by Al Gore
Since 1972, the United States has pioneered clean water protections and most of the developed world has followed suit. However, the progress in developing countries has fallen short of the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (a blueprint for global development agreed to by all 193 member states of the United Nations and 23 international organizations). According to the World Health Organization, “over 2 billion people gained access to improved water sources (defined as ‘likely to provide safe water’) and 1.8 billion people gained access to improved sanitation facilities between 1990 and 2010…[however] over 780 million people are still without access to improved sources of drinking water and 2.5 billion lack improved sanitation.”
If current trends continue, these numbers will remain unacceptably high in 2015: according to the World Health Organization, “605 million people will be without an improved drinking water source and 2.4 billion people will lack access to improved sanitation facilities.” In China, where 90 percent of the shallow groundwater contains pollution, including chemical and industrial waste, 190 million Chinese become ill each year due to their drinking water, and tens of thousands die.
Supplies of freshwater are unevenly distributed, with more than half of the total located in only six countries. The declining availability and deteriorating quality of freshwater in numerous countries and regions stands alongside the loss of topsoil as one of the two most serious limitations constraining the expansion of food production. Overconsumption and profligate waste of freshwater—new competition for water from cities and the growing demands of Earth Inc.—are threatening to create food crises in multiple areas of the world.
Just as urban sprawl has had an impact on the supply of agricultural land, “energy sprawl” is also having a harsh impact on the availability of freshwater for food crops. The unwise decision to promote the rapid growth of first generation ethanol fuels and biodiesel from palm oil has reallocated both water and land resources from food crops. And the growing craze for deep shale gas, which requires five million gallons of water per well, has put severe strain on supplies in regions that were already experiencing shortages. Many cities and counties in Texas, for example, have now been forced to choose between allocating water to agriculture and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of gas and oil. On a global basis, the use of water for energy production is projected to grow twice as fast as energy demand.
The expansion of oil and gas fracking is adding to the injection of toxic liquid waste into areas deep underground that have been thought to be safe repositories—until recently. In the United States, an estimated 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid waste have been injected into more than 680,000 wells for underground storage over the past few decades, even as the practice of fracking changes the underground geology, opening new fissures and modifying underground flow patterns. Unfortunately, some of these deep repositories have leaked waste upward into regions containing drinking water aquifers.
Groundwater resources represent approximately 30 percent of all the freshwater resources in the world, compared to one percent represented by all of the surface freshwater. In the last half century, the rate of shrinkage in groundwater aquifers has doubled. The rate at which groundwater withdrawals have been increasing has accelerated steadily over the last half century to double the rate in 1960, but in the last fifteen years (since the growth rates of China and other emerging economies have accelerated), the increases have proceeded at a much faster pace.
The introduction of new water drilling and pumping technology has also been a significant factor. In India, for example, $12 billion has been invested in new wells and pumps; more than 21 million wells have been drilled by the 100 million Indian farmers. Partly as a result, the aquifers in many communities have been completely dried up and drinking water has to be trucked in—while farmers must rely on increasingly unpredictable rainfall.
Because of the growth in population and the increase in water consumption, the surface water from many of the world’s important rivers is now so overallocated that many of the rivers no longer reach the sea: the Colorado, the Indus, the Nile, the Rio Grande, the Murray-Darling in Australia, the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, and the Elbe in Germany.
A SWELLING POPULATION
Although population growth rates have slowed in most of the world over the past several decades, the overall size of the population is now so large that even a slower rate of growth will add billions more people before our numbers stabilize near the end of this century at a total that is now difficult to predict but is estimated at between 10 and 15 billion. (There is also a low projection of 6.1 billion people, and a runaway projection of 27 billion people—that would occur if there are no further decreases in fertility. But the vast majority of experts assume that the most likely range is slightly above 10 billion.)
In the next dozen years, India will surpass China for at least the balance of the century as the most populous nation on Earth. In the next two dozen years, Africa will have more people than either China or India and by the end of the century is projected to have more people than both combined. Half of the global growth in population over the next four decades is projected to take place in Africa, which is now on track to more than triple its present population, to an astonishing 3.6 billion, by the end of this century. Given the dangerously low levels of soil fertility in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, shortages of freshwater, poor governance in many countries, and the projected impact of global warming, the limits to growth in Africa are likely to be a central focus of the world’s attention in the balance of the twenty-first century.
The reason it is so difficult to predict peak global population, and the reason that the range of estimates varies by five billion people—as many as all the people in the world at the end of the 1980s!—is that it is inherently difficult to predict how many children the average woman will prefer to have during the next several decades. An increase in that key variable by even a half a child (demographers have long since become numb to the discomfiture of that expression) can mean the difference in several billion people in world population in the course of the next eighty-seven years. The multiple factors that have an impact on women’s preferences are, in turn, also difficult to project over such a long period of time.
