1
CONTENTS
Population Trends......................
4
Problems of High Population
6
Hunger...................................
..
8
Industrial Agriculture.........
..
10
Alternative Agriculture.............
12
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Lead author/editor: Steven Heywood Designer: Romain Oria
Contributions: Green Patriots Posters, Vanessa Champagne, Rosey Simonds, David Woolcombe
With thanks to: Eric Benson, Artem Kolyuka Diama Ndiaye Diop, Edward Morris, Michelle Myers and her family, Loubna Sadiki, Hindowa E Saidu
Cities and Slums........................... 14 Getting Rid of Slums................... 16 Liveable Cities.............................. 18 Environment.................................. 22 Lowering Population................... 24 Consumption and Population..................................... 27 Youth Action................................. 28 Glossary......................................... 31
2
f o r e w o r d A Future Worth Choosing….
The UN’s Global Sustainability Panel was charged with formulating a “new vision for sustainable growth and prosperity, along with mechanisms for achieving it.” It’s report introduces 56 recommendations (http://www.un.org/gsp) with the following thoughts: “Today our planet and world society are experiencing the best of times: unprecedented prosperity, and the worst of times: unprecedented environmental stress. Social inequality between the world’s rich and poor is growing, and more than a billion people still live in poverty. So our long-term vision must be to eradicate poverty, reduce inequality and make growth inclusive, and production and consumption more sustainable, while combating climate change and respecting a range of other planetary boundaries.” The question is: How? “As the global population grows from 7 billion to almost 9 billion by 2040, and the number of middle-class consumers increases by 3 billion over the next 20 years, by 2030, the world will need at least 50 per cent more food, 45 per cent more energy and 30 per cent more water — all at a time when environmental boundaries are throwing up new limits to supply. Our current global development model is unsustainable: we can no longer assume that our collective actions will not trigger tipping points and cause irreversible damage to both ecosystems and human communities. But the dilemma of sustainable human development is that such thresholds should not be used to impose arbitrary growth ceilings on developing countries which seek to lift their people out of poverty. Indeed, if we fail to resolve that dilemma, we run the risk of condemning up to 3 billion members of our human family to a life of endemic poverty”. “A quarter of a century ago, the Brundtland Report argued that sustainable human development could be achieved by an integrated policy framework embracing three pillars: economic growth, social equality and environmental sustainability. It was right then and its right today. The problem is that, 25 years later, sustainable human development remains a concept not a reality. Why? Two answers: 1. There are few incentives to put it into practice when the policy dividend of sustainable human development is long-term, but politics and institutions disproportionately reward the short term. 2. We have failed to incorporate the concept of sustainable development into mainstream national and international economic policy. “It is this second area that the Panel addresses with real passion: economists, social activists and environmental scientists simply talk past each other. That is why the Panel argues that the international community needs “a new political economy” for sustainable human development – one that would mean that international agencies, national Governments and private corporations would report annually on their sustainable development performance against agreed sustainability measures”. “The Panel recognizes that this is a core challenge for politics itself. The political economy of sustainable development must bring sustainable human development from the margins to the mainstream of the global economic debate and make the cost of action and the cost of inaction transparent to all. Only then will the political process be able to summon both the arguments and the political will necessary to act for a sustainable future”. UN’s Global Sustainability Panel
3
Population Trends
O
ne of the many problems that we often hear is facing us is the ‘population timebomb’ – the idea that there are too many people on the earth already, that the population is continuing to grow at an unsustainable rate, and that this will only increase our environmental problems, as well as social problems like hunger and inequality. But how many people are there on the earth today, and how many will there be in the future?
A Short Story of Population -
300 Millions In the year 1AD, the entire population of the world was only around 300 million people – the same size as the USA today. Wars, famines, and infectious diseases like the plague, combined with poor sanitation and hygiene meant that world population grew very slowly for hundreds and hundreds of years. It took until around 1800 to reach the 1 billion people mark. However, from this point onwards technology began to improve rapidly, and as war and diseases began to fade into the past in the developed world, and these advances were exported to the developing world we reached 6 billion people in 1999 .
-
1800
1 Billion
-
1927
2 Billions
-
1960
3 Billions
-
1974
4 Billions
-
1999
6 Billions
-
2011
7 Billions
The tables on these pages give a picture of how the population is developing around the world, and we can see that in many cases it is the poorest developing countries, and the ones with the lowest life expectancy, that are growing the fastest. Many people in these countries have large families to help with agricultural work, their main means of making money and food, and to compensate for the effects of early deaths, or even the deaths of children.
The United Nations predicts that by 2050 the world population will grow to 9 billion people, before levelling off and starting to fall slightly in the second half of the century as improved education, health and life expectancies make big families less necessary.
-
4
2050
9 Billions
Fast, Slow and Zero Growth
High Population Growth, Low Life Expectancy Here we see that four of the five fastest growing countries have very low life expectancies... Country Liberia
Population growth per year 4.50%
Life Expectancy 57 years
Singapore
3.50%
82.1 years
Niger
3.50%
53.4 years
Uganda
3.20%
53.2 years
Western Sahara
3.70%
61.1 years
Slow Growth in rich countries
...and here it is clear that the five richest countries in the world have long life expectancies and very slow population growth... Country
Population growth per year
Life expectancy
USA
0.90%
78.3 years
UK
0.60%
80 years
France
0.60%
81.1 years
Japan
0.00%
82.2 years
Germany
-0.10%
80 years
Eastern Europe losing is population
...while countries in eastern Europe are actually shrinking in population size quite quickly, despite their relatively high life expectancies – a large part of this is due to immigration to western Europe, where jobs have been more easy to find recently.
