Posts Tagged ‘population’
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion”*…
… and that data can be even more useful if we can visualize it. Andrew Zolli introduces a new opportunity…
Whether we’re contending with food shocks, responding to disasters, preventing the next pandemic, helping communities adapt to a changing climate, or just delivering basic governmental services, one constant runs through it all: people. Where we live, how we move, when we gather or flee – these human patterns shape the arc of every modern challenge. Without a deep and dynamic understanding of those patterns, meaningful action becomes not just harder, it becomes guesswork.
That’s why I’m so excited about our ongoing collaboration with colleagues at the Microsoft AI for Good Lab and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to develop the world’s most up-to-date, highly accurate, high resolution #population density maps. Harnessing the power of Planet’s high-frequency, high-resolution satellite imagery, the AI for Good team’s artificial intelligence expertise, and IHME’s deep demographic modeling capabilities, these population maps allow us to estimate how many people we’re likely to find in every 40 sq meter patch of Earth, in every country of the world. And because the underlying data is updated quarterly, they also allow us to see change over time.
This week, we announced the completion of the first phase of this work at the United Nations AI For Good Global Summit, held in Geneva. We’ve been piloting the use of these population maps as part of the UN’s Early Warnings For All Initiative, which seeks to ensure that everyone on Earth is protected from hazardous weather, water, and climate events. In an early use-case, by overlaying population data with maps of mobile connectivity, we’ve been able to identify unconnected populations that might not be reachable in a crisis.
And that’s just one of what are likely hundreds – even thousands – of ways this kind of population data can be put to work. Knowing where people are settling, and how those patterns are changing, is foundational to everything from public health campaigns to the design of infrastructure and services. If we want to reduce wildfire risk, for example, we need to understand where human communities are pressing into forested frontiers. If we want to evacuate people ahead of an oncoming storm, we need to know how many lives are in harm’s way. And if we want to ensure people aren’t displaced by unlivable heat, we have to overlay human presence with climate exposure.
You can learn more and sign up to explore a coarser (but compelling!) (40km/pixel) visualization of the population data. At the AI for Good Summit, we also announced an Early Access Program for a carefully selected number of trusted organizations who will explore applications of the data and give feedback. If that sounds like it might be of interest, please contact services@healthdata.org…
A new tool for visualizing the world in which we live: “Everyone, Everywhere: Mapping Humanity’s Changing Footprint in Unprecedented Detail,” from @andrewzolli.bsky.social and his collegues at Planet.
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As we get down with data, we might spare a thought for a spiritual ancestor of Planet’s, Denis Diderot; he died on this date in 1784. A philosopher, art critic, and writer, he is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d’Alembert.
The Encyclopédie is most famous for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. According to Denis Diderot in the article “Encyclopédie”, the Encyclopédie‘s aim was “to change the way people think” and for people to be able to inform themselves and to know things. He and the other contributors advocated for the secularization of learning away from the Jesuits. Diderot wanted to incorporate all of the world’s knowledge into the Encyclopédie and hoped that the text could disseminate all this information to the public and future generations. Thus, it is an example of democratization of knowledge.
It was also the first encyclopedia to include contributions from many named contributors, and it was the first general encyclopedia to describe the mechanical arts. In the first publication, seventeen folio volumes were accompanied by detailed engravings. Later volumes were published without the engravings, in order to better reach a wide audience within Europe…
– source
“It may be said in truth that man is always susceptible of improvement”*…
… a (possibly surprising) observation from Thomas Robert Malthus, a man whose dire predictions of paucity and doom have informed political philosophy and economics since the late 18th century… and given rise to the adjective “Malthusian.” In a review of Deborah Valenze‘s The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History, Oliver Cussen explores his (also possibly surprising) lasting impact…
For the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries. In the 15th century, after the Black Death, the region’s population was at a historic low. Land was left fallow, and villagers complained about the encroachment of wild animals and forests on crops and pasture. Nature was taking its revenge for the great land colonisation movement of the Middle Ages. Civilisation recovered, but growth in a world of limits was ultimately self-defeating. The prosperity of the 16th century soon gave way to famine, drought, war and plague. It was only after modern technology unlocked the productive capacities of the earth that society was able to escape this cycle of expansion, crisis and renewal. Acknowledging his intellectual debt, Le Roy Ladurie pointed out the irony that the ‘Malthusian curse’ should lift just as it was being discovered in England in 1798. ‘Malthus was a clear-headed theoretician of traditional societies,’ he conceded, ‘but he was a prophet of the past; he was born too late in a world too new.’
