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The coming superstorm - really, a rapid procession of what scientists call atmospheric rivers - will be the ultimate test of the dams, levees and bypasses California has built to impound nature's might.

But in a state where scarcity of water has long been the central fact of existence, global warming is not only worsening droughts and wildfires. Because warmer air can hold more moisture, atmospheric rivers can carry bigger cargoes of precipitation. The infrastructure design standards, hazard maps and disaster response plans that protected California from flooding in the past might soon be out of date.

As humans burn fossil fuels and heat up the planet, we have already increased the chances each year that California will experience a monthlong, statewide megastorm of this severity to roughly 1 in 50, according to a new study published Friday. (The hypothetical storm visualized here is based on computer modeling from this study.)

In the coming decades, if global average temperatures climb by another 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Celsius - and current trends suggest they might - then the likelihood of such storms will go up further, to nearly 1 in 30.

At the same time, the risk of megastorms that are rarer but even stronger, with much fiercer downpours, will rise as well.

These are alarming possibilities. But geological evidence suggests the West has been struck by cataclysmic floods several times over the past millennium, and the new study provides the most advanced look yet at how this threat is evolving in the age of human-caused global warming.

The researchers specifically considered hypothetical storms that are extreme but realistic, and which would probably strain California's flood preparations. According to their findings, powerful storms that once would not have been expected to occur in an average human lifetime are fast becoming ones with significant risks of happening during the span of a home mortgage.

"We got kind of lucky to avoid it in the 20th century," said Daniel L. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who prepared the new study with Xingying Huang of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "I would be very surprised to avoid it occurring in the 21st."

Unlike a giant earthquake, the other "Big One" threatening California, an atmospheric river superstorm will not sneak up on the state. Forecasters can now spot incoming atmospheric rivers five days to a week in advance, though they don't always know exactly where they'll hit or how intense they'll be.

Using Dr. Huang and Dr. Swain's findings, California hopes to be ready even earlier. Aided by supercomputers, state officials plan to map out how all that precipitation will work its way through rivers and over land. They will hunt for gaps in evacuation plans and emergency services.

The last time government agencies studied a hypothetical California megaflood, more than a decade ago, they estimated it could cause $725 billion in property damage and economic disruption. That was three times the projected fallout from a severe San Andreas Fault earthquake, and five times the economic damage from Hurricane Katrina, which left much of New Orleans underwater for weeks in 2005.

Dr. Swain and Dr. Huang have handed California a new script for what could be one of its most challenging months in history. Now begin the dress rehearsals.

"Mother Nature has no obligation to wait for us," said Michael Anderson, California's state climatologist.

In fact, nature has not been wasting any time testing California's defenses. And when it comes to risks to the water system, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hardly the state's only foe.

On Feb. 12, 2017, almost 190,000 people living north of Sacramento received an urgent order: Get out. Now. Part of the tallest dam in America was verging on collapse.

That day, Ronald Stork was in another part of the state, where he was worrying about precisely this kind of disaster - at a different dam.

Standing with binoculars near California's New Exchequer Dam, he dreaded what might happen if large amounts of water were ever sent through the dam's spillways. Mr. Stork, a policy expert with the conservation group Friends of the River, had seen on a previous visit to Exchequer that the nearby earth was fractured and could be easily eroded. If enough water rushed through, it might cause major erosion and destabilize the spillways.

He only learned later that his fears were playing out in real time, 150 miles north. At the Oroville Dam, a 770-foot-tall facility built in the 1960s, water from atmospheric rivers was washing away the soil and rock beneath the dam's emergency spillway, which is essentially a hillside next to the main chute that acts like an overflow drain in a bathtub. The top of the emergency spillway looked like it might buckle, which would send a wall of water cascading toward the cities below.

Mr. Stork had no idea this was happening until he got home to Sacramento and found his neighbor in a panic. The neighbor's mother lived downriver from Oroville. She didn't drive anymore. How was he going to get her out?

Mr. Stork had filed motions and written letters to officials, starting in 2001, about vulnerabilities at Oroville. People were now in danger because nobody had listened. "It was nearly soul crushing," he said.

"With flood hazard, it's never the fastball that hits you," said Nicholas Pinter, an earth scientist at the University of California, Davis. "It's the curveball that comes from a direction you don't anticipate. And Oroville was one of those."

Such perils had lurked at Oroville for so long because California's Department of Water Resources had been "overconfident and complacent" about its infrastructure, tending to react to problems rather than pre-empt them, independent investigators later wrote in a report. It is not clear this culture is changing, even as the 21st-century climate threatens to test the state's aging dams in new ways. One recent study estimated that climate change had boosted precipitation from the 2017 storms at Oroville by up to 15 percent.

A year and a half after the crisis, crews were busy rebuilding Oroville's emergency spillway when the federal hydropower regulator wrote to the state with some unsettling news: The reconstructed emergency spillway will not be big enough to safely handle the "probable maximum flood," or the largest amount of water that might ever fall there.

Sources: Global Historical Climatology Network, Huang and Swain (2022) Measurements taken from the Oroville weather station and the nearest modeled data point

This is the standard most major hydroelectric projects in the United States have to meet. The idea is that spillways should basically never fail because of excessive rain.

Today, s cientists say they believe climate change might be increasing "probable maximum" precipitation levels at many dams. When the Oroville evacuation was ordered in 2017, nowhere near that much water had been flowing through the dam's emergency spillway.

Yet California officials have downplayed these concerns about the capacity of Oroville's emergency spillway, which were raised by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Such extreme flows are a "remote" possibility, they argued in a letter last year. Therefore, further upgrades at Oroville aren't urgently needed.

In a curt reply last month, the commission said this position was "not acceptable." It gave the state until mid-September to submit a plan for addressing the issue.

The Department of Water Resources told The Times it would continue studying the matter. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission declined to comment.

"People could die," Mr. Stork said. "And it bothers the hell out of me."

Donald G. Sullivan was lying in bed one night, early in his career as a scientist, when he realized his data might hold a startling secret.

For his master's research at the University of California, Berkeley, he had sampled the sediment beneath a remote lake in the Sacramento Valley and was hoping to study the history of vegetation in the area. But a lot of the pollen in his sediment cores didn't seem to be from nearby. How had it gotten there?

When he X-rayed the cores, he found layers where the sediment was denser. Maybe, he surmised, these layers were filled with sand and silt that had washed in during floods.

It was only late that night that he tried to estimate the ages of the layers. They lined up neatly with other records of West Coast megafloods.

"That's when it clicked," said Dr. Sullivan, who is now at the University of Denver.

His findings, from 1982, showed that major floods hadn't been exceptionally rare occurrences over the past eight centuries. They took place every 100 to 200 years. And in the decades since, advancements in modeling have helped scientists evaluate how quickly the risks are rising because of climate change.

For their new study, which was published in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Huang and Dr. Swain replayed portions of the 20th and 21st centuries using 40 simulations of the global climate. Extreme weather events, by definition, don't occur very often. So by using computer models to create realistic alternate histories of the past, present and future climate, scientists can study a longer record of events than the real world offers.

Dr. Swain and Dr. Huang looked at all the monthlong California storms that took place during two time segments in the simulations, one in the recent past and the other in a future with high global warming, and chose one of the most intense events from each period. They then used a weather model to produce detailed play-by-plays of where and when the storms dump their water.

Those details matter. There are "so many different factors" that make an atmospheric river deadly or benign, Dr. Huang said.

Rachel Woolf for The New York Times

In the high Sierras, for example, atmospheric rivers today largely bring snow. But higher temperatures are shifting the balance toward rain. Some of this rain can fall on snowpack that accumulated earlier, melting it and sending even more water toward towns and cities below.

Climate change might be affecting atmospheric rivers in other ways, too, said F. Martin Ralph of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. How strong their winds are, for instance. Or how long they last: Some storms stall, barraging an area for days on end, while others blow through quickly.

Scientists are also working to improve atmospheric river forecasts, which is no easy task as the West experiences increasingly sharp shifts from very dry conditions to very wet and back again. In October, strong storms broke records in Sacramento and other places. Yet this January through March was the driest in the Sierra Nevada in more than a century.

"My scientific gut says there's change happening," Dr. Ralph said. "And we just haven't quite pinned down how to detect it adequately."

Better forecasting is already helping California run some of its reservoirs more efficiently, a crucial step toward coping with wetter wet years and drier dry ones.

On the last day of 2016, Wes Monier was looking at forecasts on his iPad and getting a sinking feeling.

