We have to stop generating more of ourselves. We use more of some resources than the Earth and Sun generate. We use more fossil fuels than life on Earth can sustain. We are working on getting to Peak Humanity, and then backing down some, but not yet quickly enough. And we still have to work on renewables, carbon capture in soils and otherwise, conservation, efficiency, design for recycling, and all the rest that we all know about.
tl;dr
The global average fertility rate was 5 children per woman until the end of the 1960s and has halved since then, to a bit below 2.5. We need to reduce it by 0.5 births per fertile woman in order to peak below 9 billion people by 2050. We know how:
- Renewable energy even in the poorest and most remote villages
- Cell phones and broadband Internet for all
- Education, especially for girls, enabled by the above
- Availability of family planning services and birth control, likewise
- Economic growth, rule of law, and human rights in the poorest countries
(Birth rates in developed countries and many others are well below replacement, and still declining.) That's a decline of a bit over 2.5 in about 60 years, so at that rate it would take 12 years to reach global replacement. It will of course be slower. We got from 3.0 to 2.5 in 20 years.
So we don't have to throw up our hands in despair. We can discuss means, funding, and political will.
Models and Projections
As we know
Prediction is very difficult, especially concerning the future.
Yogi Berra
Malthus started this discussion, with a model of exponential growth of the human population and arithmetic growth of food resources, resulting in inevitable famine. But famine wasn't inevitable, and mainly resulted from drought, plant diseases, and war, not overpopulation.
Projections of population growth
Future Population Growth
Now we have more sophisticated models that are commonly just as wrong. The UN as good as admits that these are guesses, or rather that the parameters used are guesses.
These are then goals, not predictions. We get to set the critical parameters.
The minority of US Christianists and White Supremacists and nativists and such who variously want to
- call birth control "abortion" and ban both totally
- teach "abstinence-only" sex education worldwide
- keep poor countries poor
- not allow in refugees, and create vastly more of them
are aiming at the complete disaster. The rest of us can join in some of the programs in family planning, education for girls, and sustainable economic growth pointed to below, and the myriad NGOs and profitable businesses taking part in solutions.
Our models now work with modified exponential population growth, with falling fertility rates, but have had to turn from consumption to pollution as our limiting factor, specifically Greenhouse Gas (GHG) pollution and Global Warming. On the other side is birth control and in some places dread diseases like AIDS, which has replaced smallpox and polio as a major killer, along with persistent malaria and TB.
I spent 17 years in high-tech global market research. I learned early on how to predict technology trends. We could look at current product sales, at products being brought to market, at concept designs, and at technologies still in the lab, all with reasonably well-known times to market if they turned out to work. Of course, with that knowledge we joked
Anything you can actually buy is obsolete.
But what we could not predict was what people would want to do with new technologies. There were multitudes of gee-whiz technologies generating buzz at the trade shows and other events. People would crowd around them and watch as they went through their paces. But the real question was not the excitement at seeing something new and sometimes strange or hypnotic. It was not what got TV coverage in reporting the shows. It was whether people would put up real money for whatever it was. Sometimes people buy into fads like fidget spinners, and sometimes people want nothing to do with a product, like a talking refrigerator. Before you've had your morning coffee.
It is even harder to predict pure people trends, apart from technology. Like the evolution of political opinion, or religion, or most of all personal relations like sex, marriage, family, and especially children. And so anybody who claims to know the future of the world's population for sure is deluded or running a con.
Technology runs in accordance with scientific knowledge, where there are generally reliable rules, except when someone like Einstein is inventing new physics, or someone like Tesla is inventing things that others thought impossible. People don't run that way.
Ordinary population biology for plants and animals largely runs according to predictable rules, because they don't decide to change their fertility for social and political reasons. People are weird like that.
We have technical means for turning fertility up, as with in vitro fertilization, or down, as with birth control. We can advance or delay sex, marriage, and childbirth for a multitude of reasons. We can extend our lifespans or cut them short.
So the problem is how quickly we can get the women of Niger, for example (7 children per woman), to adopt birth control, which is generally not available to them now. Or these other countries, making up the 93 that are above replacement fertility.
Fertility Rate By Country 2019
Each has different problems, so there will be no one-size-fits-all solutions. I cannot possibly list the interventions going on in each of these countries, but I can give you some starting points. The countries with the greatest needs are almost all in Africa, so I will concentrate there.