Yet the spectre of Malthus continued to haunt industrial modernity. No sooner had the Great Exhibition of 1851 encouraged Victorians to embrace material gratification without guilt than William Stanley Jevons began to warn of the imminent exhaustion of the nation’s coal supply. Drawing explicitly on Malthus, Jevons argued that the increased demand on resources from a growing population was forcing mines into deeper and more inaccessible seams. ‘We shall begin as it were to see the further shore of our Black Indies,’ he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of unprecedented energy consumption, economic prosperity and demographic growth, produced its own peculiar versions of Malthusian catastrophism, from the neoliberal to the cosmological (the American scientist Garrett Hardin seriously entertained ‘interstellar migration’ as a solution to ‘the population problem’). When the first edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population appeared in 1798 there were just over ten million people in Britain and life expectancy was under forty. We are a long way from Malthus’s Britain, and further still from Le Roy Ladurie’s Languedoc. Why does a theory of scarcity endure in an age of abundance?…
And at what cost? A fascinating– and all-too-relevant– story: “Prophet of the Past,” from @lrb.co.uk.
(Image above: source)
* Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population
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As we ponder the prospect of progress, we might might send chilly birthday greetings to a man who helped breach some of the limits about which Malthus worried: Carl von Linde; he was born on this date in 1842. A scientist, engineer, and businessman, he discovered the refrigeration cycle, invented the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes, and laid the foundation for the development of the refrigerator and ultimately the cold chain— the supply chain that uses refrigeration to maintain perishable goods (meat and produce, pharmaceuticals, and other heat-sensitive goods) in transit, often across the globe.
“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything”*…
A “great reshuffle” of the land is underway, Michael Albertus explains– and it will force us to reconsider traditional ideas of property and ownership…
… It can be easy to forget the significance of the ground beneath our feet – and how much it has shaped the societies we live in. For most people, their home is their house – or their landlord’s. It is bought, sold or rented along with the land underneath it, passing between families over the years. But at some point – and probably several times – there have been abrupt changes to that seemingly permanent arrangement. Land tenure can be profoundly reshuffled. It has in the past and it will be again in the future.
As a political scientist, I’ve studied how land power has shaped societies all over the world. From Ireland to Italy, from Chile to South Africa, and across the US West, struggles over ownership and land use are etched in family histories and have determined the fate of nations…
… Today we are in the middle of a ‘great reshuffle’ of land. Over the past two centuries, nearly every society has reallocated land ownership and property rights. And because of the power that land confers to those who hold it, this reshuffling has set societies on distinct trajectories of development. It’s helped some countries become more egalitarian and productive, whereas for others it has embedded racial hierarchies, deep inequalities and economic stagnation.
The global population bubble and climate change will amplify the reshuffling, and a picture of how that will happen is starting to emerge. Land will become ever scarcer and more valuable as populations increase – and the opposite could occur in the next century as the world’s population plummets. Meanwhile, a changing climate will make vast areas of land more attractive and productive while rendering other areas uninhabitable. Amid these changes, the question is how to reshuffle land well. One thing is clear: centuries-old approaches to property rights and ownership are not up to that task…
[Albertus quickly reviews the hstory of property regimes, with special emphasis on the devlopment of today’s, whihc he calls “the Great Reshuffle”…]
… This great reshuffle began in different ways. In some cases, it entailed the appropriation of Indigenous lands on the part of settlers. Other times, it involved stripping large landowners of their property and granting it to peasants, whether collectively, in cooperatives or as individuals. My ancestors in southern Poland won a small plot of land – presumably taken from the local noble family – through the 1848 revolutions that swept across Europe.
Land reshuffling rewired nearly every country on Earth and set societies on new trajectories of development, race and gender relations, and treatment of the environment. For some societies, that meant becoming more egalitarian. In the years after the Second World War, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all adopted sweeping programmes that transferred land from landlords to their tenants in small, family-sized plots. The governments of these countries followed that up with generous subsidies. Within a generation, families were sending their children to schools rather than the fields. Urbanisation and industrialisation followed, vaunting these nations to the forefront of the global economy.