Mr. Monier is chief hydrologist for the Turlock Irrigation District, which operates the New Don Pedro Reservoir near Modesto. The Tuolumne River, where the Don Pedro sits, was coming out of its driest four years in a millennium. Now, some terrifying rainfall projections were rolling in.

First, 23.2 inches over the next 16 days. A day later: 28.8 inches. Then 37.1 inches, roughly what the area normally received in a full year.

If Mr. Monier started releasing Don Pedro's water too quickly, homes and farms downstream would flood. Release too much and he would be accused of squandering water that would be precious come summer.

But the forecasts helped him time his flood releases precisely enough that, after weeks of rain, the water in the dam ended up just shy of capacity. Barely a drop was wasted, although some orchards were flooded, and growers took a financial hit.

The next storm might be even bigger, though. And even the best data and forecasts might not allow Mr. Monier to stop it from causing destruction. "There's a point there where I can't do anything," he said.

How do you protect a place as vast as California from a storm as colossal as that? Two ways, said David Peterson, a veteran engineer. Change where the water goes, or change where the people are. Ideally, both. But neither is easy.

Firebaugh is a quiet, mostly Hispanic city of 8,100 people, one of many small communities that power the Central Valley's prodigious agricultural economy. Many residents work at nearby facilities that process almonds, pistachios, garlic and tomatoes.

Firebaugh also sits right on the San Joaquin River.

For a sleepless stretch of early 2017, Ben Gallegos, Firebaugh's city manager, did little but watch the river rise and debate whether to evacuate half the town. Water from winter storms had already turned the town's cherished rodeo grounds into a swamp. Now it was threatening homes, schools, churches and the wastewater treatment plant. If that flooded, people would be unable to flush their toilets. Raw sewage would flow down the San Joaquin.

Luckily, the river stopped rising. Still, the experience led Mr. Gallegos to apply for tens of millions in funding for new and improved levees around Firebaugh.

Levees change where the water goes, giving rivers more room to swell before they inundate the land. Levee failures in New Orleans were what turned Katrina into an epochal catastrophe, and after that storm, California toughened levee standards in urbanized areas of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, two major river basins of the Central Valley.

The idea is to keep people out of places where the levees don't protect against 200-year storms, or those with a 0.5 percent chance of occurring in any year. To account for rising seas and the shifting climate, California requires that levees be recertified as providing this level of defense at least every 20 years.

The problem is that once levees are strengthened, the areas behind them often become particularly attractive for development: fancier homes, bigger buildings, more people. The likelihood of a disaster is reduced, but the consequences, should one strike, are increased.

Federal agencies try to stop this by not funding infrastructure projects that induce growth in flood zones. But "it's almost impossible to generate the local funds to raise that levee if you don't facilitate some sort of growth behind the levee," Mr. Peterson said. "You need that economic activity to pay for the project," he said. "It puts you in a Catch-22."

A project to provide 200-year protection to the Mossdale Tract, a large area south of Stockton, one of the San Joaquin Valley's major cities, has been on pause for years because the Army Corps of Engineers fears it would spur growth, said Chris Elias, executive director of the San Joaquin Area Flood Control Agency, which is leading the project. City planners have agreed to freeze development across thousands of acres, but the Corps still hasn't given its final blessing.

The Corps and state and local agencies will begin studying how best to protect the area this fall, said Tyler M. Stalker, a spokesman for the Corps's Sacramento District.

The plodding pace of work in the San Joaquin Valley has set people on edge. At a recent public hearing in Stockton on flood risk, Mr. Elias stood up and highlighted some troubling math.

The Department of Water Resources says up to $30 billion in investment is needed over the next 30 years to keep the Central Valley safe. Yet over the past 15 years, the state managed to spend only $3.5 billion.

"We have to find ways to get ahead of the curve," Mr. Elias said. "We don't want to have a Katrina 2.0 play out right here in the heart of Stockton."

As Mr. Elias waits for projects to be approved and budgets to come through, heat and moisture will continue to churn over the Pacific. Government agencies, battling the forces of inertia, indifference and delay, will make plans and update policies. And Stockton and the Central Valley, which runs through the heart of California, will count down the days and years until the inevitable storm.

Sources

The megastorm simulation is based on the "ARkHist" storm modeled by Huang and Swain, Science Advances (2022), a hypothetical statewide, 30-day atmospheric river storm sequence over California with an approximately 2 percent likelihood of occurring each year in the present climate. Data was generated using the Weather Research and Forecasting model and global climate simulations from the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble.

The chart of precipitation at Oroville compares cumulative rainfall at the Oroville weather station before the 2017 crisis with cumulative rainfall at the closest data point in ARkHist.

The rainfall visualization compares observed hourly rainfall in December 2016 from the Los Angeles Downtown weather station with rainfall at the closest data point in a hypothetical future megastorm, the ARkFuture scenario in Huang and Swain (2022). This storm would be a rare but plausible event in the second half of the 21st century if nations continue on a path of high greenhouse-gas emissions.

Additional credits

The 3D rainfall visualization and augmented reality effect by Nia Adurogbola, Jeffrey Gray, Evan Grothjan, Lydia Jessup, Max Lauter, Daniel Mangosing, Noah Pisner, James Surdam and Raymond Zhong.

Photo editing by Matt McCann.

Produced by Sarah Graham, Claire O'Neill, Jesse Pesta and Nadja Popovich.

Audio produced by Kate Winslett.

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The coming superstorm - really, a rapid procession of what scientists call atmospheric rivers - will be the ultimate test of the dams, levees and bypasses California has built to impound nature's might. But in a state where scarcity of water has long been the central fact of existence, global warming is not only worsening droughts and wildfires.

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When megafires burn in unison and harsh droughts parch the West, local governments, utilities and companies struggle with how to prevent outbreaks, especially as each year brings record destruction.

Carrying an unconventional weapon, Ms. Malmberg travels the American West in an Arctic Fox camper, occupying a small but vital entrepreneurial niche.

Ms. Malmberg, 64, is a goat herder and a pioneer in using the animals to restore fire-ravaged lands to greener pastures and make them less prone to the spread of blazes.

She developed the fire-prevention technique in graduate school and is among a few individuals using grazing methods for fire mitigation. It's a word-of-mouth business, and private landowners and local governments hire her to remove weeds while restoring the soil.

Ms. Malmberg works with her son, Donny Benz; his fiancé, Kaiti Singley; and an occasional unpaid intern. The team runs on the goats' time and have their dinner only when the day's job is done.

They arrive early and open the trailer. The goats jump out, ready to eat, as Ms. Malmberg watches that they don't stray. The team sets up an electric fence to confine the goats and their meals to a specific area overnight.

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After the goats digest the brush, their waste returns organic matter to the soil, increasing its potential to hold water. Goats are browsers that eat the grass, leaves and tall brush that cows and other grazers can't reach. This type of vegetation is known as the fire fuel ladder and leads to wider spread when wildfires spark. More than quell a fire, Ms. Malmberg aims to prevent it from even starting. "By increasing soil organic matter by 1 percent, that soil can hold an additional 16,500 gallons of water per acre," said Ms. Malmberg. "If helicopters come and dump water on the fires, nothing is done for the soil."

In 2020, Ms. Malmberg co-founded the nonprofit Goatapelli Foundation to train people in how to use goats to prevent wildfires. She said that of the 200 or so participants, only a few had launched their own businesses. Start-up costs could total $360,000, Ms. Malmberg said, including equipment and the livestock, which she trains herself.

"Lani is a leading example of someone who has carved the pathway and is a trailblazer in this industry of prescribed grazing," said Brittany Cole-Bush, one of Ms. Malmberg's mentees and the owner of Shepherdess Land and Livestock in Ojai Valley, Calif. "We want to support ecology as much as possible. We want to support the growth of native perennial grasses." Ms. Cole-Bush, who uses goats and sheep in her business, believes that fortifying perennial grasses, rather than planting grass annually, will make the land more tolerant of drought.

Ms. Malmberg, who has a master's degree in weed science from Colorado State University, spends most of the year traveling around the West on jobs. Last year, for the first time, the Bureau of Land Management contracted Ms. Malmberg and her goats for fire mitigation in Carbondale, Colo.

"We thought that the goats could achieve our objectives with their ability to work on steep slopes," said Kristy Wallner, a range land management specialist for the bureau's Colorado Valley field office. "It's going to be a useful tool for us to use moving forward."

In the rush to prevent worsening wildfires, state and local agencies that want to remove excess weeds rely on herbicides and machinery as well as prescribed burns: intentional fires that periodically clear underbrush, dead trees and other fuels.