Communications
It has not been very long since Africa got its first fiber optic cables, first along both coasts, then to every country inland. Now there are vast revolutions going on in mobile phones and Internet almost everywhere.
The internet is changing Africa, mostly for the better
Cheap smartphones are flooding Africa, giving many of its citizens access to the internet for the very first time.
These are profitable businesses that enable education, multitudes of other businesses, health care, and political engagement. Anyone can invest in them through various international funds.
Education
UNESCO: Education in Africa
The world is really falling down here. This may be our point of maximum leverage for some time to come.
Of all regions, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of education exclusion. Over one-fifth of children between the ages of about 6 and 11 are out of school, followed by one-third of youth between the ages of about 12 and 14. According to UIS data, almost 60% of youth between the ages of about 15 and 17 are not in school.
Without urgent action, the situation will likely get worse as the region faces a rising demand for education due to a still-growing school-age population.
That's incredibly bad news. But not so long ago those numbers would have been fantastically, unimaginably good news. We will get there.
Disclosure: I was a volunteer program manager with Sugar Labs, the software and textbook partner of One Laptop Per Child. I look forward to having done with Trumpism and Global Warming Denialism, and getting back to teaching children how to take over the world and tackle the hard problems.
There are numerous other programs to produce digital learning materials free of copyright restrictions. Creative Commons is a leader in this area, but there are also Wikibooks, the California Free Digital Textbook Initiative, and many others. Bangladesh was the first country to produce a complete set of free textbooks. The textbook publishers are fighting this movement. Ah, well, more Fridays.
Family Planning
Progress in family planning in Africa accelerating
A new study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that women in eight sub-Saharan African countries are gaining access to and using modern contraception at a faster rate than previously projected. This rate is well ahead of benchmark goals designed to give access to family planning services to an additional 120 million women in 69 of the world's poorest countries by 2020.
The researchers found improved average annual growth rates of change in the modern contraceptive prevalence rate, an important metric that measures contraception use by women. For all women in the study, the average annual rate of change was 1.92 percent, with the average rate of change for married women even higher at 2.25 percent. Both numbers exceed the 1.4 percent benchmark set at the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning. This 1.4 percent benchmark is considered ambitious because it is substantially higher than the historical rate of annual increase.
The findings, along with continued monitoring of these trends and their causes, will help inform thinking and provide guidance beyond 2020 as the global family planning community makes a push to achieve universal access to reproductive health by 2030.
Now you're talking.
Economic Growth
Growth→Tax revenue→expanded government services, including health, family planning, education, infrastructure, and a lot more. Eventually, it means that the population can take on corruption and human rights effectively.
Unpacking Africa’s 2019 GDP Growth Prospects
The World Bank released its annual Global Economic Prospects [PDF] report for sub-Saharan Africa earlier this month, forecasting a GDP growth rate of 3.4 percent in sub-Saharan Africa for 2019. This is up from 2018 and represents a modest recovery from a downturn that began in 2015.
In 2010, McKinsey released Lions on the Move, a report predicting the region would generate as much as $2.6 trillion in revenue by 2020. Around the same time, investment in emerging markets was trending, largely due to the fact that investors could find returns nearly three times greater than those to be had in Western economies.
Investment! Profitable investment beats charity every time.
But don't believe the hype from fund managers. You have to know what you are getting into.
Homework
Yes.
Friday, Aug 9, 2019 · 5:22:05 PM +00:00
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Mokurai
Sorry, I thought I put this in.
Liftoff: The Blossoming of Contraceptive Implant Use in Africa
As recently as 2011, implant CPR in sub-Saharan Africa was only 1.1%. Since then, sizeable price reductions, much-increased commodity supply, greater government commitment to rights-based family planning, broader WHO eligibility guidance, and wider adoption of high-impact service delivery practices have resulted in expanded client access and marked increases in implant prevalence and share of the method mix. Ten of the 12 countries now have an implant CPR around 6% or higher, with 3 countries above 11%. Increased implant use has been the main driver of the increased mCPR attained by 11 countries, with gains in implant use alone exceeding combined gains in use of injectables, pills, and intrauterine devices.
This is key, because it does not depend on daily compliance, regular and continuing availability, or permission from or action by men. It isn't yet enough, of course, but it is moving in the right direction, and can be expected to accelerate.