Part 8 (1/2)

j.a.pan had a remarkable economic boom when its workforce was predominantly young, but its slowdown over the last two decades has coincided with the aging of its population. In 2012, the j.a.panese bought more adult diapers than baby diapers. By midcentury its median age, the world's oldest, in 2012, at forty-three, will be fifty-six. Globally, the median is projected to increase from twenty-eight today to forty by midcentury.

Whenever there is an unusually large generation of young people compared to the rest of a society, the so-called youth bulge can also contribute to disruptive and even revolutionary pressures if the society does not have an adequate number of job opportunities-particularly for males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Demographic historians believe that the relatively large proportion of young men in France more than 200 years ago contributed to the pressures that resulted in the French Revolution. The same was true during the seventeenth-century English Civil War and the majority of the revolutions in developing countries during the twentieth century. The cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s in the United States coincided with the young adulthood of the postWorld War II baby boom.

In the 1990s, according to Population Action International, nations with more than 40 percent of its adults made up of those aged fifteen to twenty-nine experienced civil conflict at twice the rate of countries generally, and more than two thirds of civil conflicts since the 1970s have been in nations with youth bulges. Among the many factors causing the Arab Spring in 2011 was the disproportionate size of the young adult generation in most of the Arab countries. It is worth remembering, however, that it was a food vendor in Tunisia who set off the Arab Spring during a period of food price hikes around the world.

One of the largest youth bulges in the world today is in Iran, and although the street demonstrations and the Green Revolution have been suppressed brutally, the pressures for societal change appear to be still building. Similarly, Saudi Arabia, where dissent and demonstrations are also suppressed, faces similar demographic pressures for change, because the percentage of its population made up of young men age fifteen to twenty-nine is exceptionally high, and the number of jobs available to them is exceptionally low.

By most of these demographic measures, the United States has a more favorable outlook than many developed countries. Its median age is climbing, but will reach only 40 by midcentury. Its fertility rate is above the replacement rate, partly due to immigration and to the fertility of immigrant populations.

MIGRATIONS.

In 2010, the United Nations reported that the world's migrant population had reached almost 214 million people, driving the percentage of migrants in the population of developed countries to 10 percent, an increase from 7.2 percent twenty years earlier. In the last year for which statistics are available (2009), 740 million internal migrants moved from one region to another inside countries. Cities are the primary destination for these migrants-both international migrants and those who migrate within their own countries from one region to another, almost always from rural areas to cities.

One new trend is that the number of international migrants moving from one developing country to another is now roughly equal to the number of migrants moving from a developing country to developed regions of the world. As the secretary-general of the United Nations put it, ”In other words, those moving 'South-to-South' are about as numerous as those moving 'South-to-North.' ”

Although migration has, of course, many beneficial effects-not least among them the enrichment of the talent pool in countries and regions to which they relocate-the number of international migrants has also been driving some dangerous trends in many countries. Xenophobia, with its a.s.sociated discrimination and violence against migrants-particularly those with ethnicities, nationalities, cultures, and religions markedly different from the majority in the country they move to-has been most p.r.o.nounced in regions stressed by high unemployment among natives and in countries where the percentage of international migrants has become seen as a threat to the majority's culture, traditions, and future prosperity.

In Athens, neo-n.a.z.i vigilantes have been patrolling the streets and brutally attacking the growing number of Muslim migrants from several countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Algeria. In Moscow and some other Russian cities, neo-n.a.z.is, skinheads, and other right-wing extremist groups are also brutalizing migrants-many of them from areas like Chechnya in the trans-Caucasus region, where there are significant Muslim populations.

Migrants now make up 20 percent or more of the people in forty-one countries around the world; three quarters of them have less than one million people. There are now thirty-eight larger countries where cross-border migrants make up 10 percent of the population or more.

India will soon complete construction of a 2,100-mile-long, 2.5-meter-high iron fence on its border with Bangladesh. As the nation most affected by the early impacts of climate change, Bangladesh has experienced a surge of internal migration from low-lying coastal areas and offsh.o.r.e islands in the Bay of Bengal, where four million people currently live. The overall population of Bangladesh is expected to increase from 150 million today to 242 million over the next few decades.