"Because of the wildfires, more people are understanding the urgency and willing to try different tools beyond what they're used to," said Jenn Balch, a Goatapelli Foundation board member who plans to start a business in the Northeast that uses goats to restore meadows and overgrown recreational areas.

Ms. Malmberg's assignments can take anywhere from a day to six months; she prices them after evaluating the site. In late August, she was hired to work on a property in Silverthorne that took six days and cost more than $9,000.

At the beginning and end of every job, Ms. Malmberg asks the spirits in the area to protect her herd. She lights a ceremonial stick of tobacco and calls out to introduce herself, an intruder on the land, to the animals living there.

With 100 acres to cover, Ms. Malmberg and her team spent a day moving the goats from one parcel to another across a highway. The police halted traffic so the animals could cross.

The work can take longer because of on-the-ground conditions. The Carbondale mitigation project was pushed back three weeks because mudslides caused by last year's wildfires had closed Interstate 70, the state's main highway.

Scientists say that wildfires have become hotter, more intense and more destructive in recent years.

Experts attribute the longer and more ferocious fire seasons to climate change. Wildfires in the West are growing larger, spreading faster and reaching higher, scaling mountains that were once too wet and cool to support them. Studies have shown that wildfires are leading to skin damage and premature births.

The cost of fire suppression has doubled since 1994 to over $400 million in 2018 - a cost, Ms. Malmberg notes, that doesn't account for how people are affected by the loss of their land and homes.

"How do we value the nest that supports us?" Ms. Malmberg asked. "We're just about out of time to change the ways of how we do things."

Amanda Lucier contributed reporting from Silverthorne, Colo.

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The Unconventional Weapon Against Future Wildfires: Goats

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When megafires burn in unison and harsh droughts parch the West, local governments, utilities and companies struggle with how to prevent outbreaks, especially as each year brings record destruction. Carrying an unconventional weapon, Ms. Malmberg travels the American West in an Arctic Fox camper, occupying a small but vital entrepreneurial niche.

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Not likely, but...

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Adam Feinberg had no sooner made a bright yellow thin sheet of plastic than he had to shred it into little pieces. He chose an "I"-shaped mold for the logo of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is a chemist. Then, he filled it with the plastic bits and stuck it in a hot oven.

"I opened up the mold and there was this beautiful yellow 'I'," he recalls. His new plastic passed the first test - it was moldable with heat like regular plastic. But there was another important step left in rethinking the world of durable plastics.

Dr. Feinberg placed the I under a white light, and five minutes later, only half of it remained. The other half had fallen on the ground. Pieced back together, the I had a hole in the middle and in its place was yellow goo.

The plastic did not simply melt. Its building blocks, the synthetic polymers within, had reverted to their molecular units. "It was a phenomenal feeling," he said of the successful experiment.

Most synthetic polymers - Greek for "many parts," because they are long chains of many identical molecules - were not designed to disintegrate or disappear. On the contrary, they were meant to last as long as possible once they began replacing metals and glass in long-lasting things like automobiles and airplanes.

But synthetic polymers became so popular and adaptable that decades later, they're at the root of the global burden of billions of tons of plastic waste. The latest villains in environmental campaigns are disposable plastic products formed from synthetic polymers - straws, cigarette filters, coffee cup lids, etc. Over the past few decades, this mismatch between material and product life span has built up plastic waste in landfills and natural environments, some drifting in oceans until mounds and mounds have reached the ends of the world and bits have been ingested by marine life. Too little gets recycled; in fact some estimates indicate that a mere 10 percent of all plastics are recycled every year.

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Dr. Feinberg, center, with other researchers, including, from left, Evan Lloyd, Oleg Davydovich, Edgar Mejia and Sydney Butikofer. Credit Lyndon French for The New York Times

The European Union has proposed banning single-use plastics, seeking to cut production of items ranging from fishing gear to cotton swabs. Cities in the United States have also been trying to ban some plastics, including grocery bags and those ubiquitous straws that have suddenly turned into the symbol of all that's wrong with our throwaway culture.

The environmental effects of plastic buildup and the declining popularity of plastics have helped to spur chemists on a quest to make new materials with two conflicting requirements: They must be durable, but degradable on command. In short, scientists are in search of polymers or plastics with a built-in self-destruct mechanism.

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"It's two diametrically opposed criteria that we're trying to juggle," Dr. Feinberg said. It's easier to mold a robust plastic without destroying it, he says, but at the same time, it should not last forever.

"The real trick is to make them stable when you're using them, and unstable when you don't want to use them," says Marc Hillmyer, who leads the Center for Sustainable Polymers at the University of Minnesota.

While not a silver bullet for the problem of plastic waste, self-destructing plastics could also enable new applications in drug delivery, self-healing materials and even some electronics.

The starting point requires picking polymers that are inherently unstable, and often historically overlooked because of their fragility. Given a choice, their units would rather stay as small molecules. What scientists do is force those molecules to link up into long chains, and then trap the resulting polymers.

Dismantling these polymers is sometimes called unzipping them, because once the polymers encounter a trigger that removes those traps, their units fall off one after another until the polymers have completely switched back to small molecules.

"As soon as you start the process," explains Jeffrey Moore, Dr. Feinberg's supervisor at the University of Illinois, "they just keep going."

Dr. Feinberg placing a plastic sample under U.V. light. The samples contained a yellow dye, DCA, that interacts with the polymer and starts the unzipping process. Credit Lyndon French for The New York Times

The plastic sample was destroyed after being beamed with high-powered light. Any amount of light will begin to degrade the plastic, but the timescale is inversely proportional to the strength of the light, Dr. Feinberg said. Credit Lyndon French for The New York Times

Dr. Feinberg's polymers were imprisoned in circular loops instead of being open-ended chains. By themselves, the loops were stable. For the self-destructing plastic, Dr. Feinberg mixed the polymers with a little bit of yellow, light-sensitive dye. When light shines on the plastic, the energized dye molecules rip electrons out from the polymers. The loops break, exposing the polymer ends, and the polymers unzip.

Other scientists trap their polymers by capping the ends of the long chains or linking the chains together into networks. By designing these traps to fail upon meeting certain triggers like light or acid, scientists can control exactly how and when their polymers unzip.

"We can have a big change in properties or complete degradation of the polymer just from one event," says Elizabeth Gillies, a polymer chemist at Western University in London, Ontario. On-demand, rapid disintegration gives unzipping polymers an edge over biodegradable ones, she says, as biodegradation is often slow and difficult to control.

In theory, these next-generation polymers could help mitigate pollution problems associated with plastic products. If the units were collected after unzipping to make new polymers, that would lead to chemical recycling. Most recycling done today simply involves melting the plastic and remolding it.

"In my view it has great potential, the problem is to make it cheap enough and to make the properties competitive enough to be useful and have market penetration for the consumer," Dr. Hillmyer said.

Economically speaking, replacing the most widely used polymers like polyethylene (grocery bags), polypropylene (fishing nets) or polyterephthalate (single-use bottles) with unzipping polymers is not feasible.

"Packaging plastic is the cheapest thing ever," Dr. Gillies said.

Instead, scientists like Dr. Hillmyer are focusing their attention on higher-value materials like the polyurethane foams commonly found in mattresses and car seats. In 2016, Dr. Hillmyer and his team made a polyurethane from unzipping polymers that was chemically recyclable. Molecular units derived from sugar linked up to make the polymers, which then cross-linked into polyurethane networks. The foam remains stable at room temperature but unzips into units if heated above 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Using chemically recyclable materials could become practical especially if companies begin taking responsibility for their products after their useful life, Dr. Hillmyer said. He co-founded a start-up company Valerian Materials to commercialize the recyclable polyurethane. If car companies had to take back a used car, for instance, it might make sense to have an internal chemical recycling system to make new materials from old ones, he says.

"It is literally feedstock recovery," says Jeannette Garcia, a polymer chemist at IBM.

Unzipping polymers could also produce adhesives that can be turned off. That would help separate complex objects and materials like toys or Formica surfaces into their individual components for recycling. "We do a terrible job of recycling laminates, composites and even electronics," says Scott Phillips, a polymer chemist at Boise State University.

Dr. Phillips and Hyungwoo Kim, now at Chonnam National University in South Korea, introduced a tiny amount of unzipping polymer into a common, cheap polymer. By themselves, neither polymer is sticky. But when mixed, they cross-link into networks, turning into a sticky, gray goo. To turn the adhesive off, Dr. Phillips and Dr. Kim applied fluoride to the edges of two microscopic glass slides stuck together, and the glass slides fell apart within minutes.

