Can anyone name any instances where long-term displacement of people has not involved an underlying stress of overpopulation?
Is it reasonable to imagine that people displaced from a conflict or famine resulting from overpopulation can ever go home without recreating the crisis? Their numbers would be replaced within a few years.Migration literature, particularly under the “new economics of labour migration” (NELM) theory, tends to ignore population growth as a driver of migration. Analyses typically present the decision of a household to send migrants as one of income diversification and self-insurance. For example, Taylor (2002) https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2435.00066 sees rural-urban migration as a phenomenon driven by GDP growth and its implicit link with economic diversification, and suggests that constraints on local production and livelihoods are due to “market failures” such as inadequate market access, finance and insurance systems. The presumption is that, without climate change or other exogenous factors undermining livelihoods, the economic situation would be stable or gradually improving due to development, and migration offers a means to enhance development. But nothing is stable where populations are growing. The climate migration literature does not discuss the common reality that the alternative to out-migration from rural areas is an ever-dwindling allocation of natural resources per household (arable land, water, or access to common forest, pasture or fishing resources), and the inevitable degradation of those resources due to overuse. Equally absent is any recognition that such subdivisions and degradations over the past two generations have contributed to the impoverishment of households, and their vulnerability to adverse weather events and their proclivity to use violence to defend their resources or to capture someone else’s.Have demographers got nothing to contribute to an understanding of population pressure?Jane O'Sullivan
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(a) Book https://global.oup.com/academic/product/disaster-by-choice-9780198841340
(b) Paper https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pdisas.2019.100008
(c) Commentary https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/disaster-choice/202005/does-nature-play-disaster-games
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too much land clearing reduces rainfall, is as yet the more important cause of rainfall deficits in tropical Africa than is climate change.
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Thomas Dietz
-University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, Sociology and Animal Studies
Member: Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, Center for Global Change and Earth Observation, Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments Center
Michigan State University
-Gund Affiliate, Gund Institute for the Environment, University of Vermont
Michigan State University occupies
the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the
Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa,
and Potawatomi peoples. The University resides on Land ceded in the
1819 Treaty of Saginaw.
(a) https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/866
(b) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-016-2294-0
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Dear Richard, Jane and others,
I have found parts of this discussion of sufficient interest to chime in.
Firstly, Richard, thank you for being an enthusiastic supporter "of giving power to people to control their own fertility" and also for recognizing "the need to reduce fertility for the purpose of development and climate change mitigation", there is no argument with me there.
However, I was dismayed by your characterisation of carrying capacity as of “land”. Land is but one aspect of natural capital (as you clearly know). It is now almost 19 years since Tony McMichael and I wrote a paper for an IUSSP meeting in Rostock (https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/workshops/020619_paper25.pdf), in which we proposed Human Carrying Capacity (HCC) is better conceptualised as the interaction of 5 capitals (natural, built, human, social and financial). I’m not claiming that as a profound insight, even at the time, the ideas seemed pretty obvious to me years earlier, I recall being dismayed that Joel Cohen’s book ignored the issue of conflict, an aspect of social capital,
However, in the years since, I have repeatedly experienced a failure to be understood on this, both by physical scientists (as you describe yourself) and also by many social scientists. Partly for that reason I very rarely contribute to PERN seminars, although I do keep writing about HCC.
Thus, I agree that HCC cannot be considered without consideration of the global economy. Places with high and generally affluent population densities (Israel, Hong Kong, Netherlands etc) are easily explained using the 5 capitals approach because they have sufficient total capital, not necessarily only natural. Indeed, places with high natural capital, alone, often have low HCC (resource trap).
(BTW, as far as I know, Venezuelan physical resources are far from abundant, as oil sands have a low energy return on energy investment.)
**
However, I am sympathetic to your point that the US Right Wing will not be sympathetic to any argument stating that emigration from pockets of what I call “regional overload” is driven in part by a higher fertility than their regional HCC allows.
But in my opinion they are not likely to be sympathetic in any case.