Bangladesh has also been the destination for a large number of international migrants from Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion. The presence among these migrants of many jihadists and Taliban members has given rise to concerns by India about an upsurge in Islamic extremism on the Bangladesh side of the border. But the continuing economic stress in Bangladesh is the princ.i.p.al source of pressure for trans-border migration toward India and through India to other destinations.

Even in the United States, where immigration has been a historic success story, the surge of legal and undoc.u.mented migrants in the early part of the twenty-first century created social stress. Twenty percent of all international migrants now live in the United States even though it has only 5 percent of the world's population. During the twelve-month period that ended in July 2011, the number of ”non-white” babies born outnumbered Caucasian babies for the first time. The concern over illegal immigration from Mexico and other countries during the same period is cited by domestic terrorism experts as a major factor causing the surge of hate groups.

A RECENT STUDY by the Brookings Inst.i.tution indicates that ”minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation's population growth in the decade that ended in 2010.” The number of white children in the U.S. declined by 4.3 million as the number of Hispanic and Asian children increased by 5.5 million. Already, more than half of U.S. cities are minority majority, with the two largest groups represented by Hispanics at 26 percent and African Americans at 22 percent. Hispanics now represent the largest minority group in the United States.

U.S. domestic terrorist groups actually peaked in the 1990s just prior to the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City. The number declined sharply for more than twelve years until the inauguration of Barack Obama, which appeared to trigger a renewed upsurge in 200912 to levels far higher than the previous peak. The Southern Poverty Law Center links the increase to the changes in America's demographic makeup: ”This very real and very significant change is represented in the person of Barack Obama. We've of course seen the most remarkable growth in the radical right since 2008, precisely coinciding with Obama's first three years as president.”

Ironically, net immigration from Mexico fell to zero in 2012, though immigration from several other countries has continued. Flows of Asian immigrants to the U.S. overtook Hispanics in 2009. And according to the Brookings study, ”Even if immigration stopped tomorrow, we will achieve a national minority majority child population by 2050 (by around 2023 if current immigration trends continue).”

The relatively higher birth rate in the Palestinian territories, compared to the Jewish birth rate in Israel, is causing changes in the political a.n.a.lyses by both Palestinians and Israelis of how to evaluate potential options for resolving, or at least managing, the tensions in the region. The same differential birth rate has led to a sevenfold increase in the Arab minority population inside Israel's borders since the modern state was founded, leading to oft-expressed concerns by some Israelis that demographic trends could one day force a choice between the Jewish nature of the state of Israel and the democratic principle of majority rule.

There are also often negative consequences in countries where large numbers of migrants are leaving. Chief among them is the problem caused by a brain drain when highly trained professionals-such as doctors and nurses-leave their countries of origin, in part because their skills make it much easier for them to find lucrative employment and higher standards of living in developed countries. When middle-cla.s.s families migrate, there is often diminished support in their countries of origin for continued investments in public goods like education and health care. At the same time, the increasing percentage of migrant and domestic minority populations in developed countries has sometimes appeared to weaken the social contract supporting the provision of public goods-particularly public education-when phenomena such as white flight to private schools results in less support for public school budgets.

Nevertheless, many destination countries have adopted policies designed to attract higher-skilled migrants. And the need for low-wage workers in many developed countries with smaller than optimal workforces has also led to a significant expansion of temporary worker programs-particularly in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Colleges and universities have also significantly increased their recruiting of migrant students from foreign countries.

Many of the nations and regions from which migrants originate also experience some positive benefits, particularly in the form of remittances, especially from migrants leaving lower-middle-income countries. The remittances sent by migrants back to their families totaled $351 billion in 2011 and are projected to reach $441 billion in 2014.

The amount of remittances sent back to their communities of origin by internal migrants is believed to be much larger. In China, internal migrants from rural areas send an average of $545 per year back home from the cities where they work. In Bangladesh, the Coalition for the Urban Poor calculates that migrants from rural areas to the capital city of Dhaka routinely send back home as much as 60 percent of their income. Indian migrants from the poor states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal routinely send money orders from Mumbai back to their home communities in amounts that make up the majority of money flowing into those three states.

REFUGEES.

