Close Quarters: Population-Climate Panel Draws Crowd at Society of Environmental Journalists’ Annual Conference
At “Close Quarters: Could an End to Population Growth Help Stabilize the Climate?,” the only panel on population at the annual Society for Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference, Steve Curwood, host and executive producer of Public Radio International’s “Living On Earth,” pointed out that while “this is something we don’t talk about at all in America,” population growth in the United States increases emissions at a greater rate than in developing countries, due to our larger per capita consumption. He discussed the major connections between population and climate change, such as water use; food production and consumption; economic growth, and migration, hypothesizing that climate change will not only lead to great demographic shifts in developing countries, but also in the United States, where historically, “we haven’t dealt with them well.”
The panelists explored environmental reporters’ relative silence on the impact of population growth and other dynamics on environmental issues. According to moderator Constance Holden of Science, the possible barriers to coverage—listed below—should be “irrelevant” to working journalists:
- Unwillingness to appear anti-immigration;
- Population’s association with controversial topics like contraception;
- The widespread belief that population growth is necessary for economic growth; and
- The difficulty of researching and writing about the complex issues related to population and demographics.
Robert Engelman, vice president for programs at the Worldwatch Institute, criticized journalists for not delving into population’s significant, albeit complex, impacts on the environment. Reporters may wish to avoid writing about topics they feel have no easy solutions, but it is just as important for them to explore these thorny predicaments as more straightforward issues, he said.
As an example of a potential story angle, Engelman displayed a graph showing that CO2 emissions and population grew by the same percentage in the United States between 1990 and 2004. Yet when the data were disaggregated by state, they revealed a very different, surprisingly diverse picture. Some states’ populations and emissions increased roughly equally, but others, like Delaware, managed to decrease their emissions even while their populations grew. He suggested that reporters could explore what other factors had influenced the population-emissions relationship in their state.
Freelance writer Tom Horton explained how population growth has helped foil attempts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. As Horton wrote recently in Growing! Growing! Gone! The Chesapeake Bay and the Myth of Endless Growth, “[I]t seems questioning the expansion of the economy and the population are off the table, either because they are considered sacred cows, or they are just too hard to deal with. It is assumed we can cure the symptoms while vigorously expanding their root causes.” In an interview following the panel, Horton lauded the efforts of integrated population-environment programs in the Philippines, saying “they are far more advanced than we are” in their understanding of the relationships between coastal management and population growth.
While “Close Quarters” was the only SEJ panel to directly address population, Dennis Dimick, executive editor of National Geographic Magazine, noted the importance of population in a panel he moderated on agriculture and climate change. In addition, keynote speaker R. K. Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, briefly mentioned India’s youthful population and the opportunities presented by the “demographic dividend.” However, he did not use the opportunity to discuss global population growth’s implications for climate change.
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