How do we best approach the problem of unsustainable population growth? How do we cope with unprecedented rates of demographic change? What is the relationship between population size and conflict? And should we change retirement age as population age rises?

These are just some of the questions addressed special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B  which the Bixby Center Co-edited. 

The experts writing in this volume conclude that slowing population growth is essential if the world’s poor are to be lifted out of poverty, and if the next generations are to live in a biologically sustainable economy. Coming from many disciplines, the authors emphasize how the size, rate of growth and age structure of the human population interact with many other key factors, from environmental change – including atmospheric pollution – to conflict and the breakdown of governance. Fortunately, the assumption that people must become richer or better educated before they have fewer children is being replaced by a clearer understanding of the many barriers that separate women from the knowledge and technologies they need to manage the size of their family. When these barriers are removed, family size falls even in poor, illiterate communities. Conversely, as a result of lost attention to family planning since the 1990s, the projection for the population of several countries in 2050 has been raised (eg in Kenya from 54 to 83 million). Investment in family planning and education interact synergistically. It is therefore imperative that attention be given to the large and growing unmet need for family planning.

 This special issue emerged out of the Bixby Scientific Forum The World in 2050: A Scientific Investigation of the Impact of Global Population Changes on a Divided Planet.  You can read more about the forum at

http://bixby.berkeley.edu/world-in-2050-forum/

You can view webcasts of the presentations at

http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/worldin2050/worldin2050-overview.aspx

Download:

Press release – The Impact of Population Growth on Tomorrow’s World

 The impact of population growth on tomorrow’s world promotional flier

Subscribers to Philosophical Transactions B can access this issue online at:

Royal Society: Impact of Population Growth on Tomorrow’s World

Bangladeshi woman with her baby. The Bixby Center, working with Venture Strategies and local partners in Bangladesh to reach women who will deliver at home with a clean delivery kit that includes misoprostol for the prevention of postpartum hemorrhage. Photo by Exploretimor

In Bangladesh it is estimated that more than 85% of deliveries are conducted at home, and the majority of births are attended by untrained birth attendants, relatives, or neighbors that are not medically trained for delivery and every year 12,000 women Bangladeshi women die due to pregnancy or pregnancy-related causes.

This study will have policy implications for improving safe delivery programs in Bangladesh and other low-resource settings.

To learn more go to: http://bixby.berkeley.edu/research/maternal-health/miso/bangladesh/

The report Return of the Population Growth Factor: Its Impact on the Millennium Development Goals was that “the MDGs are difficult or impossible to achieve with the current levels of population growth in the least developed countries and regions.”

In 2006, the Bixby Center played key roles in hearings organized by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health in the UK Parliament on the impact of population growth on the Millennium Development Goals.

Dr. Ndola Prata and Dr. Malcolm Potts were among the 53 experts and international agencies submitting written evidence by invitation, and they were among 26 who provided oral evidence in the series of hearings covering eight Monday evenings in Parliamentary committee. The conclusions of the report on these hearings, titled Return of the Population Growth Factor: Its Impact upon the Millennium Development Goals, was that “the MDGs are difficult or impossible to achieve with the current levels of population growth in the least developed countries and regions.” Dr. Martha Campbell worked closely with the committee to produce this report, at the request of Richard Ottaway, MP, who had convened the hearings.

View the Report:  Return of the Population Growth Factor PDF

In 2007 Campbell and Prata, along with Dr. Alex Ezeh from African Population and Health Research Center, Nairobi, Kenya and Professor John Cleland from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, published a Policy Forum article in Science summarizing the report under the title Return of the Population Growth Factor – Science 315:1501-1502. 2007.

Ninety-nine percent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries and the majority of these women deliver alone, or with a traditional birth attendant.

Ninety-nine percent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries and the majority of these women deliver alone, or with a traditional birth attendant.According to the authors the three interventions that are most suitable for resource-poor settings are:

• Improve access to contraception
• Increase efforts to reduce deaths from unsafe abortion
• Increase access to misoprostol to manage postpartum hemorrhage (including for home births)

Furthermore, authors found that the combined effect of postpartum hemorrhage and unsafe abortion prevention would result in the greatest gains in maternal deaths averted.

read more (pdf)

The Population and MDGs DeCal will feature guest speakers whose work focuses on a particular MDG each week. We will learn about these various interdisciplinary perspectives and discuss how the population growth factor underlies each one.