Having unzipping polymers and fully recyclable products is a step forward, but consumers still have to do their recycling right. "Pollution exists because the material wasn't collected," says Steve Alexander who leads the Association of Plastic Recyclers. "If you can't sort properly, no matter what it is, it is just trash." Collection and sorting remain the biggest problems for recyclers today, he says.

The key, says Ramani Narayan, a polymer chemist at Michigan State University, is to have clear, well-defined disposal environments for any object that's reached its end-of-life.

Arguably, he says, biodegradable plastics also have a self-destruct mechanism, provided they end up in the right place with the right microbes. But they've suffered from years of false advertising and consumer confusion. For that, Dr. Narayan is leading a push toward compostable plastics, starting with disposable utensils and food packaging from his spinoff company Natur-Tec. Compost could divert not only single-use plastics associated with food, but also food waste.

"By using the word 'compostable,' it defines the environment," he says, and that, for consumers trying to pick the right bin, is "critical."

Beyond recycling, unzipping polymers can enable new applications ranging from drug delivery to materials that automatically heal themselves, Dr. Moore said.

While self-destructing biomedical implants or electronics are still far-off into the future, scientists like Dr. Gillies are making smart packaging from unzipping polymers. Not to carry groceries, but for payloads like cancer drugs that could be released in tumors or fertilizer only when needed in fields.

For these applications, the units must be safe and benign. A potential candidate is glyoxylate, says Dr. Gillies, which is a molecule that occurs naturally in soil microorganisms. Dr. Gillies' team made unzipping polymers from glyoxylate units and put different caps on them so that they could be deployed in many different scenarios.

"We have a universal backbone and we can just change the end cap to make it responsive to different things," says Dr. Gillies, like light in the fields or a low oxygen environment in tumors.

For Dr. Moore, the goal is to make materials that can heal themselves. "We want our materials to be able to recover from damage and maintain performance over long periods of time," he says.

Dr. Moore envisions filling tiny capsules made from unzipping polymers with healing agents and then embedding the capsules in coatings. Perhaps they respond to light, he says, so that when a cellphone's coating cracks, for example, the light that penetrates will trigger capsule degradation. Those healing agents then spill out to fill the cracks. Then, the coating will automatically be good as new, reducing the need to get a new device.

While waiting for these next-generation polymers to appear, current commercial plastics are still being pumped out on the scale of 400 million metric tons a year. And those plastics were intended to be as strong, as robust and to last as long as possible, says Dr. Garcia.

"Designing new polymers is going to be absolutely important and absolutely necessary," says Dr. Garcia. But a bigger problem, she says, is learning how to break down legacy polymers of plastic waste in a similar way, ideally into their building blocks.

"It's almost like a holy grail challenge."

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Adam Feinberg had no sooner made a bright yellow thin sheet of plastic than he had to shred it into little pieces. He chose an "I"-shaped mold for the logo of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is a chemist. Then, he filled it with the plastic bits and stuck it in a hot oven.

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The Water Wars of Arizona (Published 2018)

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Feature Attracted by lax regulations, industrial agriculture has descended on a remote valley, depleting its aquifer - leaving many residents with no water at all. Homes in the Sulphur Springs Valley in Arizona stand just outside a corn field with a large irrigation system. Credit...

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On an overcast day, Roger Sylvester-Bradley walks along a hawthorn hedge, collecting a thick rind of mud on his leather boots, before stepping into a gently sloping field of barley.

He stoops to pluck an ankle-high seedling from the ground and examines its healthy mop of fine white roots. Turning them in his hands, he says, "when you see a plant that's deficient in phosphorus, it doesn't look like this."

That's something of a surprise to Sylvester-Bradley, a crop scientist at ADAS, an agricultural consulting company in Cambridge, England. Phosphorus occurs naturally in soil and is a critical nutrient for plant growth. For centuries, farmers have added extra to their fields to boost harvests, but Sylvester-Bradley and his colleagues are studying ways to produce food using less of it.

The reasons are twofold: First, phosphorus runoff from farms contributes to widespread water pollution. Second, we don't have phosphorus to waste.

Nearly all of the phosphorus that farmers use today-and that we consume in the food we eat-is mined from a few sources of phosphate rock, mainly in the United States, China, and Morocco. By some estimates, those could run out in as little as 50 to 100 years. Geologists know of other deposits, but they are harder to access and contain less phosphorus. Thus, the price will likely rise, making it harder for growers to afford fertilizer and for people to afford food.

Here and at other experimental sites in England, Sylvester-Bradley and his colleagues have taken a first commonsense step toward addressing the problem: They stopped adding phosphorus fertilizer to half the barley field to see how the plants would fare. Eight years later, they have only just started to observe the first effects on crop size and yield. The plants have survived on the excess nutrients in the soil-so-called legacy phosphorus -which some say represents a key piece of the phosphorus puzzle.

Researchers have calculated that, in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, there is already billions of dollars' worth of fertilizer in the ground that could help offset demand for mined phosphorus. Using it up would also curb phosphorus runoff.

To Paul Withers, a soil scientist at Lancaster University and one of Sylvester-Bradley's collaborators, tapping into legacy phosphorus is a no-brainer and continuing with the status quo is a recipe for both ecological and humanitarian disaster. "We can't have agriculture polluting the environment and using resources the way we are," Withers says. "It's just going to cause a meltdown in the end."

A devious nutrient

Phosphorus is a non-negotiable requirement for life. It's the backbone of DNA and the P in ATP-the molecule that carries energy around cells. Plants need phosphorus to grow, which is why farmers have been feeding it to their crops for millennia.

At first, and without understanding the chemistry, people used manure and human waste as fertilizer. Then in the 1800s farmers recognized that phosphorus-rich bones and rocks worked too.

In 1842 an Oxford University dropout named John Bennet Lawes patented a process for treating these new mineral forms of phosphorus with acid, making the nutrient more accessible to plants, and soon began selling the world's first human-made fertilizer.

Lawes plowed his considerable profits back into research at his family's country estate, which later became the Rothamsted Research center. And there, scientists discovered that phosphorus was a somewhat devious nutrient.

The fertilizer Lawes manufactured contained a soluble, inorganic form of phosphorus that plants can readily use. But as soon as the phosphorus hit the soil, a large fraction of it reacted with soil minerals, forming compounds that crops can't access. Some also got locked away in equally unavailable organic forms.

From those observations, scientists concluded that farmers shouldn't scrimp on phosphorus. They should heap it on, especially as they raced to feed the world's growing populations during the 20 th century.

In fact, it was once Withers' job to spread the word. As a government farm advisor in the 1980s, he drove a red Volvo station wagon around the winding roads of rural England telling farmers to make sure their crops got plenty of key nutrients.

This method, which Withers calls "insurance-based farming," still prevails in many parts of the world. In Europe, farmers apply roughly 4 kilograms of phosphorus for each kilogram that we consume in food. For U.S. diets, that ratio is about 9 to 1, and in China, it may be as high as 13 to 1. (There are crucial exceptions in places where farmers have never had adequate access to phosphorus fertilizer, like many parts of Africa and South America.)

Phosphorus is lost at many stages of food production and processing. But these inefficiencies pose a problem as looming changes in phosphorus availability and price threaten to destabilize the world's food system, Withers says. "We've sort of gone over the top and we've come back to vulnerability."

To make matters worse, some unused fertilizer builds up in the soil, which causes environmental problems long after it's applied, says Helen Jarvie, a hydrochemist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, U.K. Her research shows that it slowly leaks into the environment for decades, confounding well-intentioned efforts by landowners to reduce nutrient pollution.

Even small amounts of phosphorus runoff from farms and sewage are enough to fuel algal blooms that fill waterways with festering green scum. Sometimes, like in Lake Erie, they produce toxins that can foul drinking water and use up dissolved oxygen, killing fish and other aquatic life.

According to one study, phosphorus pollution affects nearly 40 percent of Earth's land areas. And the damage adds up. By one estimate, the impacts of excess phosphorus and nitrogen-another key nutrient-on water quality and ecosystems cost $2.2 billion per year in the U.S. alone.

A slam dunk for plants?

If legacy phosphorus is an environmental liability, it is also a tremendous opportunity, according to Withers and other scientists. He and his colleagues calculated in a 2015 studythat fields in the United Kingdom contain more than $10 billion worth of phosphorus, enough to meet the country's fertilizer demand for up to 54 years.

Many other nations possess similar reserves. A 2012 analysis found that global soils contain enough legacy phosphorus to cut the projected demand for new fertilizer in half by 2050.