Far more countries stumbled. Following the end of China’s civil war in the late 1940s, the Communist Party seized all private land in the country, nationalised it, and then formed large land collectives that incorporated some 430 million people. It was one of the largest experiments in land reshuffling in human history. And it wreaked havoc as China’s forests were felled and underproductivity in agriculture drove the Great Famine. Walking through the fields of a place like Dali in Yunnan province today, as I have done, paints a different picture of productivity that emerged only after China broke up its collectives and allowed families to farm specific plots of land…
In the US, land reshuffling had varied consequences. The displacement of Indigenous communities and reallocation of their land to settlers set the stage for a radical experiment in democracy among smallholding settlers in New England, the slavery and plantation system in the South, and a system of Indian reservations in the West. When I did fieldwork at the Agua Caliente Reservation that centres on Palm Springs, California in late 2023, tribal members pointed to repeated land grabs as the root of attempts by outsiders to break down tribal cohesion and cultural preservation.
Around the world today, people are living and breathing the consequences of how the great reshuffle has rewired societies – from resource depletion to racism, gender inequalities, prosperity levels, and the global pecking order. In the coming decades, addressing problems linked to these shifts will require recognising their origins and crafting policies that turn land into a force for positive social change.
After all, land is still the world’s most valuable asset, despite the economic rotation toward technology and manufacturing in advanced economies. Growing populations and the need to feed them and generate resources for them have driven a spiralling demand for land. This is true even in urban areas, where land prices typically skyrocket. Pressure on the land is only going to increase in the coming decades. More land reshuffles are coming…
… The future lies to the north. Latitudes north of the 45th parallel make up only 15 per cent of the world’s surface area but have 29 per cent of its ice-free land and are very sparsely populated. Even more northern land is set to shed its ice and permafrost in the coming decades and become more temperate and productive. Much of this land is owned directly by governments and Indigenous communities, often with colliding claims; little of it is privately owned.
Canada and Russia, the world’s two largest northerly countries, will undergo the most dramatic changes. Agriculture could dramatically expand through longer growing seasons, warmer temperatures and the melting of millions of acres of permafrost. One recent climate model shows Canada gaining 4.2 million square kilometres of arable land suitable for growing crops like wheat, corn and potatoes by 2080 – a fourfold increase of its current stock of suitable land. A comparable amount of land will become newly arable in Russia, positioning these two countries as the world’s key breadbaskets of the future. At the same time, these changes will threaten expansive boreal forests and the forestry industry.
The more temperate climate and increased economic activity in these countries will drive population growth and migration, placing pressure to reshuffle lands. In Canada, 89 per cent of all land is ‘Crown land’ – publicly owned by the federal government and provincial governments. Indigenous First Nations people lay claim to large portions, so tensions could boil over as private interest strengthens…
… As for the US, the picture in Alaska parallels that in Canada. The US federal government owns 61 per cent of Alaska’s land, and a growing share will become arable within decades. With Indigenous claims to a large portion, there will be campaigns to reallocate this land – for instance by privatising more federal land – as it becomes more attractive for settlement and economic activity.
And alongside this thawing, governments, private interests and, where present, Indigenous communities, are poised to clash over sparsely populated territories like Greenland and Antarctica with weak, absent or transitional sovereignty. Indeed, under President Donald Trump, that has already begun.
While looming northern land reshuffles will catch outsized attention, climate change will also foster internal reshuffles on the land in countries across the globe. That dynamic could be scary and destabilising, but it is also an opportunity. Changing land relationships and migration patterns associated with climate change present a possibility to put land in service of society in ways that have rarely been attempted in human history…
[Albertus describes some of the approaches to land rights developing around the world…]
… There will inevitably be mistakes and growing pains associated with such approaches. But these efforts will be increasingly important if we are going to manage future land reshuffling to the benefit of societies as a whole, and without systemic conflict. Everyone from Aboriginal Australian leaders to Minnesotan farmers have expressed excitement to me about this future under new land arrangements.
