Welcome to the eighth of our weekly areas of focus on climate action, providing encouragement and seeking to inspire action within all the 22 Methodist Churches in the Ipswich area.
This is the penultimate topic before the COP26 summit begins on 1st November, we will have covered 9 distinct areas of concern.
This Week’s focus
This week the subject is Population and Community. It is fitting that we turn our attention to the human aspect of the climate crisis as we approach the summit. It has been important to focus on the science that is fuelling climate change, and the role that science, technology and engineering can play in addressing the problems caused.
This week, we look at the interplay between climate change and people as individuals, in their communities and as large populations. Attitudes and behaviours are as important as actions.
Trends in Global Population
Napoleon was crowned as emperor of France, the US Vice President killed the former Secretary of the Treasury in a duel, Haiti gained independence to become the first black republic following a slave revolt, and the world’s first railway journey took place in the UK.
The year was 1804. Thought to be the year the global population first topped one billion people. It took another 123 years for the population to grow to 2 billion. For the last 50 years, the rate of population growth has been relatively constant taking around 12 years to add an extra billion, though the growth is now at its slowest for several decades. One estimate suggests that the population reached 7.9 billion on the 12th October this year.
Well over a quarter (and nearly one third) of the human race that have ever lived, are alive today. Yes – it is true! This is one of the staggering consequences of science and medicine whose solutions have increased longevity beyond wildest dreams of a century ago, but like all human advances, the underlying data are full of inequity – a reality we need to confront alongside all the challenges of climate change.
In the chart below, all the countries have been ranked according to average life expectancy. The population of that country is assumed to share that country’s average value, and the cumulative number of the population is plotted from left to right, with the countries having highest life expectancy to the right. China and India appear as flat lines, because of their huge populations. This chart hides the immense wealth and immense poverty hidden in the country’s average, but the chart still shows very clearly how much inequity there is between nations.
The relationship between life expectancy and national wealth is shown in the bubble chart below. Each bubble represents one country, centred in the chart with its per capita wealth (GDP) and its life expectancy. The area of the bubble represents the population in that country. It is clear that the total population affects the life expectancy far less than the per capita wealth.
The global population is continuing to grow, with wide variation between countries. The projected population growth is concentrated amongst many of the poorest countries which still have the lowest life expectancy. In many of the wealthier countries, population numbers are almost static, with some countries’ beginning to see reducing populations with families often being smaller and started later in life. Various lifestyle issues, including financial concerns, career focus and housing shortages all contributing. The graph below shows how these projected population growth figures vary.
Another important population trend is urbanisation, where once-rural communities are increasingly moving towards cities. In 1960 only around one third of people lived in urban communities. With more people being drawn to urban lifestyles, rural and urban populations became equal in 2007, since rural communities have been the minority.
Living standards in urban communities tend to be higher and this encourages people to migrate towards urban communities as they become richer, or in search of the expected wealth. Nearly one third of those in urban communities live in slum households.
In 1976, the UN held its first summit focusing on the challenges created by urbanisation. Habitat 1 conference was held in Vancouver, followed 20 years later by Habitat II in Istanbul and the third conference in 2016 in Quito was intersecting with the growing awareness of climate change. The Quito conference, with 36 000 attendees from 167 countries went almost unreported in the UK, despite its important challenge of focusing on sustainability of cities.
The impact of urbanisation, especially in developing nations, is as difficult to comprehend as climate change.
By 2050, the world’s ten largest cities (so-called megacities) are projected to hold the same population as the whole of the USA, and by 2100, a similar figure will live in the biggest five cities in Africa: Lagos, Kinshasa, Dar es Salaam, Khartoum and Niamey. By then, only Mumbai (4th largest) and Delhi (5th largest) will compete for the dubious status of the largest city. Lagos alone is predicted to have a larger population than Germany has now. Tokyo, currently the world’s largest city will drop to 7th largest in 2050 but ranked 28th in population in 2100.
Populations are on the move for more reasons than shifting from rural to urban living. There are around 280 million people as international migrants each year, around 30% of whom are refugees, 10% of them forcibly, because of conflict.
How do these population trends relate to climate change?
The growing global population will continue to increase the strain on the earth’s resources that are contributing to global warming and leading to the climate change effects we have studied over the past seven weeks.
It is widely recognised that the wealthier nations are the greatest contributors to climate change and will have to provide strong leadership in measures to combat climate change. The poorer nations are still on a strong developing curve to lift them out of the poverty and deprivation and to raise their living standards, so there is a strong moral justification for them to make greater demands on the earth’s resources in “catch-up”. This case will be an inevitable cause of tensions between world leaders as they seek to make difficult decisions. It will be the subject of the final week in this series.
The challenge of global inequity and climate change is wider than this moral case.
It is clear from the trends in population growth, that the most rapid growth is projected to be in the poorest countries, with the fastest rate of urbanisation from the currently rural economies. These are the centres in which the megacities of 50m+ population will also emerge. Rapid growth in these cities will demand massive construction of infrastructure, similar to that currently witnessed in China, where rates of construction have driven global shortages of building materials. The construction industry is one of the major sources of greenhouse gases, with production of concrete having a very high footprint. New technologies are under development to reduce greenhouse gases from concrete by about a third, but the astonishing scale of the megacities will be difficult to offset effectively.
Current figures show that around one third of city-dwellers live in slum housing conditions, and it is inevitable that these megacities will have a disproportionately high level of slum housing as the enlarging cities become a magnet to draw the poorest in search of a dream future. The lack of infrastructure, limited sanitation and excess unmanaged waste will also have disproportionately high footprint.