I have also long argued that neoliberalism has played an important role in suppressing the pop’n debate, particularly since the 1980s in the run up to the Mexico City meeting. I also argue that the other half of the coin of laissez faire pop’n growth is strict border control; variants of Hardin’s "lifeboat economics”. So (though unspoken), even if high pop’n growth with free markets in low income settings leads to problems (ie the magic formula of marketism fails to generate promised prosperity for poor people with high fertility) the global North would still win - with cheap labour in the South, in-migration (skilled and less skilled) at a manageable trickle to the North, and fence the rest out if necessary. The theory, of course, breaks down once actors in the South have access to rockets, terrorist martyrs and cyber-crime .. still it’s partly manageable.
__
Now I will say something which is an appeal for a new alliance, but risks misinterpretation. One of my mentors, Maurice King, often talked in favour of benign uproar (debate) as opposed to malignant uproar (Gaza, Guatemala, Venezuela etc). So apologies if this next sentence leads to benign uproar.
My sense is that we should be on the same side (and so should feminist authors such as the authors of 'Malthus’s specter and the Anthropocene', Gender, Place & Culture. A Journal of Feminist Geography: doi: 10.1080/0966369X.2018.1553858. Diana Ojeda, Jade S. Sasser, and Elizabeth Lunstrum). But we are very divided. That is a great shame to me. Is it just academic turf-protecting? Is it more than that?
I agree with Jane about the ethics of self-censorship. I have at times self-censored, either to protect my livelihood, my emotions or to avoid work. But, when it comes to the issues which we discuss, which concern the lives of billions, don’t we have a duty of care to be as truthful as possible? We have already wasted decades in in-fighting; I think to be silent on this is to play right into the hands of those who ignore limits to growth, and who rationalise the suffering of other people and of nature (including the future) as somehow justifiable.
Best wishes
Colin
Colin Butler PhD, MSc, BMed, DTM&H
Honorary Professor, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, Australia
Member of Scientific Advisory Committee: Doctors for the Environment, Australia
https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/butler-cdd
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http://health-earth.weebly.com
colin....@anu.edu.au
From: Jane O'Sullivan <j.osu...@uq.edu.au>
Date: Wednesday, 19 May 2021 at 10:13 pm
To: Richard Seager <sea...@ldeo.columbia.edu>
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1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2698596
2. https://doi.org/10.1111/etap.12016
3. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329296024001005
4. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654314532696
5. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12085
6. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X99000215
7. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyh179
8. https://doi.org/10.2190/6U6R-LTVN-FHU6-KCNU
9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.04.012
10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0199-1
11. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.00194
12. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-7506-7222-1.50008-8
13. https://anthempress.com/depoliticizing-development-pb
14. https://doi.org/10.1525/sod.2015.1.1.123
Not peer-reviewed literature, but useful debate at http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc203.pdf
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Dear Jane,
Thank you for your notes and for the continuing discussion. In response to all your questions, noting that you did not answer some of mine (e.g. "Why would it be valuable to claim that they are 'exceptions that prove the rule' without providing any evidence for this statement?"):
A. "What proportion of currently internally displaced people, refugees and asylum seekers do not have population growth as a factor contributing to the circumstances from which they fled?"
Quantification at this level might perhaps not be the most useful question to ask, because population growth, population numbers, and population densities are important to examine and consider in 100% of instances. The analysis methods will vary according to need and situation. This specific question could be interesting and have usefulness for pure research if people wish to pursue it, yet care would be needed in interpreting the quantitative results for policy and practice without sensitivity analyses while indicating possible sources of aleatory and epistemic uncertainties, both in order to indicate the impacts of assumptions made.
B. "Is it reasonable to imagine that people displaced from a conflict or famine resulting from overpopulation can ever go home without recreating the crisis?"
Yes, keeping in mind that the mobilities literature for decades has been clear that a single factor rarely directly causes displacement with no other influences. See, for instance, https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199652433.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199652433 and https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/116728 and I would be happy to provide many more, if these would not suffice. Statements such as "a conflict or famine resulting from overpopulation" are inadequate for describing reality, as it could be interpreted (possibly unintentionally) as presuming that overpopulation is the only causal factor in some (not all or even necessarily many) conflicts or famines. For the latter, see of course work by Amartya Sen, Stephen Devereux, and George Kent. Nonetheless, as one generic yet grounded example--within the context of the request "to imagine"--there are sad situations where population numbers in a location are severely reduced by mortality, non-returnees, or a combination. In such situations, people who return might imaginably be able to do so without recreating the crisis, because the population numbers and structures have substantially changed.
