Human population growth and climate change

I've been troubled by the issue of population growth in the recent IPCCC report I've been reading. So as I slog through the more than 1,100 pages, I decided to take the quick route and Google it.

This is what I found on the Population and Sustainability Network webpage:

What does the IPCC report say about population dynamics and climate change?

April 11, 2014

SOURCE: PSN

The latest IPCC report identifies changes in population as factors that exacerbate climate change vulnerability. Here we present the report’s key messages about different population dynamics and access to reproductive health etc.

Credit: UN Photo/Nasim Fekrat

The report known as the second volume of the Fifth Assessment Report, released by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that “human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems”.

These are the report’s key references to population, with direct quotes from the report:

Freshwater resources

• Non-climatic drivers such as population increase, economic development, urbanisation, and land-use or natural geomorphic changes also challenge the sustainability of resources by decreasing water supply or increasing demand.

• Over the next few decades and for increases in global mean temperature of less than around 2oC above pre-industrial, changes in population will generally have a greater effect on changes in resource availability than will climate change. Climate change would, however, regionally exacerbate or offset the effects of population pressures.

Coastal systems and low-lying areas

• The population and assets projected to be exposed to coastal risks as well as human pressures on coastal ecosystems will increase significantly in the coming decades due to population growth, economic development, and urbanisation. 

• All the studies indicate high and growing exposure of low-lying coastal areas. The Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ) constitutes 2% of the world’s land area but contains 10% of world’s population (600 million) and 13% of world’s urban population (360 million) based on year 2000 estimates.

• About 65% of the world’s cities with populations of over 5 million are located in the LECZ. 

• The population living in coastal lowlands is increasing and more than 270 million people in 2010 are already exposed to flooding by the 1-in-100 year coastal flood. Population growth and land subsidence in coastal lowlands are the major causes; therefore there is very low attribution to climate change.

Food security and food production systems

• Developing countries rely heavily on climate -dependent agriculture and especially in conjunction with poverty and rapid increase in population they are vulnerable to climate change. While food insecurity is concentrated mostly in developing countries situated in the tropics global food supply may also be affected by heat stress in both temperate and subtropical regions.

Human health and the role of family planning

• Although population growth rates and total population size do not alone determine emissions, population size is an important factor. One study showed that CO2 emissions could be lower by 30% by 2100 if access to contraception was provided to those women expressing a need for it. Providing the unmet need for contraceptive services in areas such as the Sahel region of Africa that has both high fertility and high vulnerability to climate change can potentially significantly reduce human suffering as climate change proceeds. This is important not only in poor countries, however, but also some rich ones like the US, where there is unmet need for reproductive health services as well as high CO 2 emissions per capita.
• Slowing population growth through lowering fertility, as might be achieved by increasing access to family planning, has been associated with improved maternal and child health – the co - benefit - in two main ways: increased birth spacing and reducing births by very young and old mothers.    
• Programs to provide access to reproductive health services for all women will not only lead to slower population growth and its associated energy demands, but also will reduce the numbers of child and maternal deaths. 

Key economic sectors and services

• For most economic sectors, the impacts of drivers such as changes in population, age structure, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, and governance are projected to be large relative to the impacts of climate change.

Human security

• Climate change over the 21st century is projected to increase displacement of people.
• Displacement risk increases when populations that lack the resources for planned migration experience higher exposure to extreme weather events, in both rural and urban areas, particularly in developing countries with low income.

Read more about the fifth volume of the IPCC report. 

Taken directly from:
http://populationandsustainability.org/what-does-the-ipcc-report-say-about-population-dynamics-and-climate-change-html/

Let's get serious about impacts

Okay, So I've been reviewing the Working Group II Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - Summary for Policy Makers.

It's riveting. If you like this sort of thing. Which I actually do.