"The plants can use our mistakes from the past," says Sheida Sattari, lead author of the study.

By the numbers, legacy phosphorus looks like a slam dunk. But can plants actually live on it? Studies suggest that, in places with long histories of phosphorus overuse, like the U.K., crops can thrive for 10 years or more on the stores built up in the ground. The most extreme example comes from Saskatchewan, where researchers haven't added phosphorus to plots of wheat since 1995. Twenty-five years later they still haven't seen problems.

Conventional measures of soil chemistry suggest they should apply more fertilizer, says Barbara Cade-Menun, who oversees the experiments at the Swift Current Research and Development Center in Canada. "But our yields aren't changing."

Scientists think that as plants use up the readily available phosphorus in the fields, soil minerals and organic matter release more of the nutrient. Cade-Menun doesn't yet know whether changes in soil chemistry, soil microbes, or plants themselves can explain what's happening in her plots. Regardless, the results suggest that those inaccessible forms of phosphorus that the Rothamsted researchers fretted about aren't quite as off-limits as scientists once thought.

And that means just cutting back on fertilizer could go a long way to meeting phosphorus demand and reducing runoff without jeopardizing harvests.

Smarter crops

At some point, however, soil phosphorus drops low enough that crops become stressed. That's partly because some of it really is out of reach for plants, but also because many modern crops cannot get ahold of what is there.

The scarcity of phosphorus in nature forced wild plants to develop strategies for securing an adequate supply. Many evolved extensive root systems that search out phosphorus. Some can also excrete chemicals to liberate the nutrient from the soil.

But most commercial crops don't have those abilities. Scientists cultivated them in well-fertilized soils that didn't require plants to spend energy deploying such tools. And, in a world of plentiful resources, breeders didn't select for varieties with strong phosphorus-harvesting traits. The result, says Phil Haygarth, a soil scientist at Lancaster University, is "a load of fast-growing, dumb plants" that struggle to extract phosphorus from the soil.

Researchers now want to create smarter crops. In 2012, scientists identified a gene in an ancient variety of Japanese rice that enhanced the plant's ability to find phosphorus by growing fine roots. Researchers then bred the trait into modern rice plants, and in 2019 farmers in Madagascar-which has naturally nutrient-poor soils-started testing some of the most promising varieties.

Sigrid Heuer, a researcher at Rothamsted who helped with the rice study, is searching for a similar gene in wheat as part of the International Wheat Yield Partnership. Other scientists are developing crop varieties that don't need as much phosphorus in the first place.

Besides breeding, no-till farming could help by preventing soil compaction and encouraging good root development to help plants access more legacy phosphorus. Adding symbiotic fungi that spread through the soil may extend a plant's underground reach, and growing crops alongside legumes and other plants that secrete phosphorus-releasing compounds can free up more of the nutrient.

Withers and Sylvester-Bradley have been running down the phosphorus levels in their test fields for the exact purpose of exploring these kinds of approaches.

The researchers had to abandon the barley field in Cambridge because of changes in farm ownership. But at the remaining sites, phosporus levels have finally dipped low enough for them to start conducting experiments on how to help plants access as much legacy phosphorus as possible. The first will compare the performance of existing commercial wheat varieties.

The researchers had to wait longer than expected-nearly a decade-for phosphorus levels to drop back to natural levels. But that fact alone should reassure growers that they can safely cut back on the nutrient, Sylvester-Bradley says.

"The take-home for farmers, as far as I'm concerned, is they can relax."
This story was supported by a science journalism fellowship from the European Geosciences Union.

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Farmers are facing a phosphorus crisis. The solution starts with soil.

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On an overcast day, Roger Sylvester-Bradley walks along a hawthorn hedge, collecting a thick rind of mud on his leather boots, before stepping into a gently sloping field of barley. He stoops to pluck an ankle-high seedling from the ground and examines its healthy mop of fine white roots.

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In a country where most older adults rely heavily on their families, the continuing drop in births could have a seismic effect in the decades to come.

Officials hoped that a reversal of China's one-child policy would significantly raise the birthrate, but that has not materialized. Credit... Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

BEIJING - The number of babies born in China last year fell to a nearly six-decade low, exacerbating a looming demographic crisis that is set to reshape the world's most populous nation and threaten its economic vitality.

About 14.6million babies were born in China in 2019, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That was a nearly 4 percent fall from the previous year, and the lowest official number of births in China since 1961, the last year of a widespread famine in which millions of people starved to death. That year, only 11.8 million babies were born.

Births in China have now fallen for three years in a row. They had risen slightly in 2016, a year after the government ended its one-child policy and allowed couples to have two children, a shift that officials hoped would drive a sustained increase in the number of newborns. But that has not materialized.

Experts say the slowdown is rooted in several trends, including the rise of women in the work force who are educated and don't see marriage as necessary to achieving financial security, at least for themselves. For Chinese couples, many cannot afford to have children as living costs increase and their jobs demand more time and energy. And attitudes have shifted.

"It's a society where nobody wants to get married and people can't afford to have children," said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. "On a deeper level, you would have to think about what kind of society China will become, not just demographically, but socially."

Eno Zhang, a 37-year-old engineer in a tech company in Beijing, said he had argued with his parents for 10 years about his decision not to have children. They have since given up, he said.

"I value my spiritual life and hobbies," Mr. Zhang said. "Children will consume too much of my energy. This is something I cannot accept."

While many countries are struggling with low fertility rates and aging populations, these issues are even more pressing in China, because the country's underdeveloped social safety net means that most older adults rely heavily on their families to pay for health care, retirement and other expenses. Many young married couples are expected to shoulder the burden of taking care of their parents, in-laws and grandparents, without the support of siblings.

The birthrate in China fell to 10.48 per thousand last year, the lowest since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, a decline that has important implications for the country's economy and labor pool. If birthrates continue to fall while life expectancy increases, there will not be enough young people to support the economy and the elderly, the fastest-growing segment of the population.

That will put pressure on the country's underfunded pension systems, its overcrowded hospitals, and companies.

Making matters worse, the slowing birthrate has meant that China's main state pension fund, which relies on tax revenues from its work force, risks running out of money by 2035 because of a decline in the number of workers, according to research commissioned by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Despite the looming demographic crisis, the government still maintains tight control over reproduction.

The ruling Communist Party had sought for three decades to slow population growth by limiting most couples to one child and forcing many women to undergo abortions and sterilizations. In 2015, alarmed by the slump in births, it increased that limit to two children.

Even as the government is now trying to encourage people to have babies, it is sending mixed signals. It still punishes couples who exceed the birth restrictions. The authorities fine single women who bear children, and bar them from using reproductive technologies like freezing their eggs.

The government's effort to raise the birthrate is also running into broader economic and social changes.

Education, housing and health care costs are rising. More women are getting university degrees and are reluctant to interrupt their careers.Some among the current generation of women of childbearing age, themselves the product of the "one child" policy, don't see what the fuss about offspring is all about.

Dong Chang, a 28-year-old administrative employee at a dentist's clinic in Beijing, said millennials like her enjoyed spending on themselves without batting an eyelid and would find it hard to sacrifice their wants for a child.

"We are all only children, and to be honest, a little selfish," she said. "How can I raise a child when I'm still a child myself? And take care of him and feed him at midnight?"

Ms. Dong said that she was living with her boyfriend but that they had decided to not get married for the time being because they didn't want their parents to hound them about having children.

Melody Lin, a 26-year-old worker at a nonprofit, said she couldn't think of a reason to have a child. She said she had thought about conforming to societal norms and starting a family but decided against it after reading arguments that not all women need to have children.

"My parents think that I'm still young and will change my mind when I get older, but I think it's unlikely," she said.

China's total fertility rate - an estimate of the number of babies a woman would have over her lifetime - has fallen to 1.6 children per woman, and for years has generally remained below the "replacement" level of 2.1.That means China could soon see a shrinking population and a work force too small to support its pensioners.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said last year that China's population contraction would begin in 2027. Others believe it will come sooner or has already begun. The accuracy and completeness of China's population figures, like other sensitive statistics, have been questioned for years, making exact projections and comparisons difficult.

Cai Yong, an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, said he expected the low fertility rate to continue for at least a decade.

"There are a lot of parallels with this demographic crisis to global warming," Dr. Cai said. "The waters are rising slowly, and we need a longer term strategy to deal with it."

Elsie Chen contributed research.

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China's Birthrate Hits Historic Low, in Looming Crisis for Beijing

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In a country where most older adults rely heavily on their families, the continuing drop in births could have a seismic effect in the decades to come. BEIJING - The number of babies born in China last year fell to a nearly six-decade low, exacerbating a looming demographic crisis that is set to reshape the world's most populous nation and threaten its economic vitality.