These new higher projections for peak global population in the latter part of the twenty-first century reflect a slower than expected decline in the average fertility rate in scores of less developed countries—the majority of them in Africa. The biggest single reason for the increased population estimates for Africa and the world is the failure of the world community to make fertility management knowledge and technology available to women who wish to use it.
Population and development specialists have learned a great deal over the last few decades about the many factors that actually drive changes in the dynamics of population growth. Voluminous research has shown conclusively that four elements of the population puzzle all fit together and act in combination to shift the pattern of population growth in any country from one equilibrium—characterized by high death rates, high birth rates, and large families—to a second equilibrium—characterized by low death rates, low birth rates, and small families.
The good news is that the global effort to slow population growth is actually a success story, albeit one that is unfolding in slow motion. Even though very large increases in our absolute numbers will continue for many decades to come, almost every nation in the world has been moving from the high equilibrium state toward the low equilibrium state. Some have changed quickly but others are lagging behind. In the U.S., the rate of growth in population has slowed to the lowest level since the Great Depression.
For several decades in the twentieth century, the prevailing view was that increases in GDP—particularly those factors associated with industrial development—were the key to falling population growth rates. This was another early illustration of the seductive convenience and illusory simplicity of GDP as a proxy measurement of generalized progress and how it c
an capture the attention of policymakers, even when it is only loosely connected to the real goals they are trying to reach.
Although GDP is not one of the four factors, economic growth is loosely correlated in many countries with the creation of social conditions that can and do have an impact on population. And conversely, in most instances, extreme poverty is certainly correlated with higher population growth rates—especially in countries with failing institutions and shortages of clean water and topsoil. All fourteen nations with those three characteristics have extremely high population growth rates; thirteen of the fourteen are in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The four relevant factors, all of which are necessary but none of which, by itself, is sufficient, are:
• First, the education of girls—the single most powerful factor. The education of boys is also important, but population statistics show clearly that the ability of girls to become literate and to obtain a good education is crucial.
• Second, the empowerment of women in society, to the point where their opinions are heard and respected, and they have the ability to participate in making decisions with their husbands or partners about family size and other issues important to their families.
• Third, the ubiquitous availability of fertility management knowledge and technology, so that women can effectively choose how many children they wish to have and the spacing of their children.
• Fourth, low infant mortality rates. As an African leader, Julius K. Nyerere, said midway through the twentieth century, “the most powerful contraceptive is the confidence by parents that their children will live.”
The struggle to provide access to contraception and the knowledge of how to manage fertility has not gone as well as social scientists and population experts had hoped. The commitments by wealthy countries to finance wider access in poor countries to fertility management have not been fully met. In some developed countries where democracy is being weakened, like the United States, attacks on programs beneficial to women have been more successful in recent years. Political opposition to contraception, for example, has surprisingly reemerged in the United States in the last two years, even though the overwhelming majority of American women (including 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women) support it and even though it seemed to be a question that had been settled in the 1960s.
The religion-based opposition to contraception by a tiny minority in the U.S. has also had a harsh impact on U.S. contributions to the global effort to make fertility management available in fast growing developing countries—in part because of the disingenuous conflation of contraception and abortion. Since foreign aid is always vulnerable to budget cuts in the United States, the amount of help actually provided has fallen far short of the amount pledged. And once again, the imbalance of power and political paralysis in the U.S. has deprived the world of desperately needed leadership, which, in turn, has seriously damaged the world’s ability to take action.
Partially as a result, anticipated declines in fertility rates have not been achieved—especially in Africa, where thirty-nine out of the fifty-five African countries have high levels of fertility. (There are nine high-fertility countries in Asia, six in Pacific Island nations, and four in the low-income countries of Latin America.) In thirty-four of the fifty-eight high-fertility countries in the world, population will triple in the balance of this century.
On a global basis, women now have an average of 2.5 children during their childbearing years. In Africa, however, the average is almost 4.5 children per woman. Moreover, in four African countries, the average woman is still expected to have more than six children, leading to disruptive and unsustainable population growth. Malawi, for example, which has 15 million people today, is projected to have a nearly tenfold increase in population by the end of the century to an estimated 129 million. The African nation with the largest population, Nigeria, is projected to increase from slightly more than 160 million people today to more than 730 million by 2100. That would put Nigeria’s population at the level of China in the mid-1960s.