C. "is it that anthropogenic disasters are not your focus of study?"
This question shows that the past decades of disaster science remain as a needed reading list. Almost all disasters are anthropogenic, with exceptions detailed in the publications I already provided in my initial reaction to the phrase "natural disasters". I have sent numerous further sources explaining this point, some of them more than once, so perhaps it would be appropriate to please consider spending more time reading these scientific publications rather than focusing on the oft-repeated statement (or similar) of "looked briefly"? As I typically explain to students, it is remarkable how reading a piece rather than glancing through it (or just looking at its title) does indeed convey detailed information about what the author is saying. For example, the claim that "they seem to consistently avoid mentioning population growth as a contributor to the 'historical vulnerabilities'" is contradicted by the trio of illustrative examples (there are more) of (i) pages 45-57 of https://global.oup.com/academic/product/disaster-by-choice-9780198841340 (sent earlier); (ii) the paper https://jpopsus.org/full_articles/disaster-vulnerability-by-demographics which you say you read and then dismiss on the basis of erroneous assumptions about "natural events"; and (iii) point 3 on page 23 of https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-015-0038-5 which is specifically about population numbers. The material here understandably might not be specifically how you would address the topics while numerous aspects are certainly missing and they might not use the exact vocabulary you are used to. In fact, I have yet to publish anything which is comprehensive or which appeals to every single scientific discipline. These provisos are a long way from your false accusation that the topic is absent. For me, I find it constructive and productive to read people's publications rather than publicly (or even privately) misrepresenting them--without having actually read them. Where I feel their work might be inadequate, I then do my own research and publish in order to contribute to filling in gaps. Gaping holes and lack of appeal to everyone nonetheless remain in all of my work.
On the note of supposedly "natural events", might it possibly be interesting to read in detail references explaining how much of nature we influence, part of which (not all of which) relates to population numbers leading to these influences? From earthquakes https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2017.07.008 to floods https://doi.org/10.1130/0091-7613(2001)029%3C0875:FETFC%3E2.0.CO;2 to droughts https://www.nature.com/articles/267192a0 storms https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-18-0194.1 many so-called "natural" phenomena have a significant human influence. I leave as an exercise to you to find numerous examples of human activities influencing lava and tsunami parameters. Your wonderful 99% (I understood your point, but you apparently missed mine, which is why I repeat it here) seem to neglect the science of hazards, instead sticking with long-eviscerated assumptions--even when provided with counterevidence that they do not read--and thus producing incorrect conclusions which disaster science had overturned over forty years ago. Useful starting points are https://www.nature.com/articles/260566a0 and https://www.routledge.com/Interpretations-of-Calamity-From-the-Viewpoint-of-Human-Ecology/Hewitt/p/book/9780367350796 which are important to read more than briefly.
For me, I frequently find how helpful it is to look at the science of a field before commenting. Your statement "Displacements due to volcanic eruptions and tsunamis are relatively rare, usually more limited in scale and more rapidly resolved" is contradicted by past centuries of experience, extensively documented in scientific publications, using detailed examples some of which I gave previously and supplemented by evidence in https://www.elsevier.com/books/volcanic-activity-and-human-ecology/sheets/978-0-12-639120-6 and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvolgeores.2008.01.036 (which need to be read in their entirety). For a quick fix of examples, I wrote in a previous message "Niua Fo’ou in Tonga in 1946, Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic in 1961 with return in 1963, Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, Manam in Papua New Guinea on-and-off since 2004". In each of these cases, some people have not returned, the situations had cross-continental impacts, none were rapidly resolved, and the disaster was caused by society, not by the volcano. If you would commit to reading the material in detail, then I would be happy to provide references for each one to support my statements. In terms of being "relatively rare", this would need to be quantified with a cross-hazard comparison rather than making an unevidenced claim. As a starting point for volcanoes, please see http://www.islandvulnerability.org/docs/Gaudru2007.pdf demonstrating that "relatively rare" might be hard to defend, depending on specific definitions. I leave tsunamis as an exercise for you to seek (i) data and (ii) comparisons with other hazards.