Alongside the flows of international and internal migrants are growing numbers of refugees. According to the international treaty on refugees, the definition of a refugee is someone who, unlike a migrant, leaves his or her country of origin due to the fear of violence or persecution. Almost 44 million people around the world have been forced from their nations of origin by conflict or persecution-of which 15.4 million are cla.s.sified as refugees-and another 27.5 million people have been displaced by violence and persecution to new communities within their own country.

The U.N. high commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, notes that 70 percent of current refugees have been in that status for more than five years, and as a result, ”it's becoming more and more difficult to find solutions for them.” Twelve million among them are stateless, meaning they have no place to go home to. In the last five years, for the first time, more refugees moved to cities than to refugee camps. While equal numbers of migrants traveled to developed and developing countries, 80 percent of refugees live in poor regions of the world.

All of the large source countries for refugees are mired in violent conflicts, including Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Colombia, and Sudan. The two largest source countries for refugees are Afghanistan and Iraq. The ill-fated decision by the United States in 2002 to invade Iraq-thus prolonging the conflict in Afghanistan as well, by prematurely removing troops that had encircled Osama bin Laden-has had a cascading impact on the entire region, flooding neighboring countries with refugees.

The three million Afghans displaced by the war in their home country have fled mostly to Pakistan (1.9 million) and Iran (one million). The 1.7 million refugees from Iraq have also gone mostly to neighboring countries. Indeed, according to the World Development Report, more than three quarters of refugees worldwide are hosted in nations neighboring their country of origin. The largest number are now living in Asia and the Pacific (2 million-most of them in South Asia), Sub-Saharan Africa (2.2 million-403,000 of them in one country, Kenya!), and the Middle East and North Africa (another 1.9 million).

However, more than 1.6 million refugees, the vast majority of them Muslim, have found their way to Europe, further exacerbating xenophobic tensions and increasing fears of radicalization of poorly a.s.similated young Muslim populations living in Europe; Muslims already make up 5 percent of Europe's population. The surge of international migrants from North Africa and South Asia into Europe has also triggered a renewal of xenophobia, even in countries previously known for their commitment to tolerance. In several European countries, the combination of economic stress and the growing numbers of immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants, has disrupted the political balance as extreme right-wing and nativist groups exploit the public's uneasiness.

THE FASTEST GROWING new category of refugees is climate refugees. Although they are not legally cla.s.sified as refugees (because the definition in the Refugee Protocol requires that the source of their motivating fear be violence or persecution from other people), they are nevertheless routinely described as refugees because their migration is not voluntary. In the U.N.'s State of the World's Refugees report from June 2012, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon noted that the traditional causes of forced displacement, ”conflict and human rights abuses,” are now ”increasingly intertwined with and compounded by other factors,” many of them related ”to the relentless advance of climate change.”

Israel announced a major national plan last May on climate change that included a recommendation to build ”sea fences” near its maritime borders on the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, linked with impa.s.sable barriers on its land borders, in order to protect against a predicted wave of climate refugees. ”Climate change is already here and requires comprehensive preparations,” said Israeli environmental protection minister Gilad Erdan. ”The lack of water, warming and sea level rise, even if it will occur on a different schedule, will bring migration movements from all impoverished regions to every place where it is possible to escape this,” the study noted.

One of the two leaders of the team authoring the report, Professor Arnon Soffer of the University of Haifa's Geography Department, added, ”The migration wave is not a problem for the future. It is today, it is going on now.... It will just increase from day to day.” Noting that European navies prevent most boats with migrants from reaching Europe, he said they are forced to go elsewhere, but ”in India they shoot, in Nepal they shoot, in j.a.pan they shoot.” The team noted that climate refugees are expected from Africa, where approximately 800 lakes have dried up completely in the last decade, including the former largest lake in Africa, Lake Chad, which mobilized many climate refugees eastward into the Darfur region.

Persistent droughts and desertification in Somalia have also contributed to the violent conflict there. Other climate refugees attempting to migrate to Israel are expected from Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Syria, and the Nile Delta in Egypt. In addition, still more internal climate refugees are expected from the Negev, from which many Bedouins have already moved to cities in the center of Israel. Soffer added, ”If we want to keep Israel a Jewish state, we will have to defend ourselves from what I call 'climate refugees,' exactly as Europe is doing now.”