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When we think about threats to the environment, we tend to picture cars and smokestacks, not dinner. But the truth is, our need for food poses one of the biggest dangers to the planet.

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It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy - The New York Times

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It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy - The New York Times

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A new study shows that death rates increased for middle-aged people of all racial and ethnic groups.

A makeshift memorial in Philadelphia to drug overdose victims during a demonstration supporting supervised injection sites in September. Credit... Matt Rourke/Associated Press

As the life expectancy of Americans has declined over a period of three years - a drop driven by higher death rates among people in the prime of life - the focus has been on the plight of white Americans in rural areas who were dying from so-called deaths of despair: drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide.

But a new analysis of more than a half-century of federal mortality data, published on Tuesday in JAMA, found that the increased death rates among people in midlife extended to all racial and ethnic groups, and to suburbs and cities. And while suicides, drug overdoses and alcoholism were the main causes, other medical conditions, including heart disease, strokes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, also contributed, the authors reported.

"The whole country is at a health disadvantage compared to other wealthy nations," the study's lead author, Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, said. "We are losing people in the most productive period of their lives. Children are losing parents. Employers have a sicker work force."

That some Americans' life spans were decreasing has been well established. But the level of detail in Tuesday's study was new, as was the rich analysis of the geography of the declines. Health experts say the full effect was startling.

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The increase in deaths among people in midlife highlighted the lagging health measures in the United States compared with other wealthy nations, despite the fact that the United States has the highest per capita health spending in the world, noted an editorial that accompanied the study.

"Mortality has improved year to year over the course of the 20th century," said Dr. Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania. "The 21st century is a major exception. Since 2010 there's been no improvement in mortality among working-aged people."

While the total number of excess deaths - meaning the number of deaths that would not have happened if the mortality rate had continued to improve - is small, at 33,000, deaths in younger people have a much bigger effect on national life-expectancy estimates than deaths of people in their 80s or 90s.

Death rates are actually improving among children and older Americans, Dr. Woolf noted, perhaps because they may have more reliable health care - Medicaid for many children and Medicare for older people.

According to the new study, the death rate from 2010 to 2017 for all causes among people ages 25 to 64 increased from 328.5 deaths per 100,000 people to 348.2 deaths per 100,000. It was clear statistically by 2014 that it was not just whites who were affected, but all racial and ethnic groups and that the main causes were drug overdoses, alcohol and suicides.

"The fact that it's so expansive and involves so many causes of death - it's saying that there's something broader going on in our country," said Ellen R. Meara, a professor of health policy at Dartmouth College. "This no longer limited to middle-aged whites."

The states with the greatest relative increases in death rates among young and middle-aged adults were New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, West Virginia and Ohio.

Dr. Woolf said one of the findings showed that the excess deaths were highly concentrated geographically, with fully a third of them in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana.

"What's not lost on us is what is going on in those states," he said. "The history of when this health trend started happens to coincide with when these economic shifts began - the loss of manufacturing jobs and closure of steel mills and auto plants."

For demographers like Kenneth Wachter, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, the study's findings are not surprising because there have been a number of similar reports. But, he said, "it is a valuable paper in bringing together these trends."

The study leaves unanswered questions, including, Why is there an increased death rate only in the 25-to-64 age group?

"We need to look at root causes," Dr. Woolf said. "Something changed in the 1980s, which is when the growth in our life expectancy began to slow down compared to other wealthy nations."

The increased deaths from drug overdoses reflected increased rates of addiction to opioids. But they have also risen because of changes in the drug supply in the East and Midwest. Over the last decade, the synthetic drug known as fentanyl has been mixed into heroin - or in some places has replaced it. That has made the drug supply more deadly, since it is difficult for users to know the dose they are taking.

This is not the first time that life expectancy has gotten stuck in the United States. Male life expectancy stalled in the 1960s, Dr. Preston said. It picked up again, and the gains made since have been substantial.

Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal, offered a word of caution.

"I'm not sure the dramatic, 'there's something desperately wrong with the entire country' narrative is entirely accurate," Dr. Harper said. "Certain groups, such as Hispanics and Asians, are doing O.K. It's not like the entire country is being subsumed by a single social phenomenon that can explain all of this. There are a lot of moving parts."

He added: "The U.S. has made dramatic gains in life expectancy over the past several decades. It's important to remember that people here live a very long time compared to a lot of places in the world."

John G. Haaga, director of the division of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, which funded this study, also saw a bright spot: Life expectancy in the coastal metro areas - both east and west - has improved at roughly the same rate as in Canada.

"It's important because it means this is not somehow deep in our national soul or genetics or something," he said. "We know we can do better right here in America. It proves that it's possible."

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It's Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy

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A new study shows that death rates increased for middle-aged people of all racial and ethnic groups. As the life expectancy of Americans has declined over a period of three years - a drop driven by higher death rates among people in the prime of life - the focus has been on the plight of white Americans in rural areas who were dying from so-called deaths of despair: drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide.

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Birth rate in U.S. falls to lowest level in 32 years, CDC says

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Birth rate in U.S. falls to lowest level in 32 years, CDC says

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The number of babies born in the U.S. in 2018 fell to the lowest level in 32 years, according to a government report released Wednesday.

The numbers are part of a decadeslong trend toward fewer and fewer babies being born each year - which means we're getting further away from the possibility of having enough children to replace ourselves, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"The major finding is that the fertility rates are reaching record lows," said the report's lead author, Brady Hamilton, a statistician and demographer at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. "There have been record lows in the teenage birth rate, which fell 7 percent compared to 2017."

Hamilton and his colleagues found that the total number of births in 2018, at 3,788,235, was down 2 percent from 2017. The general fertility rate for 2018 was 59.0 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, another record low for the U.S.

For perspective, it's lower than in the years after the Great Depression. In 1936, for example, the general fertility rate was 75.6.

More telling, perhaps, is the drop in the "total fertility rate," which also fell 2 percent compared to 2017 figures, to 1,728 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

For the nation's population to reproduce itself at current numbers and remain stable, the total fertility rate would need to be at least 2,100 births per 1,000 women. So, essentially, for the population to remain stable, each woman needs to have at least two babies. At 2,000 there would be enough children to replace fathers and mothers. The extra 100 is to account for deaths.

The CDC research doesn't explain why birth rates are declining, Hamilton said.

There was some good news in the new report: Fewer babies are being born to teens. In fact, "these are record lows for teenage birth rates," Hamilton said. "This year's rate is 7 percent lower than in 2017."

Overall, the report finds that younger women are having fewer babies, with the only demographic seeing an increase in birth rates is women in their late 30s and early 40s.

The patterns seen in the U.S. echo what's been happening in many developed countries, said Dr. John W. Rowe, a professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. "For comparison, the total fertility rate in Europe is 1.58, in Southern Europe, meaning Spain and Italy, it's 1.3, and in Japan, it's 1.44," Rowe said. "So this is not unprecedented."

There are some serious implications that could result from the declining birth rates, Rowe said. "Long term it means we're going to have an increasing proportion of older people," he added. "All the projections about what percent of the population will be elderly in 5, 10, 20 years from now were made with the assumption that the birth rate would be stable."

The lowered birthrate will "have a significant impact on the labor force," Rowe said.

Japan in particular is having issues related to declining birthrates because of its immigration policies, Rowe said. "They don't have an adequate workforce to take care of a very large elderly population," he explained. "It's a real challenge for them."

Studies have shown that women are delaying both marriage and childbirth, said Donna Strobino, professor and chair of education, population, family and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "We're clearly in the throes of major social change with regard to women getting married and choosing to have children," she added. "There's no question that part of the explanation for that is economic. It's very expensive to raise children these days. And in part it's social - all the changes in women's roles."

Still, there are hints in the new report that the current trend could at least partially reverse itself, said Strobino. "It's perhaps not as gloom and doom as some think it is," Strobino said.

She points to the increase in the number of babies being born to women in their late 30s and early 40s, which she sees as a possible sign that the fertility rate could recover eventually. It's possible that women who have been postponing pregnancy may have the babies they were planning to have and that could reverse the trend.

Maybe, says Dr. Helen Kim. But maybe not.

"As a fertility specialist, I worry that delaying childbearing will result in more fertility problems," said Kim, an associate professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

Fertility - particularly women's fertility - declines with age.

"I have seen numerous couples who have waited too long," said Kim. "Some have been married for more than 10 years before they think about having kids. There have been many advances in fertility treatment, but there is still no treatment for reproductive aging."

