• UK’s foreign aid strategy puts focus on safe abortion and contraception

    Updated: 2010-12-31 11:38:48
      People clamour for free condoms in China. Photograph: Reuters The coalition government will put contraception and safe abortion at the heart of its efforts to help save women’s lives in poor countries, it says today. Two documents set out plans for international development, which has a ringfenced budget. One focuses on the fight against malaria, to [...]

  • China’s green gift to the world

    Updated: 2010-12-31 11:31:27
    A power plant in Zhangjiakou, northeast China’s Hebei province. Photograph: STR/AFP In a mostly dismal year for US and international climate policy, China’s coal imports are skyrocketing to record levels. The environmental community and policy pundits have rushed to decry this new development, arguing that China’s expanding imports undermine global climate efforts, and even that countries should [...]

  • US: As boomers wrinkle

    Updated: 2010-12-31 11:17:41
    From the moment they entered the workforce in the 1960s, baby-boomers began to shape America’s economy and politics. They will do the same as they leave. The first of the estimated 78m Americans born between 1946 and 1964 turn 65 in 2011, the normal age for retirement. As their ranks swell in coming years, the [...]

  • Britain’s rivers come back to life

    Updated: 2010-12-31 10:01:22
    Britain’s rivers, some of which were little better than sewers a generation ago, are now at their cleanest for more than a century. In the past decade, our waterways have returned to conditions not seen since before the industrial revolution, the Environment Agency says. Water quality has improved so much in some places that a number [...]

  • John Bongaarts and Bob Walker on demographic change, growth & the developing world

    Updated: 2010-12-30 14:40:20
    Pop Audio from the Woodrow Wilson Center • “Can the planet handle 9 billion? The answer is probably yes. Is it a desirable trajectory? The answer is no,” says John Bongaarts of the Population Council. [more] • Robert Walker of the Population Institute calls expanding reproductive health services a “win for women, for their health, [...]

  • Polar bears have highest levels of toxic pollutants of any creature

    Updated: 2010-12-30 10:52:21
    Although they live in the Arctic wilderness, the bears were found to have high levels of pollution because of the toxic food chain, scientists say. This is because industrial pollution from Europe, America and Asia is dispersed by air and ocean currents and concentrated over the Arctic. The smaller animals are all affected by the [...]

  • Migration – The Environmental Consequences for the UK

    Updated: 2010-12-30 10:48:53
    Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the UK will soar by almost 515 million tonnes over the period from 2008 to 2033 solely as a result of the projected increase in population due to net migration over that period, says a new report out today. The report from think-tank Migrationwatch on the environmental effects of large scale [...]

  • China counts £130bn cost of economic growth

    Updated: 2010-12-30 10:46:22
    Photo: Qilai Shen/EPA China’s economic growth is inflicting more than a trillion yuan’s worth of damage on its environment each year, according to a government report that increases pressure on planners to slow the breakneck speed of development. In one of the longest-term accountings of ecological degradation, the China academy for environmental planning calculated that the cost [...]

  • Motorists face a new year of higher petrol prices on the forecourt

    Updated: 2010-12-30 10:42:58
    A month of snowbound misery for Britain’s motorists is set to be compounded by a torrid beginning to 2011 at the petrol pumps, the AA has warned, with tax increases and global demand driving up the cost of fuel. In the same week that the British Retail Consortium warned of a year of inflation for consumers, [...]

  • Spain helps out neighbour France in green power surge

    Updated: 2010-12-30 10:41:07
    Spain has bolstered its credentials as a world leader in renewable energy by exporting electricity to France for the first time. Heavy rain and strong winds during 2010 meant that renewables - principally hydro, wind and solar power - met 35% of Spanish demand. Wind power rose by 18.5% in 2010 and now meets 16% of [...]

  • Indonesia needs demography ministry: expert

    Updated: 2010-12-30 09:35:05
     Indonesia needs a demography ministry to coordinate tasks related to demographic things as the country is facing a population boom, an expert said here on Wednesday. Sonny Harry B Harmadi, head of the Demographic Institution at the University of Indonesia, said that currently, there is no institution that is focusing merely on demography as this [...]

  • African Women Speak Out: A documentary film project created by Blue Planet United/Population Press

    Updated: 2010-12-29 15:58:22
    Thanks to Marilyn Hempel for this announcement. —————– African Women Speak Out A documentary film project created by Blue Planet United/Population Press http://www.populationpress.org from Marilyn Hempel, Executive Director of Blue Planet United The Population Press, and its parent organization Blue Planet United, are pleased to announce the completion of a video project – African Women [...]

  • Survival in the Sahel: Climatic extremes, from drought to flood, threaten survival

    Updated: 2010-12-28 14:41:22
    You may want to thank The Economist for mentioning population near the end of this article. To comment, visit, http://www.economist.com/node/17628093/comments#commentForm ——————— In some ways Alhaji Bunu Fodio is lucky: at least his house is still standing. Most of Kagara, his dusty village in Nigeria’s far north, was smashed to smithereens during this year’s rainy season [...]

  • Economic Growth

    Updated: 2010-12-27 14:35:27
    At http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/worldbiz/ all you can listen to a November 29 BBC broadcast on the issue of economic growth and the question of whether it should continue. Look for the link: GlobalBiz: Growing Pains: 29 Nov 10

  • American Psychosis: What happens to a society that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion?

    Updated: 2010-12-26 14:33:48
    Thanks to Hugh Harwell for this OpEd. It does not mention population, but the problem of societal illusions applies to many population and sustainability issues. ——————— The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the [...]

  • Palau Debates Banning Contraceptives to Stimulate Population Growth

    Updated: 2010-12-24 14:28:29
    Thanks to Joe Bish for this article about a possible human rights violation in Palau. ——————– Palau is currently wrangling with a controversial bill that would ban the sale and distribution of contraceptives. The Population Growth Act is intended to stimulate population growth in the country, and has already been passed by the Senate on [...]

  • Brazil’s Threatened Atlantic Forest

    Updated: 2010-12-23 14:33:32
    At http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002vsnb at 10/12/2010 (December 10, 2010), you can listen to an interesting BBC World Service program on the threat to biodiversity by loss of single trees in Brazil’s Atlantic forest. Here is BBC’s description of the program: Analysing tree-specific microbes in the Brazilian rainforest Scientists in Brazil are using ‘meta-genomics’ – the use of [...]

  • FM100 to air radio drama on MDGs

    Updated: 2010-12-22 14:06:08
    FM100 to air radio drama on MDGs By ELIZABETH MIAE The Population Media Centre-PNG (PMC) has partnered with Kalang Advertising Ltd (KAL)-FM100 for the broadcast of the millennium development goals (MDG) radio drama series for a two-year period commencing next February. A broadcast agreement contract was signed last Friday between the two parties. PMC is [...]

  • Contemporary Mass Extinction and the Human Population Imperative

    Updated: 2010-12-20 14:53:28
    Thanks to Eric Rimmer for this article from the Journal of Cosmology. ——————— Humans and their predecessors have accelerated the loss of Earth’s biodiversity into a sixth global mass extinction. Paleontologically, it is a new phenomenon for a mass extinction to be attributed to a single species, but the evolution and expansion of humans has [...]

  • Mother: Caring Our Way Out of the Population Dilemma

    Updated: 2010-12-19 14:51:44
    Finally! An environmental film that breaks the 40-year old population taboo by connecting the dots to the world’s most pressing environmental, social and humanitarian crises. Click here: Mother: Caring Our Way Out of the Population Dilemma to find out more about this groundbreaking film, due to be released in February 2011.

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