U.S. a.s.sistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell recently wrote that the impact of climate change on Africa and South Asia, including ”the expected decline in food production and fresh drinking water, combined with the increased conflict sparked by resource scarcity,” is likely to produce ”a surge in the number of Muslim immigrants to the European Union (EU),” doubling Europe's Muslim population within the next twelve years, ”and it will be much larger if, as we expect, the effects of climate change spur additional migration from Africa and South Asia.”

A few years ago, I visited the southernmost extremity of the European Union, Spain's Canary Islands, just off the coast of West Africa. I found many conversations dominated by concerns of residents about the surge of refugees attempting to migrate by boat from Africa to their most convenient point of entry into the European Union. In some years, more than 20,000 Africans have attempted the dangerous journey across to the Canaries.

Over the next century, the global community can expect millions of climate refugees. Almost 150 million people now live in low-lying areas only one meter or less higher than the current sea level. For each additional meter of sea level rise, roughly 100 million more people will be forced to abandon the places they call home. And this number, of course, does not include refugees from desertifying dryland areas.

The dimensions of the climate crisis are described in Chapter 6, along with the difficult but cost-effective and necessary responses. What is clear now, however, is that even with global warming in its early stages, the growth of human civilization is already pressing hard against limitations that are complicating our ability to provide the essentials of life for billions of people.

ENDANGERED GROUNDWATER AND TOPSOIL.

For example, where topsoil and groundwater are concerned, there is a disconnect between the frenzied rate of exploitation of both these resources on the one hand, and the extremely slow rate with which either resource can be regenerated on the other. Renewable groundwater aquifers fill back up, on average, at the rate of less than one half of one percent per year. Similarly, topsoil regenerates naturally-but at the agonizingly slow rate of approximately 2.5 centimeters every 500 years.

In just the last forty years, the overexploitation of topsoil has led to the loss of a significant amount of productivity on almost one third of the arable land on Earth. Without urgent action, the majority of the Earth's topsoil could be severely degraded or lost before the end of this century. In China, topsoil is being lost fifty-seven times faster than this natural replacement process; in Europe seventeen times faster. According to the National Academy of Sciences, it is being lost in the United States ten times faster than it can be replenished. Ethiopia is now losing almost two billion tons of topsoil every year to rain was.h.i.+ng the erodible soils down the steep slopes of its terrain.

In the case of groundwater, the nearly total depletion of some important aquifers and the sharply dropping levels of others have now focused the attention of experts in many countries on the future of this resource. The doubling of the global withdrawal rate over the last half century-and the projection that withdrawals will continue to increase at an even faster pace-have many experts beginning to get very worried. In many areas, the withdrawals from aquifers now far exceed the rate of replenishment; many aquifers are now falling several meters per year.

IT IS AS if we are willfully blind to the basic underlying reality of our relations.h.i.+p to the Earth's limited resources. But this seeming blindness is reinforced by the world's princ.i.p.al method of accounting for natural resources, which treats their use as income rather than withdrawals from capital. This is, in the words of economist Herman Daly, ”a colossal accounting error.... At least we should put the costs and the benefits in separate accounts for comparison.”

The basic distinction between operating income and withdrawals from capital is crucial, whether one is accounting for a company or a nation. In the words of a cla.s.sic accounting text, if this distinction is misunderstood and improperly made, it leads to ”practical confusion between income and capital.” Another seminal accounting text notes that ”net income of an ent.i.ty for any period is the maximum amount that can be distributed to its owners during the period and still allow the ent.i.ty to have the same net worth at the end of the period as at the beginning.... In other words, capital must be maintained before an ent.i.ty can earn income.” This same principle holds true for nations and for the world as a whole. In recognition of this principle, the U.N. Statistical Commission in 2012 adopted a ”system of environmental-economic accounts” as a step toward integrating environmental externalities. In 2007, the European Union launched its ”beyond GDP” initiative, and is due to release an a.s.sessment by all member states of their ”natural capital” in 2014.

When Simon Kuznets warned in 1937 that misuse of GDP would make us vulnerable to such accounting errors and could lead to a form of willful blindness, he noted that conflicts over resources might well exacerbate the risk inherent in the admittedly flawed design of his elaborate accounting system: The valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterization becomes dangerous when not controlled in terms of definitely stated criteria. With quant.i.tative measurements especially, the definiteness of the result suggests, often misleadingly, a precision and simplicity in the outlines of the object measured. Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion ... especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is often contingent on oversimplification.

