Friday Podcasts From ECSP and MHI

Hosted by DFID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund, the July 2012 London Summit on Family Planning raised over $2.6 billion and gained commitments from donors and governments towards increasing access to family planning resources worldwide. A September 17 event at the Wilson Center highlighted and assessed some of the key action steps identified during the summit and discussed ways to move forward. This podcast covers part of the panel discussion, moderated by Karen Hardee of the Futures Group. Speakers include Julia Bunting of U.K. Department of International Development (DFID), Win Brown of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Scott Radloff from U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

For “Beyond Seven Billion,” a landmark five-part series published in the Los Angeles Times, environmental reporter Kenneth R. Weiss and photographer Rick Loomis traveled to Africa and Asia to document the past two decades’ rapid population growth. They found that the boom is not over: “The biggest generation in history is just entering its childbearing years. The coming wave will reshape the planet, and the impact will be greatest in the poorest, most unstable countries,” writes Weiss. This podcast is Kenneth Weiss' presentation at a Wilson Center event on October 9, 2012. Weiss shared his stories about the impact of population growth on natural resources, food supply, and conflict in Afghanistan, India, Kenya, China, and the Philippines. He also discussed the challenges of covering this complex topic—from analyzing demographic projections to addressing contraception controversies—that make this series a unique accomplishment in the U.S. media.

“For the first time in human history, more than one half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and some of the largest and fastest growing population centers in the world – countries like India, China, parts of sub-Saharan Africa – are in areas where water resources are becoming more and more scarce,” said Water.org’s Rich Thorsten in a recent interview with ECSP. Thorsten serves as director of international programs for Water.org, which partners with local communities, governments, and NGOs across Central America, South Asia, and Africa to bring improved water sanitation to at-need rural and urban populations. He emphasized that ensuring access to clean water has a number of positive spillover effects, ranging from improved prospects for economic development to greater social stability, since access to non-polluted water supplies removes one potential source of tension within and between communities. Community Health The greatest benefit of improved sanitation services, however, comes in the form of enhanced public health outcomes. “I would definitely say there is a strong correlation” between the two, Thorsten asserted. “Water and sanitation-related diseases are related to the deaths of at least 3.5 million people every year in the developing world – not to mention millions of hours and dollars that are lost to treating health problems and coping with health problems as a result of poor [water] access and hygiene practices.” Thorsten said that community participation has been a key aspect of ensuring the sustainability of Water.org’s projects. To pave the way for continued gains in economic development and public health, he said they work alongside water users, engineers, and government officials in target communities to make those parties stakeholders in the infrastructure development process. Fostering a sense of community ownership of sanitation projects helps reduce the likelihood that infrastructure will fall into disrepair or disuse after the initial programming intervention has been conducted. Given that improving water-sanitation access for the world’s poor is a key element of the UN Millennium Development Goals, Thorsten said he is pleased the subject seems to be attracting more attention within the policymaking and development communities. Despite the positive momentum, however, he acknowledged the fight to ensure clean-water access for the developing world will remain an uphill battle. “When one considers that….about 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation, that there’s more people in the world that have access to a cell phone than a pit latrine or a toilet, it’s still a very daunting task that will require a lot more investment, commitment, and attention in order to improve the situation for billions of people,” Thorsten said.

“A lot of cities are trying to become green cities,” said Karen Seto in part two of an interview with ECSP about her recently published article, “A Meta-Analysis of Global Urban Land Expansion,” co-authored with Michail Fragkias, Burak Güneralp, and Michael K. Reilly. “I think one of the main policy implications of our study is that how a city urbanizes is critical, because one of the things we are finding is that urban land is growing faster than urban population, and in some cases it is growing much faster.” Seto said that the cities with the best prospects for implementing green growth and expansion strategies “tend to focus on the low-hanging fruit,” such as planting trees or constructing buildings with green roofs. From the public’s perspective, these types of measures are relatively painless because they “don’t require changing people’s behavior.” More challenging, said Seto, will be getting rapidly expanding cities to anchor future development around public-transit systems, especially given the changing lifestyle preferences of upwardly mobile urban populations across China and India, for whom private car ownership serves as an important status symbol. Still, Seto said she is tentatively optimistic about city planners’ ability to grow cities in a sustainable fashion. “We’ve experienced this rapid growth of urban population and urban land areas, but we’re also seeing that over the next 20 years, according to the UN, we’re going to see even more people living in urban areas,” she said. “We have this window of opportunity to really shape the way in which cities get developed, and I think that’s really one of the big messages of the study.”