Bulgaria
-0.60%
73.6 years
Georgia
-0.60%
77.1 years
Ukraine
-0.60%
68.6 years
Belarus
-0.50%
71.2 year
Most Populous Countries
Brazil- 194 Millions
71.3 years
Indonesia- 239 Millions
-1.10%
USA-310 Millions
Moldova
India- 1.22 Billions
Population growth per year Life expectancy
China- 1.34 Billions
Country
5
The Problems of High Population
O
ur growing human population is usually seen as a bad thing, leading to hunger, overcrowding, and environmental problems. Here we introduce those problems, and in the rest of this booklet we examine how much of these problems is really down to population.
Hunger The most famous person to put forward this idea was the English Doctor Thomas Malthus. In the 18th century he predicted that the population would soon be growing faster than food production could keep up, and there would be a mass starvation which would reduce the population back to ‘sustainable’ levels. Malthus has so far proved to be wrong, at least in the developing world, where agricultural technology and innovation has seen food production continually increase. But massive famines have hit large parts of the developing world in recent decades – did population have a part to play in those disasters? Or is it something else?
Overcrowding Our high population also seems to have led to a problem with overcrowding and poverty – there are simply too many people with not enough jobs, housing or money to look after them all. The result is that megacities have sprung up around the world, with tens of millions of people living in places like Rio de Janeiro, Lagos and Manila, with huge shanty towns and slums of poverty-stricken people, desperate for work, growing up on their outskirts. This problem of overcrowding has affected the developed world too, with cities like Los Angeles, Tokyo and London growing to huge sizes and containing massive inequalities of wealth and living standards. Later in the booklet we look into whether these problems can be overcome.
6
Environmental problems Population growth has also been blamed for the environmental problems we face. More people means more fuel is consumed, more products are made and bought, more emissions are released. It seems logical that the most reliable way to reduce our emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change would be to stop the population growing, and even to encourage a population reduction over the coming decades. At the end of the booklet, we explore whether population is really to blame for our environmental woes, or whether it is unequal consumption that is more to blame.
‘Every additional person increases carbon emissions, the rich more than the poor; and increases the number of climate change victims, the poor more than the rich.’
Population Matters
7
Hunger
A
lmost one in six people on earth do not have enough to eat, and are at risk of illness and death as a result. Many people suggest this is down to the size of the population, but on these pages we explore other possible explanations for this terrible crisis.
Hunger is said to affect anyone who is getting less than 2,100 calories per day – if we eat less than this our bodies start to weaken and slow down, both physically and mentally, making it difficult for adults to work or schoolchildren to learn, and the immune system breaks down, making it easier for diseases to attack us. The total number of hungry people worldwide is 925 million, around 16% of everyone on earth. The number of hungry people is actually growing, and was only 791 million in 1997. Hunger affects more people than diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS combined, and children are particularly badly affected – 146 million of the hungry are children, and if women do not get enough to eat while pregnant they can give birth to underweight children who start life with a much lower chance of survival. Despite this, the UN World Food Programme admits that “In purely quantitative terms, there is enough food available to feed the entire global population of 7 billion”.
So, if we have enough food for everyone, why are people going hungry? There are a number of other factors involved...
8
Climate Change
As climate change gets stronger and stronger we are seeing more floods, storms and droughts that can destroy huge amounts of crops very quickly – and parts of the world with many hungry people and lots of small farmers who grow food for themselves and their families, like Africa and Asia, are often the most vulnerable to these disasters.
War
Many of the countries with the greatest levels of hunger are also ones that have had a large amount of conflict in recent history, such as DR Congo and Angola, and this is no coincidence. In war times, food is often taken to be given to troops, destroyed as a punishment, or farmers are killed or enlisted to fight.
Unfair Distribution
If there is enough food in the world but people are going hungry, to some extent the problem must be that the food is not being distributed fairly. For example, while many people in the developing world are starving to death, Europe purposefully produces more milk and butter than it can consume in order to keep its farmers in a job. As a BBC story on rising food prices says “to put it bluntly, rich people eat more than poor people” , even if a lot of the food that is bought in rich countries is wasted. As more people in countries like China, India and Brazil become richer, this is going to make it more difficult for poor people to get the food they need. Despite these facts, it takes just 25 cents a day to feed a hungry child, but this money is not being made available by rich countries that already have all the food they need – another example of unequal distribution, this time of wealth.
Speculation
One of the biggest problems is financial speculation on food prices. The price of wheat rose by 70% at the end of 2010, and the average cost of all food by 32%, despite there being just as much food as before. The reason was speculation, which is quite a complex thing to explain: at the beginning of the year farmers can sell their grain before it is grown using something called a futures contract. This protects both the farmer and the buyer from the effects of the price of food going up or down during the year. However, the trader who buys the grain from the farmer for $100 can then sell the contract to someone else, like a bank, for $120 to make a profit. The bank can sell it to more banks, and so on, with the price rising each time. This means that by the time the grain is actually grown, harvested, and reaches the market, its price is much higher that it was originally and it costs more for people to buy . Recently the rising price of food has become a big problem, with many people in developing countries finding it harder and harder to afford enough basic food to avoid hunger. It doesn’t matter how much food there is if people won’t sell it for a reasonable price.
