climate action on a cold and sunny Saturday afternoon. Thousands of journalists and producers filed reports from a crowded media room at the Bella Center, itself so full that security forces limited access.

Yet what was clear in Copenhagen, just as it was plain in the two other international climate conferences I’ve attended — in Barcelona in 2009 and in Tianjin last month — is this: The very same governments that produced a near stalemate on a climate treaty are simultaneously supporting global alliances of powerful energy companies to develop and consume the planet’s remaining reserves of fossil fuels.

Let’s just put it this way. The executives of those companies are perfectly content with the grudging pace of climate negotiations. Nobody else should be. The equatorial regions of east Africa are drying up as fast as the tinderbox hills and water-scarce fields of Australia’s Murray Darling Basin. Both poles are melting along with the glaciers of Greenland and the Himalayas. South Dakota this year experienced floods and hail and fierce storms that formed the most erratic and dangerous weather in its recorded history.

The damage to freshwater supplies is the most personal consequence of climate change around the world. Climate change, in fact, is producing an emergency, except in the front offices of the world’s major fossil fuel companies and the legions of elected and appointed officials they’ve helped to install in public office. And as Circle of Blue reports in its Choke Point: U.S. series this year, and in its other projects, there is no more visible evidence than the effect climate change is having on the planet’s reserves of fresh water. In the U.S., persistent drought on the Colorado Plateau has so significantly lowered water levels in the Colorado River and Lake Mead that Hoover Dam is fast approaching the day when it will no longer produce any power. In Myanmar and Bangladesh, record floods this year displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

The damage to freshwater supplies is the most personal consequence of climate change around the world. It’s true that a number of nations have initiated important industrial programs to lower carbon emissions by fostering the switch to cleaner energy sources. China, for instance, has gained international renown for the speed at which it’s developed an alternative fuels manufacturing and power-generating sector.

It’s not nearly enough, though, to slow the planet’s warming. That’s because the bigger money in the industrialized world involves producing and consuming carbon-emitting coal, oil, and natural gas.

cont.On November 29 representatives from 190 countries will be in Cancun, Mexico for the... more

JanforGore
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Article: Causes of Growth

population growth reaching 10.7 billion in 2050 and over 18 billion by 2150.

frankpatton
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Bill Gates: Register Every Birth by Cellphone to Ensure Vaccination, Control Population

On the tails of a recent TED conference where Bill Gates stated that vaccines need to... more

rodstradamus
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Harvard Study: "Half of US Population will be Obese by 2050"

By 2050, 40 per cent of the US population will be obese, according to a new prediction... more

eva2
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Article: Anglicans: We have to acknowledge and respond to population issues in order to care for life

The Anglican General Synod of Australia recently held its three-yearly meeting, at... more

frankpatton
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2 years ago
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Article: What Is True Sustainability?

Every day we hear about topics like sustainable growth and sustainable building, but... more

frankpatton
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