Leading to finally...
D. "why you dismiss the utility of the term 'natural disaster'"
I "dismiss the utility of the term 'natural disaster'" due to the citations which I have given above and in previous messages, to which I add https://practicalactionpublishing.com/book/527/development-in-disaster-prone-places and https://www.routledge.com/At-Risk-Natural-Hazards-Peoples-Vulnerability-and-Disasters/Blaikie-Cannon-Davis-Wisner/p/book/9780415252164 and https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1596/978-0-8213-8050-5 and...how many more would you like? They all deconstruct in various ways your unevidenced assumption that "the underlying tensions of population pressure had lowered resilience to the point where these events caused cascading crises rather than transient hardship" demonstrating that it is not so simple. None rejects population-related issues. They do place these topics within wider contexts, accepting population quantities and qualities as being among the many contributing factors to "natural disaster" being a misnomer. You might disagree which is fine--but then scientific explanations and evidence would be expected, rather than blanket statements with little meaning, no scientific support, and an absence of logical argumentation.
And before you chide me for using some old citations, as you did to another respondent, I already provided much more recent material, but you already stated that you chose not to read it thoroughly. Similarly, I am sympathetic to concerns regarding the amount of reading being asked of you, but I provided summaries and those were dismissed without giving any rationale, instead just repeating the myths which the summaries specifically explained were incorrect. Hope this helps and with best wishes for accepting what decades of science across numerous disciplines has evidenced and proven,
Ilan
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From: Jane O'Sullivan <j.osu...@uq.edu.au>
Sent: May 19, 2021 12:42
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Hello to the panelists and participants,
Thank you to all for an interesting discussion. However, one area seems oddly neglected in this discussion. Do demographers have nothing to say about the role of population pressure in causing the circumstances from which people flee?
Jalal said in the webinar that demographic drivers act in concert with other drivers. This seemed to be a way of dismissing further examination of demographic drivers. Yet it would be more accurate and enlightening to say that other drivers act in concert with demographic pressure. Can any of them be properly understood without referencing the underlying effects of population growth?
Clearly there are natural disasters that are independent of demography, but normally they only displace people locally and temporarily. Even there, there is also an influence of demographic pressure placing more people in harm’s way – onto floodplains or beach fronts or steep slopes which people avoided in the past due to their hazards, but which now support dwellings because there is nowhere else to expand into.
Can anyone name any instances where long-term displacement of people has not involved an underlying stress of overpopulation?
Is it reasonable to imagine that people displaced from a conflict or famine resulting from overpopulation can ever go home without recreating the crisis? Their numbers would be replaced within a few years.
Migration literature, particularly under the “new economics of labour migration” (NELM) theory, tends to ignore population growth as a driver of migration. Analyses typically present the decision of a household to send migrants as one of income diversification and self-insurance. For example, Taylor (2002) https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2435.00066 sees rural-urban migration as a phenomenon driven by GDP growth and its implicit link with economic diversification, and suggests that constraints on local production and livelihoods are due to “market failures” such as inadequate market access, finance and insurance systems. The presumption is that, without climate change or other exogenous factors undermining livelihoods, the economic situation would be stable or gradually improving due to development, and migration offers a means to enhance development. But nothing is stable where populations are growing. The climate migration literature does not discuss the common reality that the alternative to out-migration from rural areas is an ever-dwindling allocation of natural resources per household (arable land, water, or access to common forest, pasture or fishing resources), and the inevitable degradation of those resources due to overuse. Equally absent is any recognition that such subdivisions and degradations over the past two generations have contributed to the impoverishment of households, and their vulnerability to adverse weather events and their proclivity to use violence to defend their resources or to capture someone else’s.
Have demographers got nothing to contribute to an understanding of population pressure?