9
Industrial Agriculture
I
ndustrialised agriculture is the system of food production that has enabled us to grow so much food and avoid mass starvation, at least in developed countries. However, while it has had many positive impacts, it has also contributed to environmental problems and the inequality that sees so many people remain hungry. We need to decide if the positives of industrial agirculture outweigh the negatives.
Industrial agriculture has developed over the past century in much the same way that the industrial revolution in factories and technology developed from the 19th century onwards – whereas hundreds of years ago people owned small amounts of land for farming, and used natural materials to do so, farms are now much larger and owned by a much smaller group of businesses, and a large amount of chemical fertilisers are used to increase the amount of crops that can be grown. Also, where farming used to involve growing a diversity of crops, many farms now grow huge amounts of single crops like rice, wheat or corn. Some of the positive effects of this have been great – for example, India’s wheat production grew from 10 million tonnes to 73 million tonnes between 1968 and 2006. However, some of its effects have been less good for some of the world’s poorest people.
Environmental Impact
In its current form, farming creates between 17% and 32% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which mainly come from raising animals for meat and dairy, and using artificial fertilisers for growing crops. Natural fertilisers are made from animal manure, which is full of nutrients, but cheap artificial fertilisers are made from fossil fuels – each tonne of artificial fertiliser uses one tonne of oil and 108 tonnes of water to produce, and releases 7 tonnes of CO2 and a lot of nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. Meanwhile, the huge amount of animals we keep for meat and dairy produce up to 40% of the world’s methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 . This comes from a process that’s scientifically called ‘enteric fermentation’, but to you and me is simply called ‘farting’.
Diseases
Monocultures – that is, fields where large amounts of identical crops are planted, packed closely together – are much more likely to fall victim to disease because if the disease infects one plant it can very easily spread to the others. If slightly different varieties of each crop, which are not vulnerable to the same diseases, are planted in the same field, they stop infections from spreading so quickly.
10
Unemployment
Because industrial farming is done on a few large farms rather than a lot of small farms, and uses machines rather than human labour for planting crops and spreading fertilisers, a lot of people whose families have been farmers for generations now find themselves without land. They either have to compete for the few human jobs on the industrial farms, often exposing themselves to dangerous chemicals, or they have to move away from their traditional homes to look for work.
Feeding animals instead of humans
A lot of the food grown today is grown not for direct human consumption, but for animal feed. These animals are then used to produce meat and dairy, which are expensive and only available in large amounts to rich consumers. Around 33% of the soy beans grown in Brazil and Argentina are used to feed chickens and pigs on European farms , while at the same time the amount of land in Argentina used to grow rice and maize, crops that humans eat in large amounts, has dropped by 44% and 26% respectively . Growing these soy beans for animal feed has also been a big cause of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
Meat for the rich, plants for the poor
Buthan 3kg
Bangladesh 3kg
Burundi 3.5 kg
Luxemboutrg 141 kg
New Zealand 142 kg
Denmark 146 kg
The countries with the highest amounts of meat consumption per person per year are all rich, developed nations, while poorer nations in Africa and Asia eat almost 50 times less – confirming the fact that growing crops to feed animals rather than humans is only an advantage to rich countries.
Feeding cars instead of humans
A large amount of ‘food’ grown on industrial farms is not used to feed humans or animals – it’s used to feed cars. Soy beans are increasingly being grown to produce biofuels, which are used in petrol in developed countries to try and lessen CO2 emissions from transport. The European Union is one of the biggest areas for biofuel demand, with an aim that 10% of all transport fuel will be bio by 2020. In 2007 the amount of biofuel used in the EU required 38,000km2 to grow, an area the size of the Netherlands, and all land that could have been used to grow food instead . The amount of land needed for growing plants for biofuels is only likely to grow in the future, as rich countries try to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and as oil runs out and becomes increasingly difficult or expensive to find.
11
Alternative Agriculture
S
o with a growing population set to reach 9 billion by the middle of the century, and the industrial model of farming causing environmental damage and prioritising fuel and meat over feeding the world, what should we do? On these pages we suggest a few positive ideas for improving agriculture.
Local Food
A lot of the food we eat, especially in Europe and North America, is flown into our local areas from a very long way away – bananas from Colombia, peppers from Israel, apples from South Africa. While we enjoy eating these foods from faraway places, we should do so in moderation – the further away something comes from, the more fuel is needed to transport it to us, usually by plane. This is very damaging to the environment, but luckily a wide range of food can be grown in the countries we live in, saving on emissions from transport. And eating food from local farmers helps keep money in your local area and creates green jobs on local farms.
Eating less meat As well as eating local food, eating less meat is good for the environment. As we have seen on previous pages, animals create a lot of greenhouse gas emissions through their gas, and the rainforests of South America are being chopped down to grow food for raising pigs and chickens, as well as to raise cows for beef. Many people in developed countries are now choosing to eat meat only once or twice a week, to protect the environment, and to encourage more land to be used for growing crops for humans to eat rather than pigs and cows.
Variety
Organic farms usually grow a much wider range of food, both plants and animals, than industrial farms, meaning that even if they do get affected by disease in one or two crops, they have a lot of others to fall back on .