In the 22nd century, the great reshuffle will shift once again. There will be major changes in the size of human populations, the climate, technology and, inevitably, in politics. The result will be new relationships with the land that could look foreign to what we experience today. Experiments with new forms of property rights will need to go mainstream in order to accommodate shifting populations and climate change in an orderly and equitable fashion.
There is considerable uncertainty in population projections beyond 2100 but, if fertility rates continue their steady decline, the several-millennia-old human population boom is most likely going to bust. If the world converges to today’s average low fertility rate in East Asia, the 22nd century would be one of rapid depopulation, tracing back to some 2 billion people…
… In the 22nd century, many cities may trace Detroit’s trajectory. If housing remains dense, city footprints will have to shrink dramatically. Meanwhile, in the countryside, there will be far more land to go around, but that land may be degraded if it was not adequately protected.
The climate picture in the 22nd century will also drastically alter where people live on the land and how they relate to it. Even if emissions slow considerably, global temperatures and sea levels will rise, and weather patterns will be more extreme. As we explored earlier, a thawing North will continue to open up to agriculture, but land elsewhere will undergo drastic change. Arid and drought-prone areas like northeastern Brazil, the US Southwest and the African Sahel will become increasingly hot and pose a challenge for human livelihoods. Crop yields in the US Southwest are already declining and farmers are struggling to access water for their fields. Some are giving up and fallowing or leaving the land. Meanwhile, low-lying coastal areas in places like Florida and Bangladesh will disappear, as well as entire island nations like the Maldives.
That changing land use will inform the political landscape. Some countries may trace the path that Canada envisions for itself: welcoming immigrants into a dynamic economy. An influential group of Canadian leaders are already organising around an idea known as the Century Initiative that aims to triple the country’s population by 2100, largely by supercharging immigration. Other countries may wall themselves off to protect existing landholdings, resources and wealth from outsiders.
Growing wealth inequality could directly impact who owns the land, too. Powerful multinational companies have increasingly amassed land in order to secure their supply chains, crowding out local populations. If wealthy individuals and investors buy up land at a large scale, a significant portion of the world’s population could end up as renters, mimicking patterns of concentrated large landholding and widespread landlessness that prevailed prior to the onset of the great reshuffle.
Amid all these climatic and economic changes, future generations will make choices once again about whether to spread out on the land or to concentrate in shrinking cities. Land will once more undergo a radical reshuffle in either scenario.
If humanity is to flourish, the next century and beyond will again require a rethink of land relationships…
Reconsidering property rights and ownership: “On unstable ground,” from @mikealbertus.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
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As we ponder just how real real estate is, we might recall that on this date in 1916, the Easter Rising, an insurrection launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the aim of establishing an independent Irish Republic. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798 and the first armed conflict of the Irish revolutionary period.
High on the republicans’ list of grievences with their colonial masters was the issue of land reform.
“Every picture tells a story”*…
The world’s populations is unevenly spread across the globe. But, plotted by latitude (as per this visualization from Engaging Data), it’s a little more concentrated…
… which is interesting (perhaps better said, “bracing”) to consider aside this illustration from NOAA…
Global warming is coming for most of us: “World Population Distribution by Latitude and Longitude,” from @engagingdata.bsky.social and @climate.noaa.gov.
See also: “The world is heating up. How much can our bodies handle?” from @gristnews.bsky.social and “Understanding Climate Migration,” from RAND.
* traditional saying
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As we feel the heat, we might spare a thought for John Graunt; he died on this date in 1674. A haberdasher turned statistician, he is considered by many to be the father of demography (the statistical study of human populations).
A charter member of The Royal Society, Graunt distributed a 90-page book, Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality at the February, 1662 Society meeting. He described his work as having “reduced several great confused volumes” of parish records into a few easily to understood tables, and “abridged such Observations… into a few succinct Paragraphs.” He initiated “life tables” of life expectancy. His use of demographics was further pioneered by his friend Sir William Petty and Edmond Halley, the Astronomer Royal.
Graunt’s work also gives him some claim to having been the first epidemiologist.
“By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down”*…
… And increasingly across the globe, starting in the developed world, we’ve been doing a better job of that. Indeed, some are beginning to worry about a kind of problem that the modern world has never faced– depopulation.