This DeCal will be supervised by Professor Malcolm Potts and the School of Public Health

For more information contact: pmdgdecal@gmail.com

On May 8, 2009 The Bixby Center co-sponsored cross-disciplinary symposium on Global Change and Global Health with Berkeley Alliance for Global Health and the Center for Global Metropolitan Studies.  The symposium focused on urban health challenges at the intersection of climate change, demographic shifts and economic globalization. 

Both within and beyond UC Berkeley, there is increasing momentum towards interdisciplinary approaches to address complex global health problems. The Global Change and Global Health symposium sparked dialogue, disseminated information on existing and planned research, broaden perspectives, and lead to new collaborations. The event provided “a chance to engage in an active cross-pollination of ideas and strategies focused on improving urban health over the coming decades,” said Eva Harris, one of the symposium’s organizers. 

The three trends – climate change, demographic change and economic globalization – and the interactions between them, have particular significance for health in the 21st century. The field of public health has traditionally focused on the prevention, monitoring, and mitigation of disease. However, with environmental changes and mass migration compromising the health of vulnerable populations, public health researchers have become increasingly concerned with the rapidly deteriorating quality of air, soil, and water. In both rural and urban regions of the globe, these environmental changes are leading to increases in infectious and chronic diseases.

For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s people are living in urban areas, according to the United Nations. Driven by complex economic and social pressures, rural dwellers are migrating to urban areas in unprecedented numbers. Urban planners, economists, demographers, environmental scientists and public health practitioners alike face the same question: what challenges will such rapid migration create, and what unexpected opportunities may arise?  

In a world marked by increasing income disparities that adversely impact the health of the poor, poverty alleviation is a primary concern. Yet as rural dwellers become urban dwellers, the rapid change in lifestyle will lead to an increasing use of energy and environmentally polluting products.  The impact of economic globalization has impacted the poor unevenly, raising concerns over inequitable access to natural resources, livelihood opportunities, and services, especially health care and education. In the meantime, the population size of many cities is projected to double or triple in size, a daunting prospect considering the fact that many urban areas are already stretched beyond their infrastructural capacities. 

Urbanization also presents numerous positive opportunities for education and delivery of health services, as barriers such as sheer distance, difficult terrain, and inadequate roads are reduced. Technological advances in health and communications have enormous potential to impact health.  Many innovative solutions are currently being piloted by UC Berkeley faculty and their colleagues around the world. The  Symposium provided participants an opportunity to share and synergize these experiences by setting the stage for an interdisciplinary, solutions-based approach to health. 

Three keynote speakers addressed the major drivers of global change and their consequences for urban health. Dr. Trevor Hancock, a pioneer in the healthy cities and communities movement, discussed the State of Urban Health in 2009. Dr. Stephen Schneider of Stanford University discussed climate change and its impacts on health, and Dr. Alex Ezeh, the Director of the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, discussed demographic shifts and how they will affect health.  

This new research agenda and the idea for the symposium were initiated by faculty at the School of Public Health, including Kirk Smith, Eva Harris, Lee Riley, and Malcolm Potts. The multidisciplinary approach was developed in collaboration among colleagues at the Berkeley Alliance for Global Health, the Center for Global Metropolitan Studies and the Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability.  Faculty from the School of Public Health, Urban Planning, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Environmental Science Policy and Management participated in three interlinked panel discussions to develop cross-cutting strategies to prevent or mitigate contemporary urban health challenges.

You can view webcasts of the symposium at:

webcast.berkeley
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?seriesid=99decdff-c1d8-4b19-bbcc-318ab8b083f2
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?seriesid=4e879913-83b4-41fb-a0f5-591a989718af

YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZS5C_LGDqw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW9esjxLzjY
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=01FAB7CDAA53069D

iTunes-U
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/berkeley.edu.1681316936.02132191348.2122459432?i=1085468052
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/berkeley.edu.1681316936.02132191348.2122559146?i=1641444935

View the complete list of presentations here

Participants of the Bixby forum, The World in 2050: A Scientific Investigation of the Impact of Global Population Changes on a Divided Planet.

Professor Malcolm Potts, who has led the Bixby Program at the School since becoming its director in 1992, believes that population growth is at the core of many of the world’s problems. “I think the huge challenge for the human race in the 21st century is whether we can move to a biologically sustainable way of life on this planet,” he says. “And population plays an essential role in that.”