12
Grow your own food
While growing food is a way of life for many people in rural areas, even those of us who live in towns and cities can grow a little of our own food. This can be done in gardens, on allotments, or even in pots on the windowsill – anywhere that has access to the sun’s light and energy, in fact. In the UK for instance, many people grow tomatoes, herbs, strawberries and other fruit and vegetables on their land. This may not be enough to feed everyone in the world for the whole year, and not everyone has access to the knowledge, land and seeds needed to do it, but for those who do, it can provide fresh, nutritious food, and a connection with our food and the land.
Adapting for Climate Change New varieties of crops like rice are being grown that are able to deal with the effects of climate change, making it less likely for farmers in developing countries to see their crops get wiped out by the weather. These new crops can be made tolerant to being submerged under water during floods, droughts, having too much salt or iron in the soil, or extreme cold. All of them increase the amount of crops that can be grown by overcoming climate change-related problems, and they can all be bred without the use of controversial genetic modification (GM) techniques.
Organic Agriculture
Organic farming means not using chemical fertilisers made from fossil fuels, or chemical pesticides to kill bugs, and treating animals with care and respect. It is often assumed that organic agriculture, which respects and works with nature, cannot produce as much food as industrial agriculture. In fact, research has shown that using organic fertilisers produces almost exactly the same amount of crops as chemical fertilisers .
Are these steps enough to feed 9 billion people? Some would argue that it isn’t, some that it is. Ultimately, we must remember the words of the UN World Food Programme – there is already enough food for everyone, we simply don’t distribute it fairly. The above steps will help us grow food that is good for people, good for jobs and good for the environment, but a political change is what is needed to ensure that everyone has access to this good food once we have grown it.
13
Cities and Slums
O
ne of the biggest problems is overcrowding, with too many people having to live in too little space, competing for too few jobs, and in many cases with no access to healthcare, decent housing or even clean water.
Recent decades have seen cities around the world grow to enormous sizes, especially in the developing world – it is estimated that there are 26 urban area with more than 10 million people living in them, and 18 of those are in developing nations. Many of these cities, while often attractive and rich in the centre and home to many international companies and banks, have outskirts crowded with slums, where impoverished people live in horrible conditions, with little or no access to healthcare or clean water. The UN-HABITAT agency, which deals with housing conditions around the world, describes a slum as ‘a run-down area of a city characterised by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security’, meaning that the people that live there are always at risk of being thrown out by their government . By 2030 it is estimated that up to 2 billion people could be living in slums. But these slums are not created simply because there are too many people, but because of economic pressures and inequalities. Three-quarters of the world’s hungry people live in rural areas, forcing many rural people to move to the megacities in search of employment, money and food. Rural people are also usually poorer than city-dwellers, giving them another incentive to move. When they arrive in cities, they often find that the work they are offered is very lowpaid, and short-term, forcing them into slums as the only way they can afford to shelter and feed themselves.
14
Biggest Cities In Millions of Inhabtants
1
2
3
-
-
36.7 Millions
T O K Y O 22.2 Millions
D E L H I
20.3 Millions
S P A A O U L O
In rich countries the movement of people is often in the opposite direction, with people moving out of city centres as they become wealthier and into sprawling suburbs at the outer edges of cities. Suburbs are areas that are usually devoted largely to housing above all else, and are much more spread out than inner cities. This means people have more space to live, and many people in the suburbs have large gardens, a luxury that is unavailable in crowded cities. However, suburbs are also very bad for the environment, as due to the large distances between them, and their distance from shopping and leisure areas, the people who live in them usually rely on cars to get around. Despite having many more people moving to the richer suburbs, inequality and poverty still affect cities even in the developed world. For example, in London, one of the world’s wealthiest cities, there are great differences in the levels of poverty between different parts of the city. In Tower Hamlets, in east London, 45.7% of children live in families that need government assistance because of their low incomes; while in Richmond-on-Thames in the south-west, the number is only 8.4% . Meanwhile, amongst London’s gleaming glass buildings, 5,000 people are homeless and live on the streets.
4
5
20 Millions
M U M B A I
19.5 Millions M C E X I T I Y C O
The problem, it seems, is not population – London, while being by far the biggest city in the UK, is relatively small compared to many of the mega-cities at only 7 million inhabitants – but poverty. It is poverty that creates dirty, overcrowded, unhealthy slums, and overcoming poverty will allow us to overcome these other problems. The Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator is home to perhaps the most remarkable example of a slum – because as much as 25% of the entire population of the country lives in it. Over the past two decades 700,000 have moved to the district in the north of the city, with tens of thousands more arriving each year in search of a better life for themselves and their families – Mongolia has an overall population of less than 2.8 million. Many of these people live in gers, the traditional felt tents used in the Mongolian countryside, and in the coldest capital city in the world, where temperatures drop as low as minus 27C in January, they have to spend up to 40% of their income on fuel for heating.
15
Getting rid of Slums
F
ar from disappearing as the world has become more and more developed, there are just as many slum-dwellers today as there were decades ago – and with the continuing growth of the world’s biggest cities, more and more people are going to be living in slums in the coming decades. What can we do about this?
There are a number of reasons why governments should make every effort to improve the lives of slum-dwellers. At the most basic level, it is simply the right thing to do to remove the suffering faced by people living in shacks, with no access to healthcare or running water. But it is also good for public health, as slums have high levels of infectious diseases like cholera; it is good for peace and social stability to increase equality within cities; and it is good for the government’s budget – as people in slums begin to get jobs and achieve sustainable livelihoods, they require less assistance from the government and can begin to pay tax on their income. So improving the lives of those who live in slums is good for everyone – the slum-dwellers themselves, the rest of the population, and the government. But how can we best deal with slums? Below we look at four options that governments have taken to solve this problem – some good and some bad.