Before the improved understanding of population dynamics, many people assumed that higher death rates reduce overall population. But the impact of high death rates on high birth rates gives the lie to this former belief. The Black Death of the fourteenth century did reduce population—indeed, that is believed to be the last time population has declined. But in today’s world, even the most feared diseases have not had an impact on population. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has had an impact on the overall numbers of people in a few African countries, but on a worldwide basis population grew by more in the first five months of 2011 than all of the deaths from HIV/AIDS since the disease first began rapidly spreading three decades ago.
In countries with high rates of infant mortality, the natural tendency of parents is to have more children in order to ensure that at least some of them will survive to take care of their parents in old age and to carry on the family name and tradition. In practice, when child death rates fall dramatically, birth rates generally decline a half generation later—provided the other three factors are also present. Following World War II, revolutionary advances in health care—higher levels of sanitation, better nutrition, antibiotics, vaccines, and other achievements of modern medicine—led to significant declines in child and infant mortality in many countries around the world. This same combination of improvements in health care and nutrition has doubled life expectancy in industrial countries from the beginning of the nineteenth century—from thirty-five to seventy-seven years.
AN AGENDA FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS
The education of girls has become commonplace around the world, including in most countries that used to focus only on the education of boys. Although there is still opposition to the education of girls among groups such as Afghanistan’s Taliban, most nations have long since become aware of the competitive advantages, especially in the information age, of educating all their children. Saudi Arabia used to focus on boys alone in their school systems, but according to the most recent statistics available, almost 60 percent—compared to 8 percent in 1970—of college students in Saudi Arabia were women.
The comparable figure in Qatar is 64 percent, in Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates, 60 percent; the average in Arab states is now 48 percent; in Iran 51 percent. Indeed, more women than men received college degrees in 67 of the 120 nations for which statistics are available. The world average is 51 percent. In the United States, women now receive 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 51 percent of doctoral degrees.
The empowerment of women, on the other hand, remains a challenging goal in many traditionalist societies. None of those women college graduates in Saudi Arabia, for example, is allowed to drive a car—or vote—although their relatively progressive king has announced plans to allow women to vote beginning in 2015. Even though 93 percent of the gender gap in education of women has been closed on a global basis, less than 60 percent of the gap in economic participation and only 18 percent of the gap in political participation have been closed.
The Global Mind has accelerated demands for the empowerment of women throughout the world; women make up more than half of all social network users globally, and almost half of all Internet users. When they are exposed to the more favorable norms of gender equity in advanced countries, they naturally become impatient for change.
Women have been coming into the workplace in almost all countries in higher numbers than men, reflecting a historic change in global attitudes about women working outside the home. In fact, for the last forty years, two women have entered the workplace for every man. Women have made a particular difference in the competitiveness of rapidly growing East Asian nations, with 83 women in the workforce for every 100 men. They have had the biggest impact in several export-oriented businesses, including clothing and textiles—filling between 60 to 80 percent of the jobs.
The Economist has calculated that on a global basis, “the in
creased employment of women in developed economies has contributed much more to global growth than China has.” In developed countries as a group, women are responsible for producing slightly less than 40 percent of GDP. However, another flaw in the way GDP is measured—one noted by Kuznets when he first introduced it in 1937—is that it does not assign any economic value to the work women (and some men) do in the home: raising children, cooking meals, keeping the household, and all the rest. If this housework in developed countries were valued at the amount that would be paid for nannies, cooks, and housekeepers, the total contribution of women to GDP would be well over 50 percent.
The movement of women into jobs outside the home has had startling social impacts. In the United States, during the three decades between the 1960s and 1990s, the percentage of married women with children younger than six years old who work outside the home skyrocketed from 12 percent to 55 percent. The percentage of all mothers with young children who chose to work outside the home rose during the same three decades from 20 to 60 percent.
These sociological changes are also among the many factors contributing to the obesity epidemic. Because many more mothers are now working outside the home, and a much higher percentage of children live in families where both parents work, more people eat fast food, other restaurant food, and manufactured meals and food products designed for minimal preparation, such as microwaving. Portion sizes have also increased along with the body mass index. It all adds up to what Kessler calls “conditioned hyper-eating.”
Studies also show that children in low-income neighborhoods are often permitted and even encouraged by their parents and caregivers to watch more television than average because of greater concerns about their safety playing outside in neighborhoods that, relatively speaking, are prone to more violence. This mirrors a global trend for people of all ages, who are spending more time on electronic screens connecting to the Global Mind and are, on average, more likely to work in jobs that do not require as much physical activity as in the past. The trend toward more driving and less walking is also a factor.