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Birth rate in the U.S. drops again, to its lowest level in 32 years

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The number of babies born in the U.S. in 2018 fell to the lowest level in 32 years, according to a government report released Wednesday. The numbers are part of a decadeslong trend toward fewer and fewer babies being born each year - which means we're getting further away from the possibility of having enough children to replace ourselves, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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How to save a Million People from a Cyclone

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How to save a Million People from a Cyclone

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Cyclone Fani made landfall in Puri, India, on Friday. Officials said the gusts reached at least 100 m.p.h. Credit Credit Dibyangshu Sarkar/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

BHUBANESWAR, India - Flights were canceled.

Train service was out.

And one of the biggest storms in years was bearing down on Odisha, one of India's poorest states, where millions of people live cheek by jowl in a low-lying coastal area in mud-and-stick shacks.

But government authorities in Odisha, along India's eastern flank, hardly stood still. To warn people of what was coming, they deployed everything they had: 2.6 million text messages, 43,000 volunteers, nearly 1,000 emergency workers, television commercials, coastal sirens, buses, police officers, and public address systems blaring the same message on a loop, in local language, in very clear terms: "A cyclone is coming. Get to the shelters."
[Update: "The worst is over": A sigh of relief in India, mostly spared by cyclone.]
It seems to have largely worked. Cyclone Fani slammed into Odisha on Friday morning with the force of a major hurricane, packing 120 mile per hour winds. Trees were ripped from the ground and many coastal shacks smashed. It could have been catastrophic.

But as of early Saturday, mass casualties seemed to have been averted. While the full extent of the destruction remained unclear, only a few deaths had been reported, in what appeared to be an early-warning success story.

The most vulnerable people, it seemed, had gotten out of the way.

Experts say this is a remarkable achievement, especially in a poor state in a developing country, the product of a meticulous evacuation plan in which the authorities, sobered by past tragedies, moved a million people to safety, really fast.

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Passengers at a train station in Kolkata after trains to Odisha were canceled. Credit Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

"Few would have expected this kind of organizational efficiency," said Abhijit Singh, a former naval officer and head of the Maritime Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, a research organization. "It is a major success."

The storm also hit neighboring Bangladesh, but there, too, large numbers of casualties were avoided by evacuating more than one million people to shelters.

This is so different from 20 years ago, when a fearsome cyclone blasted into this same area and obliterated villages, killing thousands. Many people were caught flat-footed in their homes. Some of the dead were found miles from where they had lived, dragged away by raging cascades.

After that, the Odisha authorities vowed to ensure a disaster like that never felled them again.

"We have a very serious commitment on this - there should not be any loss of life," said Bishnupada Sethi, the state's special relief commissioner, who has been supervising the operation. "This is not the work of a day or a month but of 20 years."

One of the first steps taken after the 1999 disaster was the construction of hundreds of cyclone shelters up and down the coast. The shelters are built up to a few miles from the seashore.

They aren't picturesque - picture a bare two-story, peeling-paint, cement-block rectangular building on stilts, almost resembling a crab. But the structures, designed by the faculty at one of India's elite universities, I.I.T. Kharagpur, have proved storm-worthy.

Ravaged street stalls in Puri on Friday. Credit Dibyangshu Sarkar/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Villagers in Odisha State leaving on Thursday, ahead of Cyclone Fani. Credit Reuters

All emergency personnel were ordered to district operation centers. Government workers drafted lists of people in vulnerable houses, particularly the elderly and children.

Tourists at coastal hotels were advised to leave and an enormous amount of equipment was readied to deal with the storm's aftermath, including 300 power boats, two helicopters and many chain saws, to cut downed trees.

At the same time, truckloads of food and bottled water were delivered to the shelters.

As the sea turned frothy on Thursday afternoon and the rain began to fall, the loudspeakers blared messages telling people to go to the nearest shelter as soon as possible.

Packed buses of evacuees chugged up and down the roads around Puri, a coastal town that officials feared would be walloped. Credit Associated Press

Many people, even if they hadn't lost their lives, lost their livelihoods.

"Nature punishes the poor people more and spares the rich," said S.K. Behra, the owner of a smashed tea stall in Bhubaneswar. "What can I do? I am helpless. Slowly I will rebuild my life again."

But as the storm weakened and the worst seemed over, there was little doubt that the high level of preparedness had saved lives.

"The government is usually dysfunctional in cases like this but the whole mobilization was quite impressive," said Mr. Singh, the former naval officer. "Evacuating a million people in three or four days and providing them with not just shelter but also food is a big achievement in such a short time."

Krishan Kumar, an officer in the Khordha district of the Odisha government, said the government's success reflected an accumulated wisdom.

"Every small cyclone or tsunami teaches you how to deal with the bigger ones," he said. "If you don't learn from the past experiences, you will drown."

Hari Kumar reported from Bhubaneswar, Jeffrey Gettleman from New Delhi and Sameer Yasir from Srinagar, Kashmir. Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

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How Do You Save a Million People From a Cyclone? Ask a Poor State in India

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BHUBANESWAR, India - Flights were canceled. Train service was out. And one of the biggest storms in years was bearing down on Odisha, one of India's poorest states, where millions of people live cheek by jowl in a low-lying coastal area in mud-and-stick shacks. But government authorities in Odisha, along India's eastern flank, hardly stood still.

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Climate Change Enters Its blood-Sucking Phase

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Climate Change Enters Its blood-Sucking Phase

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As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move.

Jonathan Bartlett

We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had turned his long, gaunt head to rest against his side and closed his eyes. He might have been sleeping. The day before, April 17, 2018, when the GPS tracker on the moose's collar stopped moving for six hours, this stillness had caused both an email and a text to alert Jake Debow, a Vermont state field biologist who stood next to me now with Josh Blouin, another state biologist, that moose No. 75 had either shucked his collar or died.

"You want pictures before we start?" Debow asked me. He's the senior of the two young biologists, both still in grad school, both in their late 20s, young and strong and funny, from families long in the north country, both drawn to the job by a love of hunting and being outside. Debow had always wanted to be a game warden; in college, he "fell in love with the science." His Vermont roots go back 10 generations. "Jake Debow," Josh told me, "is about as Vermont as you can get." It was Debow's second season on the moose project, and Blouin's first. This was the sixth calf, of 30 collared, that they'd found sucked to death by ticks this season. They were here to necropsy the carcass, send the tissues to a veterinary pathology lab in New Hampshire, and try to figure out as much as possible about how and why these calves were dying.

First, they weighed him. To the trunk of the big spruce they strapped a custom-made scale-a steel ell with three pulleys and a thick rope to which they hooked a spring scale. They wrestled the moose onto a heavy net, collected the net's four corners, and with the triple-pulley system and considerable effort, hoisted him off the ground. "Any guesses?" Debow asked after they'd secured the rope. The moose swung slowly just above the snow. I asked what this ten-month-old calf would have weighed if healthy: about 400 pounds. Blouin guessed 286. Debow said 312. I said 299. Debow looked at the scale. "Two-seventy. Lightest one yet." The ticks had taken a third of this animal's weight.

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They gently lowered the calf to the ground and pulled him from the net. Debow took a six-inch steel ruler from his jacket pocket, kneeled behind the moose's shoulder, and, with his hands, parted the fur and held it down, as one might hold a stiff-spined book to spread its pages, to expose a narrow, tick-width channel of skin some six inches long. Rather, he exposed not the moose's skin, but some 50 ticks that completely obscured it. A few were male moose ticks, which sport a jagged fan pattern of tan and brown. Most were females, which have tan heads and tan legs that are conspicuous next to their dark, raisin-colored bodies. Beginning early in April, pregnant females living on a moose-and most females are pregnant-take a "blood meal," sucking themselves full for days in anticipation of dropping to the ground to lay their hundreds of eggs. About half the females on this moose were in that engorged state. Swollen to 10 times their normal size, these ticks were stretched until they turned pale, like raisins morphed into cadaver-toned grapes. When a moose so infested rises from sleep, the imprint left behind in the snow is dotted and smudged with spots of blood.

Debow, wielding his ruler, called out square-centimeter tick counts to Blouin: nine ticks in the first square centimeter, seven engorged; eight in the second, none engorged; 28, four engorged; eight, none. This count would later produce an estimated infestation total of just under 14,000 ticks. This was actually far fewer than they often found, but it was enough to render this calf chronically anemic from January through March and then acutely, fatally anemic in the last couple of weeks of his life. In April, when the gravid females start taking their blood meals, the blood loss over their last two to four weeks aboard the moose "can equate to a calf's total blood volume," according to one recent paper-some three and a half gallons. As Inga Sidor, the New Hampshire state veterinary pathologist who processed the tissue samples Debow and Blouin took that day, later told me, the ticks "literally bleed the moose to death."