Neglect them
The first option is to simply pretend slums don’t exist. Governments can do this because in many cases slums officially don’t exist – they are illegally squatted, the people who live on them have no contracts to rent the land, and often slum communities are not even included in official maps. Governments have often done nothing to improve conditions in slums, instead building public housing projects for the slum-dwellers to live in. But public housing is expensive to build, and these projects are often abandoned without being finished, and the houses that are built are usually given to government employees like teachers and police, while the slums continue to decay.
Security of Tenure
Most people living in slums have what is known as ‘insecure tenure’ – this means they have no contract stating they own or are renting the land they live on, and they can be kicked out without warning or reason. Security of tenure is one of the most important things to improve the lives of slum-dwellers – it would mean they could only be evicted with a good reason and with plenty of warning, and would make their lives more secure and stable. With this extra security, they are more likely to invest in improvement to their homes and communities, and will find it easier to get jobs and build sustainable livelihoods to look after themselves and their families.
16
Evict them
The second option is to evict the slums – to kick the people out. The justification for this may be that the slums are illegal, that the city centre is being redeveloped, that new infrastructure like a road or railway track needs to be built through the slum area, or that the slum is a threat to public health. When governments decide to do this, negotiation with the slum-dwellers is rare, and the evictions are often violent. The problem with this approach, apart from the inhumanity of destroying thousands of people’s homes, is that the slum simply reforms on the edge of the city. As the city grows, the slum is surrounded by richer areas again, and the government has to evict it again, and so on.
Help them
A better option is for governments to accept that slums and the people who live in them have rights and needs, and to improve living conditions in the slum. This includes providing basic services like waste removal, clean water, and access to health care and transport; providing security of tenure to slum-dwellers; and giving them access to small loans to help start small businesses (this is called microfinance, and was dealt with in the second book in this series, Economics and Sustainable Human Development). This is much cheaper than building new homes, and has had some successes in the past – in Kolkata, in India, this approach helped to halve waterborne diseases like Cholera and Typhoid during the 1970s, by improving sanitation facilities and providing clean water. However, after the initial high-profile improvements, often funded by organisations from developing countries, the slums are often ignored again. Maintenance is not done, initial changes are not followed up on, and soon conditions deteriorate back to their original level.
Involve them
The best option we have today is known as ‘participatory slum improvement’ – in this model, governments actively involve the slum communities in improving the slum, rather than trying to simply hand out improvements. Slum-dwellers can help decide what changes are needed in their own areas, and can even be trained and employed by the government to carry out these improvements – such as building wells or sewers. If people take part in improving their own lives, communities and local areas, and are given security of tenure, they will feel like they have an investment in the future of the slum – they will be more willing to improve things further, and to ensure that the existing changes are maintained.
17
Liveable Cities
I
t’s not just the slum areas of developing world cities that need improvements though – most cities around the world are crowded, polluted, and built to favour cars rather than people. On these pages we look at some ideas for making our cities nicer places to live for everyone.
Public Transport Public transport includes buses, trains and other types of transport that can be used by lots of people at once, and in many developed countries it has been severely overlooked in recent years, in favour of increasing numbers of polluting cars. Public transport needs to be made affordable, cleaned up, and on time – not just to convince people to get out of their cars, but to make journeys more pleasant for those who already use buses and trains. Another element of our transport systems that needs to be improved is making space for cyclists. Cycling is a healthy, energy efficient and fun means of transport, but it’s something that many of us stop doing after our childhood, often due to the dangers of cycling on roads. However, some cities, like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, have achieved high levels of cycling by introducing large amounts of cycle lanes, special traffic lights to avoid cyclists having to stop and start as often as cars, and lots of bicycle parking spaces. This helps 36% of the population of Copenhagen to get to work, school, or university by bike . Getting more people cycling is obviously easier in compact (and flat) cities, but all cities can introduce more cycle lanes on main routes to help people make a healthy, green transport choice.
Public Spaces
Cities can also become more friendly places to live by increasing the amount of public spaces they have. Public spaces include parks and other green areas, which provide leisure activities for people and trees to soak up carbon dioxide; public buildings like libraries, which provide free meeting places for local people, as well as information and studying opportunities; and pedestrianised areas – spaces in which cars are not allowed to go, and people can walk freely without fear of being run down.
18
Mixed use developments
Improving public transport and cycling is not enough by itself – the design of our cities also needs to be made more friendly to a smaller scale of life. Developed world cities are increasingly being split into a number of single-use zones – this means each are is used for one thing exclusively, such as shopping, offices, or homes. This means people often have to use cars to access their workplaces, or to buy groceries. Mixed-use areas, which combine shopping, housing and workplaces, are more sustainable, as people can work and shop near to their homes, allowing them to walk, cycle, or take short public transport journeys between them.