History Today offers a fascinating snapshot…
During the 1930s and early 1940s, many Americans held off on starting families because of the economic insecurity of the Great Depression and uncertainty of World War II. But the prosperous postwar era led to an increase of births between 1946 and 1964 that gave the baby boomer generation its nickname. Over this 19-year period, the booming birth rate helped the U.S. population grow by more than 50%. The country’s demographic makeup shifted so rapidly that by 1960, there were 64.2 million Americans under age 18, out of 180 million overall — a whopping 36% of the population. For context, in 2022, an estimated 22.4% of the U.S. population was under 18.
General fertility rates in the baby boom era peaked in 1957 at 122.9 live births for every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 — that’s 4.3 million babies that year alone. The general fertility rate took a nosedive throughout the 1960s as the birth control pill became more widely available and women entered the workforce at much higher rates. By 1970, the general fertility rate was 87.9, and the much smaller Generation X was well underway.
The baby boomer generation didn’t reproduce at the same rapid clip as their parents, but because there were so many of them, they still produced a lot of offspring. Indeed, 1990 — the year all those 1957 babies turned 33 — was another banner year for births, with 4.2 million millennials entering the world, despite a general fertility rate of just 70.9…
Consider these population pyramids from the U.S. Census Bureau:
This picture is of course in aggregate: some locales (e.g., Utah) continue to grow and are “younger”; others, like Alexander County, Illinois are much “older.” And globally, the picture is even more mixed:
The global population reached nearly 8.2 billion by mid-2024 and is expected to grow by another two billion over the next 60 years, peaking at around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s. It will then fall to around 10.2 billion, which is 700 million lower than expected a decade ago. However, changes in global population are uneven and the demographic landscape is evolving, with rapid population growth in some places and rapid ageing in others…
… The world’s overall fertility rates are dropping, with women having one child fewer on average than they did around 1990.
In more than half of all countries and areas, the average number of live births per woman is below 2.1 – the level required for a population to maintain a constant size.
Meanwhile, nearly a fifth of all countries and areas, including China, Italy, the Republic of Korea and Spain, now have “ultra-low fertility,” with fewer than 1.4 live births per woman over a lifetime. As of 2024, population size has peaked in 63 countries and areas, including China, Germany, Japan and the Russian Federation, and the total population of this group is projected to decline by 14 per cent over the next thirty years…
While the slow growth or decline of populations is occurring mainly in high-income countries, rapid population growth will occur in low-income and lower-middle-income countries.
Specifically, Angola, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, and Somalia, very rapid growth is projected, with their total population doubling between 2024 and 2054.
This population growth will increase demand for resources, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and, combined with poorly managed urbanisation and rising living standards, it will worsen environmental impacts.
Climate change, a major challenge, affects these countries the most, where many rely on agriculture – and food insecurity is prevalent.
In countries including India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the United States [our inherent decline offset to some extent by immigration… at least until now], population is also expected to increase through 2054 and could potentially peak in the second half of the century or later…
Implicit assumptions of a growing population underlie many– if not most– of the decisions we’ve made about everything from social policies (e.g., social security) to business plans (e.g., growing markets).
Populations grow for some combination of three reasons: fertility is above replacement level, people live longer, and/or immigration swells the ranks. For quite a while, the U.S. was hitting on all three cylinders; more lately, on the latter two. But recently, life expectancy has stalled.
Immigration is currently strong (and, as noted above, keeping U.S. population growth positive), but it’s looking increasingly uncertain: political energy to restrict (indeed, to undo) immigration is high, even as the pressures of climate change and political upheaval are increasing numbers of people from around the world hoping to find a home in the U.S.
If, as Comte is said to have suggested, demography is destiny, then what is ours? “In 1960, more than a third of the U.S. population was under 18.”
Apposite: “Why people over the age of 55 are the new problem generation,” gift article from The Economist
* Bill Gates
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As we dig into demographics, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Robinson Jeffers; he was born on this date in 1887. A poet renowned both for his longer (narrative and epic) verse and his shorter work, he was an icon of the environmental movement. His philosophy of “inhumanism” argued that transcending conflict required human concerns to be de-emphasized in favor of the boundless whole.
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