But here is their summary of anticipated impacts of climate change. This is a summary of their summary. As I read through the full report, I'll have more to say, especially as it relates to adaptation solutions. The impacts - that we need to adapt to break down like this:

• Decline in freshwater resources: Less freshwater available over all and increase competition among sectors (energy, agriculture, municipal water use, industry, etc.). This has wide ranging impacts we will spend more time with soon. It's a BIG one.
• Terrestrial (land) and freshwater ecosystem damages: extinction, pollutions, invasive species (think kudzu if you live in the southeast US, or zebra mussels if you live near the Great Lakes). This also will lead to irreversible damage to ecosystems, which leads to decrease in carbon storage, decrease in wood production, decline in water quality, loss of additional biodiversity, and damage to ecosystems.
• Sea level rise impacting coastal and low lying areas: includes flooding, storm surges, erosion, and submergence. (Not so good for Miami, New York, LA, London, the Netherlands, the Caribbean, etc. - also not great for communities that will be flooded with the people fleeing these areas.) 
• Marine ecosystems: decline in biodiversity, increase in extinctions, decline in fisheries, including commercial fish catches (Seriously bad news for coastal communities with big fishing dependencies, especially those which have already decimated the estuaries - which most have). 
• Ocean acidification: loss of coral reefs, disruption of the food web (including plankton), increase damage to polar ecosystems, and serious disruption to commercial fisheries. 
• Decline in food security and food production systems: we already are seeing a decline in grain yields, and it is forecast to drop very quickly in the next 25 years. This has some bad ramifications as food prices increase, and food becomes more difficult to grow.
• Food access and prices will become destabilized: as grain production drops and commercial fisheries collapse, (remember grain is fed to livestock as well as humans) access to food sources will become increasingly problematic. People will be hungry.
• Urban areas become increasingly stressed: by heat waves, extreme precipitation - rains, snow, ice, flooding, land slides, air pollution, drought and lack of clean waters, plus an increase strain on infrastructure, and large populations migrating into urban areas due to economic and environmental dislocation.
• Rural areas also stressed: by heat, decline in soil fertility and productivity, difficulties accessing clean safe water and food resources.
• Economic disruptions: while energy needs for heat may decrease over all, energy demand for cooling will increase, and basic infrastructure to support economic activities - such as transportation of people and food - are likely to be deteriorating and threatened - especially by sea level rise and loss of port services.
• Human health will be jeopardized: due to increase in disease vectors such as mosquitoes (think Zika), loss of nutrients from food and less access to clean safe water, and increase in vulnerable populations who are economically marginalized by climate change impacts.
• Human security will decline: meaning we will see increased large scale migrations of human populations, which will put stresses on already stressed communities as resources like food and fresh water grow increasingly scarce.
• Increased violence due to in-group/out-group dynamics: with displaced people migrating and being seen as threatening resource availability.
• Increased civil unrest: due to increase poverty, increased uncertainty, and economic dislocation with greater expectation of state/government responsiveness.
• Negative impacts on territorial integrity and infrastructure: as more demand is placed on access to shared resources, repairs to infrastructure and basic state functions will be increasingly stressed.

And all this results in:

Decreased economic growth, increase poverty, decreased food security, increased number of "poverty traps" and "hunger hotspots".

AND there is no mention of the increasing human populations in the timeframe they are looking at!!

In other words, we are in a bad way people. It won't get better and it won't go away. We have to deal with it, and we have to do it - TOGETHER!

A critical concluding remark of the summary states that:

"Underestimating the complexity of adaptation as a social process can create unrealistic expectations about achieving intended adaptation outcomes." p. 29. This will only exacerbate the negative impacts and increase pending civil unrest. 

It's time for us to address the complexity of adaptation as a social process. And get on with it.



For more details please see:

IPCC, 2014: Summary for policymakers. In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.

Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Field, C.B., V.R. Barros, D.J. Dokken, K.J. Mach, M.D. Mastrandrea, T.E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K.L. Ebi, Y.O. Estrada, R.C. Genova, B. Girma, E.S. Kissel, A.N. Levy, S. MacCracken,P.R. Mastrandrea, and L.L. White (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 1-32.