The city of Bogota Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of the Colombian city of Bogota between 1998 and 2001, put many of these ideas into practice, attempting to create a more sustainable and more equal city. He introduced a rapid new bus system that works as fast as a subway system, but at only a fraction of the cost. He opened many new parks and built kilometres of bicycle-only roads. He even introduced a scheme that forced people to leave their cars at home two days a week, to reduce traffic congestion. The scheme has also had long-lasting effects – the Transmilenio bus system has been visited by city planners from 70 countries around the world to see what lessons can be taken from it, thousands of drug addicts were rehabilitated and employed by the city, and 23 new schools and 14 new libraries were built in the poorest areas with the money saved from road-building programmes. this new way of developing Bogota sent out an important symbolic message that it was more important to spend money on public services for the majority of people who lived in slums than to spend it on more roads for rich car-owners. He claims ‘anything that you do in order to increase pedestrian space constructs equality. It’s a powerful symbol, showing that citizens who walk are equally important to those who have a car.’ Enrique Peñalosa
by Kleper PicturePicture by Kleper
Picture by Tijs Zwinkels
Picture by Andreas Rueda
19
Case Study : Paris Tends to be “Greener”. Vanessa Champagne is a Structural Draughtswoman working for the city of Paris. She explains to us how huge and populated cities like Paris are trying to improve their liveability and keep their environmental impact low at the same time. First, “Sorting your waste”
. Separating waste materials for collection. . Awareness campaigns with distribution of pedagogic kits in primary schools. . For older ones an iPhone app to teach users how to sort their trash better. . Creation of a Public service on Eco-behaviour in order to answer the customers’ questions.
Little note from a Parisian: Despite all this, people are really rubbish. City cleanliness :
Public space is a living space, but to avoid the city from becoming a Gigantic Garbage disposal, the city offers : . 400 free public toilets. . More than 30 000 rubbish bins in the streets. . A huge team of bin men cleaning the streets and collecting trash 24/7. . A Graffiti cleaning team. . A free service for the removal of bulky objects. keeping a healthy city is respecting the nature, animals and also acting like a citizen towards everyone. Paris has decided to punish polluters. From now on you have 450 officers who are devoted to chasing this polluters.
Little note from a Parisian: Paris stills smells like pee in parts, but we are finding less dog mess on the pavement. Despite all of the rubbish bins, people are still throwing their waste on the ground. And with a lack of public ashtrays, cigarette butts are all over the floor. I think the city still has to work more on it to guarantee a healthy environment. The public transport system is very diverse and effective:
. Enlargement of the metro network. . Tramway, RER and Transilien (which are suburban metro lanes). . A huge diversity of bus lines and night buses. . The vélib (rent a bicycle stations are all across the city) and there are more and more cycling lanes opening up inside the city.
20
Little note from a Parisian: 1 metro every 4 min and one suburban train every 20min is very appreciable. Even if the price of a single ticket is quite expensive.
Keeping electricity consumption down :
. Reconditioning of old schools and council flats which are energy guzzlers. . 225 000 m2 of solar panel installed on rooftops and even more on council buildings. . Rolling out a system for creating energy from Waste Water. . Reducing public lighting in buildings during the night by 30%. . Free instruction to Parisians on how to reduce their energy consumption.
Development of Sustainable Eco-friendly Constructions :
. You can see the creation of Eco-Districts with ecological housing . Shared-gardens (a piece of land inside the city to garden with your neighbours) . Encouragement to use tap-water because 1 litre of tap water generates 2500 times less greenhouse gases than a plastic bottle of mineral water. The introduction of “sutainable management” label on the city’s public parks. And a “Zero pesticides” policy ! . 7% of organic food in every canteen. . Priority is given to vegetation on public parks walls and rooftop ( green rooftops), to help reduce air pollution and temporary fixes the carbon level. . Improvement of the Seine’s channels in a eco-friendly way to permit a better environment for aquatic species. . Installation of Beehives on Paris rooftops, to re-integrate bees inside the city. Apparently urban bees can produce a better quality honey than their countryside cousins because of the floral diversity and the lack of pesticides in an urban environment. For example, one brand of hotels put bee hives on the roof of their buildings and voila – their guests can enjoy homemade honey.
Little note from a Parisian:
I visited a communal garden in the centre of Paris, thoses places are “blooming” all over the city. It feels like a place for friendly meetings between gardeners and nature lovers, elders, children, onlookers, curious people… everyone has his own little piece of warmth and friendliness. Also, a rooftop garden has been created on the roof of Vignolles gymnasium. Which makes a 800 m2 garden! Garden, Parks and open spaces are becoming more popular and there are loads of new devices to entertain kids. Good bye TV and Video games! Green is beautiful – more and more attention is given to green balconies, streets, rooftops etc… Guess what??? Insects are coming back ! So this is a hopeful sign that Paris is getting better in terms of chemical pollution even if the air quality has still got a way to go.
21
Environment
T
he growth in population has also been blamed for some of the environmental problems we are facing, such as climate change. It seems like common sense to say that more people means more resource use, more fossil fuels being burned, and more emissions being released. But how much of these things are down to fast-growing developing countries, and how much to slower-growth developed ones?
It is undoubtedly true that our consumption of all resources, from minerals, to fuels, to food, is growing rapidly, and that this is unsustainable. It is also true that countries with large populations play a large role in this – after many years of the USA being on top, China is now the world’s largest overall source of emissions. However, the figures for overall emissions disguise some important facts we need to consider when talking about this.
One Luxembourger
22
22.6 tonnes of C02
forty five Senegalese
Senegal 0.5
India 1.4 tonnes
China 5 tonnes
Canada 16.9 tonnes
Co2 Emissions per person per year Australia 19.3 tonnes
Luxembourg 22.6 tonnes
Firstly, countries in the developing world usually have bigger and faster-growing populations than those in the developed world, but emit as much or less greenhouse gases than the developed nations. This means that per person they actually pollute much less. Each Chinese citizen, for example, releases an average of 5 tonnes of CO2 per year, while a citizen from the tiny European nation of Luxembourg releases an average of 22.6 tonnes per year – more than four times as much. Because Luxembourg is so small it has little effect on global CO2 emissions, but if everyone on earth wanted to live like the Luxembourgers we would soon be facing complete destruction.