$10 million of the overall gift will be used to create the new center, which will be anchored in the School of Public Health, but will be recognized as a campuswide center, working in collaboration with the Blum Center for Developing Economies, the Berkeley Center for Global Public Health, the Berkeley Population Center, and other initiatives. The remaining $5 million of the gift will help support a new building for the School of Public Health, in which a wing will be named in honor of Fred H. Bixby.

“This generous gift will enable our School to significantly expand initiatives in population health,” says Dean Stephen Shortell. “The impact of the Fred H. Bixby Foundation commitment will be felt around the world for generations to come.”

Fred H. Bixby (1910-1972) was a California rancher who attended UC Berkeley in the 1930s. Interested in addressing the problem of overpopulation, he provided for the creation of the Fred H. Bixby Foundation in his will. The three trustees of the foundation, John Warren, Howard Friedman, and Owen Patotzka, oversaw the foundation’s first pledge to the School of $500,000 to establish at Berkeley the Fred H. Bixby Chair in Population and Family Planning, which resulted in the recruitment of Potts, a Cambridge-trained obstetrician and reproductive scientist who had been the first medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Over the next 16 years, Potts built a team of population and family planning experts with the goal of broadening the understanding of the population factor and making an impact on policy all around the world. That team includes Professor Ndola Prata, Professor Martha Campbell, Paige Passano, Amita Sreenivas, Claire Norris, and Laura Spautz. Campbell is also the founder and president of Venture Strategies for Health and Development, a nonprofit organization designed to build on the science from the university.

As an example of translating research into action, Potts cites a joint initiative with Campbell’s organization and directed by Prata to make injectable contraceptives such as Depo-Provera more available in rural villages in Ethiopia. “In this case, we know from our research that Ethiopian women like injectable contraception,” says Potts, “That’s their choice. Currently the rules are that only doctors and nurses can give these injections, but there aren’t any doctors in the remote villages. We’re showing that you don’t need doctors or nurses; you just need a person in the village who will teach others in a few days how to give injections. In one village, we trained an Ethiopian priest to give the injections. These are the kind of details that just change the world.”

Potts and Campbell make a compelling case for the urgency of addressing population growth, pointing to its underlying contribution to problems such as global warming, war, and violence. “All these terrorists come from places where it’s difficult to get birth control,” Potts puts it simply. Another striking point: “We’ve never found a country that has gotten out of poverty while maintaining high birth rates,” says Campbell. “Governments of rapidly growing countries simply cannot keep up with the requirements for education and health services when the number of children increases every year. At the same time there is a huge unmet need for family planning in all the fast-growing countries.”

Potts believes that Berkeley is the only university that has been consistently saying two things: first, that rapid population growth has a lot of deleterious effects, and second, that population growth can be slowed in a human rights framework. “Other universities have gone into much less focus and more diffuse descriptions of this,” he says. “I see the Center as an opportunity for Berkeley to enhance its leadership in the United States and globally in putting population growth back on the world agenda.”

Malcolm Potts Speaking at the Launch of the Bixby Center for Population Health and Sustainability

Obama signs executive orders during a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. (AP)

The Bixby Center is thrilled that Obama is working on the goal of reducing unintended pregnancies and reducing maternal and infant mortality and that he took this crucial step to remove a major barrier to family planning worldwide.

Obama’s Statement:

“It is clear that the provisions of the Mexico City Policy are unnecessarily broad and unwarranted under current law, and for the past eight years, they have undermined efforts to promote safe and effective voluntary family planning in developing countries. For these reasons, it is right for us to rescind this policy and restore critical efforts to protect and empower women and promote global economic development.

“For too long, international family planning assistance has been used as a political wedge issue, the subject of a back and forth debate that has served only to divide us. I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate.

“It is time that we end the politicization of this issue. In the coming weeks, my Administration will initiate a fresh conversation on family planning, working to find areas of common ground to best meet the needs of women and families at home and around the world.

“I have directed my staff to reach out to those on all sides of this issue to achieve the goal of reducing unintended pregnancies. They will also work to promote safe motherhood, reduce maternal and infant mortality rates and increase educational and economic opportunities for women and girls.

“In addition, I look forward to working with Congress to restore U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund. By resuming funding to UNFPA, the U.S. will be joining 180 other donor nations working collaboratively to reduce poverty, improve the health of women and children, prevent HIV/AIDS and provide family planning assistance to women in 154 countries.”