Jane O'Sullivan
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Dear colleagues,
This discussion is helpful to all of us considering the evidence and approaches to analysis, and perhaps more importantly to consider the most humane and just means to address drivers of high population growth relative to the resources that are effectively accessible to members of those populations. The comments made provide further food for thought for our future research, and we try to add the following points:
Studies have found that simplistic “overpopulation” view to be inconclusive and unconvincing over the years. That has led demographers and other strategic planners and analysts to apply unconventional approaches such as system dynamic approach as well as agent-based modeling in the explanation and predictions of the issues particularly population and climate change nexus for two main reasons:
One is the fact that, as we alluded in our paper, climate impacts are divided into climate processes and climate events. Thus, in addition to the static analysis of the impacts or correlates of demographic characteristics on climate change (vise versa) at one point of time, one should consider the long-term impacts using dynamic approaches.
The second reason is that several drivers (including population growth and size) should be considered at different levels of individual, household, community, national, regional, and international to determine the causes and consequences of environmental change, population growth and displacement.
Recent studies including Lutz et al (2002) have shown that the impacts of population composition (age, education, etc) on natural resources and environment, water scarcity etc are more noticeable.
Lutz, W., A. Prskawetz, and W.C. Sanderson, Eds. 2002. Population and Environment. Methods of Analysis. Supplement to Population and Development Review, Vol. 28, 2002. New York: The Population Council.
In particular, education has been found to be one of the important variables on population control policies, contraceptive use as well as other demographic, social, political and environmental/climate changes. Here are some useful and relevant references:
Lutz, W., Butz, W., and and KC, S. (eds.) 2014, World Population and Human Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Muttarak,
R. and W. Lutz. 2014. Is education a key to reducing vulnerability to natural
disasters and hence unavoidable climate change? Ecology and Society 19(1): 42.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-06476-190142
Lutz, W., Crespo Cuaresma, J., M.J. Abbasi-Shavazi, 2010, Demography, Education and Democracy: Global Trends and the Case of Iran, Population and Development Review, 36(2): 253-281.
Having said this, of course, using dynamic and multilevel approaches in our analysis is a complex process particularly with the lack of cross-sectional and longitudinal data. However, demographers have learned to use insufficient and incomplete data to come up with relatively accurate measures. This means that we should encourage our fellow demographers and other scientists to be engaged in the discussions and analysis to find more convincing answers to the questions raised in this forum and beyond. Training the new generation of demographers who would be able to pay attention to more multidisciplinary research and apply innovative techniques using incomplete data and considering the mutual relationship between environmental change and population displacement is a priority for our discipline.
We appreciate the discussions by our colleagues thanks to the initiation by PERN. Ellen and I cannot begin to speak to all demographers. We do, however, give focus to the components of population change and suggest that in addition to the provision of health services and health education to women, particular attention be given to girls' education and instruction as well as support for household economies. As such, investment in the present and future generations of healthy children.
We assure you that we shall make efforts, as we have done in the past, to discuss these issues in our discipline in order to mainstream the climate change and population issues. Our goal is, of course, to improve policies to mitigate the impacts on well-being of the affected populations and to preserve our climate and environment.
Jalal and Ellen
-------------------------------------------------------
Professor Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi
Department of Demography, University of Tehran,
President, Population Association of Iran, &
Council Member, International Union for the Scientific Study of Population
(IUSSP)
Email: mab...@ut.ac.ir
-------------------------------------------------------
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Not dismissing population, Jane, but putting it in perspective and context, in my view.
Dear All,Has anyone seen, examined or critiqued the article which is referenced in the following link?Abstract
We assume that human carrying capacity is determined by food availability. We propose three classes of human population dynamical models of logistic type, where the carrying capacity is a function of the food production index. We also employ an integration-based parameter estimation technique to derive explicit formulas for the model parameters. Using actual population and food production index data, numerical simulations of our models suggest that an increase in food availability implies an increase in carrying capacity, but the carrying capacity is “self-limiting” and does not increase indefinitely.Very best regards,StevePS: Please recall Hopfenberg's 2003 article, (21) (PDF) Human Carrying Capacity Is Determined by Food Availability (researchgate.net), which incidentally provides the foundation for the mathematical modelling of human carrying capacity as it relates to food availability.
Thank you,
Steve Salmony