22.6 tonnes of C02
Even these figures are misleading, however, as they don’t count ‘outsourced emissions’. Outsourced emissions are emissions that are released in a developing country, but in the process of manufacturing something that will be consumed in a developed country. For example, when electrical products are produced in a factory in China or Mexico, the emissions are counted as belonging to China and Mexico. But the expensive products are bought by rich consumers mostly in the developed world, who can claim to be improving their environmental record because they don’t need to count the emissions from making these goods. Around one third of all Chinese emissions come from products produced for other countries , and another study suggests that if imported goods like these were counted, rich countries would have increased their emissions by 7% in recent years, rather than reducing them as they claim. The same can be said for emissions from deforestation in countries like Brazil – the area of the Amazon rainforest which has been cut down was 587,000km2 by 2000, an area six times the size of Portugal. However, 70% of that land is used to raise cattle for beef, much of which is exported to rich countries, and soy bean production for biofuels, used in cars in North America and Europe, is also increasing. As with outsourced emissions from manufacturing, at least half of these emissions should be considered as coming from the countries that consume the meat and biofuels, rather than all the responsibility being on the developing world.
Finally, the emissions figures don’t count air travel – an activity which uses a huge amount of fossil fuels, but is almost entirely undertaken by people in developed nations, and rich people in developing ones. The poor people who are blamed for environmental problem because of their large family sizes are not to blame for this. While it is true that all humans have some impact on the environment, the real problem facing us is not having too many people in the developing world each consuming a little, but having too many people in the developed world who consume a lot. If everyone aspires to live like citizens of rich countries, we will soon face environmental catastrophe, so it is important that those nations set an example by showing that it is possible to live good lives with much less consumption and resource use, rather than trying to blame climate change on the same developing nations that have done the least to cause it and will be most affected by it.
23
Lowering Population
W
e have seen throughout this booklet that the increasing population of poor people is not solely to blame for food crises, crowded cities, or climate change – these problems are all caused by inequality, and by the much greater consumption of a relatively small number of wealthy people in developed countries. However, reducing the population is still a sensible goal – it is only a problem when the reproduction of the poor is given the blame for problems they didn’t cause. A reduced population, as long as it is achieved through free choice and in an fair and equal manner, can reduce pressures on food and social problems, as well as the environment. Smaller families are also usually a sign of prosperity and higher development – so improving levels of human development will most likely lead to a reduction in the population, which is good, as more developed countries usually consume more resources.
Development and Child Birth
As human development scores increase, the number of children each family has tends to reduce. COUNTRY/ HDI SCORE/ AVERAGE children per Woman
Niger / 0.261 /
7.6
children per Woman
Afghanistan/ 0.349/
5.4
children per Woman
Hong-Kong/0.862/
1
child per Woman
24
Ways of Lowering the Population The different ways of encouraging people to have fewer children could be broadly split into two categories – the coercive and the participatory. Coercive ways are ways in which people are forced to reduce the population by having less children. The best example of this can be found in China, where there is a government policy that families are only allowed to have one child each. While this has been very successful in slowing down China’s population growth – from 5.6 children per woman in 1979, to 1.5 today – it has also caused problems. Because of a cultural preference for boys over girls, there have been many reports of people killing or aborting female babies so they can have another child and hope for a boy. The one-child policy has also emphasised inequality, as the punishment for having more children is a large fine. This is impossible to pay for most poor people in slums or rural areas, but richer people who can afford it can have more children without fear.
Coercive
Some examples of birth control posters in China.
Picture by Kattebelleetje
“One child per couple, birth control stuff will be supplied free of charge” Around the child bottles with birth control pills and packets of condoms.
Picture by IISG
25
Forcing people to have less children is also not very democratic – people should have the freedom of choice to have as many children as they like, but they should be encouraged to have fewer. This is where the participatory approach comes in.
Participative
The participatory approach, where people are educated to be able to make their own decisions regarding reproduction, has been used in Iran with just as much success as the Chinese one-child policy – with the number of children per women falling from 6.6 in 1970 to 1.9 today. This was achieved by classes on family planning, and free contraceptives, like condoms, handed out around the country.
Another effective policy in Iran was to increase the education and literacy of women, especially in rural areas, where the birth rate was highest. From 1976 to 2006, the percentage of young rural women who could read and write increased from 10% to 91%. When women are educated and therefore have access to more information about things like contraceptives, they are much more likely to have small families and to make their own choices about when to have those children.
Another way to reduce the population through choice, rather than through force, is to improve health and reduce the number of children that die in the first few years after birth. This sounds odd, as you would expect reducing the number of deaths to increase the overall population. picture by foxtongue
26
picture by Beautiful Ethiopia
But a lot of families in the developing world have lots of children because of the fear that some of them may die before reaching adulthood – this is an especially big fear in rural areas, where children may be needed to help on the farm as parents get older.
The Earth is our common living space.
We need to share its limited natural resources.
The more people there are, the more we need and the more we want.
Over the last two centuries our population has rapidly grown. It is now at 7 billion, and our consumption has grown with it. Everyone needs a piece of those resources. We have to make sure we don’t use up all of the Earth’s treasures.