In an example of the precise problem Kuznets was antic.i.p.ating, today-all around the world-calculations about the impact of groundwater withdrawals are often at ”the center of conflict of opposing social groups.” Often, officials in regions where water supplies are shared with other regions or countries-and whose farms and businesses would be disrupted by any change in water allocations-have strong incentives to minimize the seriousness of the problem-putting off for the future a problem they would rather not deal with in the near term. It's an all too familiar challenge for anyone who works on global warming.

In just one of many examples of this particular variety of denial, when an expert from the University of Oklahoma, Luo Yiqi, visited Inner Mongolia in northern China a few years ago to study desertification, he was astonished to see fields of rice (one of the most water-intensive crops) grown with water that authorities allowed to be pumped at grossly unsustainable rates from deep aquifers. ”Apparently,” he noted dryly, ”farmers did not get enough scientific guidance.”

The regrettable decision to ignore the depreciation of natural resources, while accounting precisely for the depreciation of capital goods, may have been subtly influenced by the state of the world when this formula was created in the 1930s. We were still in the last stages of the colonial era, when limitations on supplies of natural resources seemed irrelevant; industrialized countries could simply obtain more in their colonial possessions, where the supply seemed, for all intents and purposes, limitless. Global population has tripled since the national accounts were adopted, and the dangerous illusion that Kuznets warned about is now at the heart of the world's failure to recognize the twin dangers of unsustainable depletion of both topsoil and groundwater.

Since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, these two strategic resources have both been essential for the production of food. The irrigation of crops emerged roughly 7,000 years ago and the Green Revolution of the twentieth century increased agriculture's dependence on irrigation-particularly in China, where 80 percent of the harvest depends on irrigation, and India, where 60 percent depends on irrigation. (The U.S. depends far less on irrigation.) Large dams for water storage gained popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are now 45,000 large dams in the world, including on all twenty-one of the world's longest rivers. FDR's economic stimulus program in the 1930s resulted in large-scale dam construction by the Tennessee Valley Authority in my home region, and the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest-and of course, the majestic Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, which was the tallest in the U.S. when it was built seventy years ago.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of urban populations, more than 90 percent of global freshwater was used for agriculture. In more recent decades, the compet.i.tion for water between agriculture, manufacturing, and fast-growing thirsty cities has led to growing disputes over water allocation-disputes that agriculture often loses. Today, more than 70 percent of the world's freshwater is used to grow food, even though 780 million people in the world still lack access to safe drinking water. As noted earlier, the world has made significant progress in reducing the number of people who lack access to improved water resources (though little progress has been made in preventing the contamination of freshwater sources-both surface and groundwater resources-from human and animal waste and other pollutants).

Some deep aquifers have long been sealed from surface water. A recently tapped aquifer in the Northeastern United States, Patapsco (under the state of Maryland) has water found to be one million years old. Similarly, the Nubian Aquifer (underneath the Sahara), the Great Artesian Basin (underneath northeastern Australia), and the Alberta Basin (underneath western Canada) all also have water more than one million years old. But although these ”fossil” aquifers are nonreplenishable, most scientists believe they are limited in their supply of water; the vast majority of aquifers are replenished slowly as rainwater filters down to them.

Until recently, the amount of information about groundwater depletion rates was spotty at best, and according to one expert, the threat to the resource is a cla.s.sic case of ”out of sight, out of mind.” Indeed, so much water is now being withdrawn from underground aquifers that it is believed by experts to account for 20 percent of the sea level rise in recent decades (although scientists forecast that the accelerating ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica will dramatically increase sea level rise later in this century).

The highest rates of groundwater depletion are in northwest India and northeast Pakistan, the Central Valley of California, and northeastern China. One Chinese groundwater specialist found that an aquifer in northern China with water 30,000 years old was being used unsustainably to irrigate crops in dryland areas. China has embarked upon the largest water project in history-the SouthNorth Water Transfer Project that has been under construction for decades, intended to remedy water shortages in northern China. Asia, which has 29 percent of the world's freshwater resources, is now using more than 50 percent of the world's water. According to the United Nations, ”In 2000, about 57% of the world's freshwater withdrawal, and 70% of its consumption, took place in Asia, where the world's major irrigated lands are located.”