High density urbanisation also drives high transport needs – there is no space available within the city for local production of food and goods that can meet the population needs. High density urban environments are typically up to 3oC hotter than rural spaces, and may be over 10o hotter at night-time because of the heat storage effect. Open green spaces and use of irrigation and fountain sprays are widely used to reduce city temperatures. New solutions will need to be found to sustain the megacities where excess temperatures are likely to be even higher. For many of these, their low latitude locations will exacerbate temperature effects, driving high levels of demand for cooling technologies which will need to find new levels of efficiency compared with current generations of cooling. The living conditions in poorest communities on the periphery of these megacities are likely to be bleak.
Copyright David Welbourn
As reported in week 4, around 800m people are undernourished and live in daily hunger. The centres of greatest population growth overlap with areas already facing greatest problem of food shortage and drought. These closely map onto the areas which are most vulnerable to the consequences of global warming, as temperatures rise, extreme weather events become more prominent, viable growing seasons become shorted and more random.
These are also the same areas of the world recognised as being outliers in risk of conflict and political instability. It is difficult to see how the emergence of megacities can support community cohesion, without additional tensions fuelling unrest and further growth in migration. The growing challenges of large-scale population migration where people are willing to face significant dangers and exploitation will continue to grow, given the existing global inequity, and the likelihood that this inequity will be deepened by climate change without adequate support from the wealthy nations for continued development and economic growth in the poorer nations.
Behaviours and Attitudes
This week’s focus on the interplay between climate change and population trends demonstrates that issues of poverty and inequity will have a major influence on plans to bring climate justice. They cannot be compartmentalised. Justice for the environment and justice for populations are inseparable.
In recent years, similar trends have emerged across the majority of wealthier countries, with significant rise in both nationalism and globalism. This has driven polarisation and tensions undermining tolerance, consensus and social cohesion.
Producing an urgent and effective response to the climate crisis will depend heavily on tolerance, consensus and social cohesion. Those with the most to lose in addressing the climate crisis will have to provide leadership by ceding things they hold precious and helping reverse the recent trends of nationalism and popularism.
Demos, a respected think tank, working with WWF recently published the results of a survey on UK attitudes to possible policy changes the UK Government may need to take to meet the zero carbon goals. The survey demonstrated a high level of support for many of the most difficult policy decisions – a considerably more encouraging result than recent public division on migration and Brexit might have suggested.
What Can We Do?
The trends in population growth, urbanisation and migration outlined here are inevitable and beyond the scope of individuals. The impact of these trends is firmly within the concern and influence of individuals, given that the most significant barrier to resolution is captured in the trends in behaviour and attitudes.
Next week’s topic will explore the challenges facing global leaders as they meet for COP26, and as they take away the decisions and actions arising from the summit.
Those leaders will be eagerly seeking reassurance that they will be supported in taking the difficult decisions and actions required by climate justice.
Make it clear to our leaders:
- you will support them to invest in the new technologies and introduce policies to drive positive change, even when they disadvantage us;
- you will also support them to invest globally in accelerating the closure of equity gaps, and to increase aid to developing nations to continue their economic development, even if that is at the expense of our own.
Within your own local communities and your work places:
- call out popularism and nationalism and any form of denial that will ultimately suppress the poorest;
- be positive and advocate for those policies which will make the biggest impact in slowing climate change;
- be an ally to others when they are being singled out for their own differences.
Use your purchasing power:
- to favour fair trade in all its forms;
- to influence markets by purchasing environmentally sustainable products if we can afford it, even where they are more expensive;
- to encourage new technologies, especially where they enable developing nations to skip technology generations.
Learn More
- Population data and trends from the UN
- General global data from Statistica or from Our World in Data
- Population and wealth data from the World Bank
- Health data from the World Health Organisation
- Population migration data from the UN or from the migration portal
- Information on Sustainable Cities from Habitat III global conference in Quito in 2016
- City trends and growth of megacities
- Smithsonian paper on Managing urban temperatures
- Global conflict tracker and political risk assessment from Marsh
- Global quality of life indicators
- Public attitudes on key issues
- Demos and WWF survey on UK attitudes to Climate change Policies
World Environment Day Exemplar
On 5th June 1974, the first World Environment Day was marked. Every year since then, a host city has brought focus to an environmental topic that was particularly pertinent to them.
In 2015, Milan was chosen to be the host city for World Environment Day, with the theme Seven Billion Dreams, One Planet, Consume with Care. This set the WED events in the context of the world expo taking place over the 6 months from May to October that year, where the events were united under the expo theme The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015. Hosting over 140 countries at the world’s largest expo, the event brought an important focus to the relationship between food poverty and populations. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation was a co-sponsor with their headquarters in Rome, and the International Organisation for Migration also had a keen interest in the link between population movement and environmental drivers.
Read more about the WED events hosted at the Milan Expo.
This Week’s Prayer
Pray to end selfish division pitting communities against each other; for a renewed unity to protect all God’s creation, committing to lasting change for equality, mutual respect and understanding.
Key Messages
- climate justice demands population justice including attention to issues of deprivation and global poverty;
- the global population will exceed 8 billion in 2023, and is predicted to reach 9 billion before 2040;
- population growth is fastest in areas with weak economies, politically least stable yet most vulnerable to impact of climate change;
- extreme events of intense heat, water shortage, and air pollution are likely to have widest impact on population health in areas with least developed healthcare infrastructure
- impact of climate change is likely to intensify pressures driving mass population migration, especially as some areas will become uninhabitable;
- extreme weather events will increase the risks associated with mass migrations and refugee shelters;
- in high wealth countries, the economic impact of drive to net-zero will affect the poorest and most disadvantaged communities the most, intensifying division and polarisation;
- wealthy individuals will be least affected by climate change and are often the most robust deniers, but will need to make biggest changes in their lifestyle;
- political resolve is likely to be weakened by essential but unpopular policies.