27
Consumption and Population
T
hroughout this section we have made it clear that many of the problems we face are not due to population, but down to consumption, which is much higher in richer countries. The problem is that as poor countries increase in human development, they also usually increase in wealth, and their citizens might then begin to consume as much as people in Europe or North America. If this happens, our environmental, social and food problems may get worse rather than better, even with a lower population.
To avoid this, the developed world needs to help the developing countries avoid the high-energy, high-consumption stage that they have all gone through, and encourage them to be environmentally friendly from the beginning of their development. This means sharing the latest green technology with them, not through schemes like the Clean Development Mechanism (which we covered in our previous section, Environment and Sustainable Human Development) which are designed mainly for profit, but in ways which help local communities to produce their own energy sustainably and cheaply. The developed world also needs to set a good example to developing countries by reducing its own consumption. This means reducing food waste (people in the US throw away 34 million tonnes of food every year, enough to feed the whole of New York City five times over – and they’re not the only rich country with this problem), increasing recycling, and putting ‘green taxes’ on environmentally damaging items like cars and plane flights (with some of the money raised being spent on improving public transport like buses and trains to help people get around in greener ways).
Influencing and changing the behaviour of consumers in rich countries with slow population growth will, ultimately, have a much bigger impact on our environment, our cities and our ability to feed ourselves than lecturing poor countries and telling their citizens to have fewer children.
28
Youth Action on Food and Cities
O
ur food system may be facing a crisis, and there may be an increasing number of dirty and dangerous slums around the world, but it doesn’t have to be this way - here are some examples of young people who are cleaning the system up and making a safe future for us all...
Rikab for Development To help raise awareness of the UN conference on Sustainable Development and the work of Road to Rio+20, the Moroccan organization Rikab for Development organized a workshop in October 2011 in a high school in Rabat, the Moroccan capital. The workshop consisted of doing a clear up and planting vegetables in a slum area where the school was located. With the impressive work of the youth who live there and the students of Omar Al Khayam high school, they gathered to make their environment greener and cleaner. The objective of the workshop was to make the community where they live aware about the importance of a clean environment no matter where and in what difficulties they live in. The other objective was for the youth to show to the other wealthy districts and communities that with basic means and hand in hand we can make our environment a better one.
29
Foundation for Democratic Initiative and Development The sanitation condition of Freetown, Sierra Leone, is very poor. Heaps of garbage and filth have taken over the city. Cockroaches and rats can be seen on the streets of Freetown playing games, while dogs and vultures sit on top of the huge garbage deposits as if they are in charge of affairs. Mosquitos are now in charge of the city, infecting it with malaria. Due to the alarming garbage deposits across the city, there is also an increase in typhoid among the world’s most vulnerable citizens – the children. As a control measure, Foundation for Democratic Initiative and Development, a youth organisation in Sierra Leone, has seen the urgent need to engage the youth in various communities within the city to clean their environment. This cleaning has helped to keep some parts of the city clean, safe and healthy. It also engages youth who are massively unemployed across the city. Keeping the youth engaged further keeps the city free from petty crimes, gang violence and drug-related offences.
 
30
Glossary Biofuels – fuels that act in the same way as petrol, but are made from the oil of plants. Some see them as a great replacement for fossil fuels, others say that making fuel from plants takes food away from humans. Food speculation – this is a complicated process where banks trade food contracts with each other for profit, meaning that when the food reaches the market the price has risen, and the poorest people cannot afford to but it. For a more detailed explanation see page 9. Hunger – the official definition of a hungry person is someone who consumes less than 2,100 calories a day – around 925 million people on earth fit this definition. Industrial agriculture –a type of farming that uses chemical fertilisers and pesticides, monocultures (see below), and very large farms. It has produced large amounts of food in the past, but at a very high environmental and human cost. Life expectancy – the average number of years a person in any country lives. This is much lower in developing countries than developed ones. Monocultures – A massive area of land in which only one crop is grown. These monocultures are particularly at risk from the spread of disease. Traditionally, farmers would grow a wide range of crops on their land. Organic agriculture – a type of farming that uses natural fertilisers (made from animal manure or plants) and grows a much more diverse range of crops on smaller farms that employ more workers. Contrary to popular opinion, if done well, organic agriculture can produce roughly as much food as industrial agriculture. Outsourced emissions – emissions that are created in one country while manufacturing products that will be exported to another country – i.e. sportswear that is made in the Philippines, but sold in Australia. Currently, the manufacturing company is entirely responsible for the emissions, which many say is unfair. Population growth – the amount of births minus the amount of deaths in any one country. If there are lots more births than deaths, the population is growing, like in many parts of Africa and the Middle East, where people have large families; if the number of births and deaths are roughly equal, population is stable; if there are more deaths than births, the population is falling. Security of tenure – most people who live in slums are at risk of being kicked out of their homes at any time because they do not legally own the land. Security of tenure would mean they would have a legal status and would have to be given warning and a reason before being evicted. This would give them a much more stable life. Slums – run-down areas of a city, inhabited by the poorest people, and often considered illegal by governments. They often have little access to medical attention, clean water or transport. Suburbs – the suburbs are the area of a city that surrounds the centre. Suburbs are usually very spread out, designed for cars to travel around, and have shops and leisure activities located in out-of-town shopping centres, a long way from people’s houses.
31
Artwork by Eric Benson
32
Be a Green Patriot - www.greenpatriotposters.org