Two months before, in mid-March, I had gotten my pre-fieldwork briefing from Vermont's moose-team leader, Cedric Alexander, at his house in the snowy countryside in Cabot, Vermont. Smack in the middle of the northernmost quarter of the state, Cabot is an apt spot for Alexander. One of 11 children (four of them twins), he was born in the 1950s in the state's wildest, emptiest, northeasternmost county, Essex, a place of mostly farms and timberland. He grew up fishing for trout and hunting deer, rabbit (with a beagle), and upland birds. When he was in middle school, his family moved across the state to the most citified, populous county, Chittenden, where he eventually earned a degree in wildlife biology at the University of Vermont. He has spent almost all of the 37 years since working as a state wildlife biologist, ranging around the physical and social landscape between Essex County and Burlington. He still believes in hunting-in its power to compel intimacy with a landscape, its honesty about where meat comes from, its world-erasing focus. He looks forward each fall to deer and moose season partly because he gets to staff the department's weigh stations, most of them at the back of small-town general stores or gun shops-the Rack N' Reel, Pauline's Quick Stop, Mr. O's Sporting Goods-where he queries the hunters who bring their take to be weighed and examined. Good stories, he says, and good intel.

Alexander is a tall man, lean and pleasant, relaxed at home. He was making coffee when I arrived, dressed in jeans and a green-and-black plaid shirt of heavy wool. After stirring us each a cup, he led me to a den beyond the living room. We sat on a big ruby-red modular sofa that framed a tinkling woodstove. Otherwise, it was dead quiet. Out the window, a sun-glinted snowfield sloped away under a brilliant blue sky.

Alexander got into wildlife because he loved birds, he said, and still does. But in a department organized along vernacular lines, he ended up on neither the feather nor fin team, but the fur. That was 1980. At the time, he said, "We didn't have any moose." Close; the official estimate that year, I later found, was 200. Moose, along with beavers, bears, fishers, eagles, and many other animals that were once abundant all over northern New England, had been killed off and driven from Vermont, New Hampshire, and most of Maine by the 1800s through uncontrolled hunting, trapping, water pollution, and logging. This environmental destruction, two centuries in the making, was the first of the ecological casualties of North America's European immigration, and it remains one of the most astounding. When Europeans arrived, 80 percent of northern New England was forested. By 1850, using just handsaws and fire, they had stripped away three- quarters of that-almost 16 million acres-and left only 20 to 25 percent forested.

Another reversal was to come. Starting in the mid-1800s-at first accidentally, as post-Civil War farmers fled west for better soil, and then more and more intentionally-the people of New England righted these ratios; by 1990, the region was 85 percent forested. This recovery, the noted environmentalist Bill McKibben has written, is one of America's greatest and perhaps least-recognized conservation victories. In the past 50 years, and especially the past 30, many of the species driven out centuries ago have returned. They came down from Canada or over from lands west to which they'd retreated: eagles, peregrine falcons, other birds of prey; pine siskin and black-throated blue warblers; salmon and brook trout; beavers, bears, bobcats, fishers; and moose.
Bill McKibben: An explosion of green
The moose was the last to reappear. Perhaps because of this late return, and definitely because of their strange magnificence, the moose, Alces alces, holds a singular place in the hearts of New Englanders. In a land of straightforward, understated, and sometimes stubborn people, it's a straightforward, understated, and sometimes stubborn beast.

Adult moose are huge, with females averaging more than 800 pounds and males about 1,100, and some weigh as much as 1,700 pounds. Yet this ponderous, overbuilt beast can run as fast as 35 miles an hour, which would pose some competition to most elite racehorses. See ya, Secretariat. Even belly-deep snow barely slows a full-grown moose. In water, the same moose could swim neck and neck with Michael Phelps at his fastest, about six miles an hour-and after a couple hundred meters, as Phelps fades, keep that pace for another two hours. Their long front legs let them easily clear fences or downed trees. YouTube has a clip of one jumping over the hood of a car as if it's a puddle.

These and other charms made the returning moose an official mascot in Maine, an unofficial mascot in New Hampshire and Vermont, and a sort of sacred beast throughout New England. Three years ago, in my adopted hometown of Montpelier, Vermont, I emerged from the hardware store early one summer Sunday morning and watched as a moose wandered casually down the empty Main Street sidewalk before me-just me and her at the moment-gazing at store displays and peering into the local dive, Charlie-O's ("Good Drinks and Bad Company Since the War Between the States"). We parted ways at Main and State. Later I learned that when someone called the police saying that a moose cow was looking confused on State Street, a cop drove over, flipped on the party lights but left the siren silent, and from a respectful distance, slowly escorted her past the golden-domed statehouse to greener spaces beyond.

Moose had been back for about a decade when Alexander and his moose team recognized that they'd soon have to allow hunting to keep the northernmost population in check. In Alexander's old hunting grounds of Essex County, as in New Hampshire and Maine, the moose, with no predators and abundant browse, were eating so much low-growing greenery that they were reducing the forest's value to not just landowners but other wildlife, from birds to bears, that counted on low growth for food and cover. Maine started hunting moose in 1980, New Hampshire in 1988, and Vermont in 1993. This provoked passionate objections. Moose had been left to thrive for so long, and could be approached so easily, that many people felt it unsporting to hunt them. A deer would generally bolt at first sight. A moose would stand and stare.

Even with the hunt, though, the moose population grew denser, especially in the north. By the mid-2000s, they were thick enough that Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont together were having a thousand moose-vehicle collisions a year. Some of these collisions-usually a moose through the windshield, and in some cases a moose and a motorcycle-killed people. The moose had gone from something you had to take pains to find to something you worried about smacking into.

This was the case in Vermont's northern region in the 2000s, Alexander told me. By then, Vermont had some 5,000 to 6,000 moose, with almost half in the state's Northeast corner. The department decided to cut the overall population to about 3,000, primarily by increasing hunting permits in Essex and adjacent counties. For most of the decade, they increased the number of permits given each year, with a peak 1,251 distributed in both 2007 and 2008 after hunters bagged a record 648 moose in 2006. It seemed the only way to check the growth.

Even as Vermont ramped up hunting, however, state biologists to the east, in moose-heavy New Hampshire, saw signs that moose numbers there were leveling off. To find out why, a research team led by the wildlife biologist Pete Pekins of the University of New Hampshire put radio collars on 92 moose cows and calves each year from 2002 to 2005 and tracked them to measure survival rates and habitat use. Amid a stack of findings that seemed perfectly normal, two things stood out: In 2002, the study's first year, fully half of the calves in the study died in the spring from heavy tick infestations, and the preceding winter had been mild and late in coming, leaving the forest floor free of the snow that usually arrived early in fall, when tick nymphs were looking to attach to wandering mammals. Those two factors seemed to explain New Hampshire's slowdown in moose expansion. As far back as the early 1900s, moose biologists had noted that late-coming warm winters, such as that of 2002, sometimes led to tick irruptions that killed young moose. But such winters were rare. Like droughts, then, these weather-related tick irruptions fit into a pattern of rare stressors that had little long-term impact.

But was it weather related in this case-or climate related?

At the time, in the early 2000s, climate change was being heavily studied as a potential disruptor of New England wildlife, but the focus in current-day wildlife management was still on how to handle the expansion of formerly depleted species, including moose. In a 2002 paper titled "Wildlife Dynamics in the Changing New England Landscape," for instance, a particularly prominent team of regional ecologists at the Harvard Forest research area concluded that the main challenge for managing the moose and other large mammals in the region was their continued expansion. No one was worried yet about climate dinging moose populations. As Pete Pekins would later note, "Moose managers concluded that the winter tick epizootic in [2002] was an anomaly and that the moose population would make a strong comeback in subsequent years, compensating for the losses."

It soon became apparent that they had badly underestimated both the possibility of rapid climate change and the explosive effect that change could have on both moose ticks and young moose.

Jonathan Bartlett

The moose tick, a.k.a. the winter tick-or Dermacentor albipictus, to use its aptly sinister, Potteresque Latin name-feeds on almost every mammal across the reasonably wet parts of North America. But it has an outsize effect on moose. Its life cycle in the northern New England climate is fairly simple. In April, female ticks who have feasted on moose over the winter take their last blood meal and drop off into the leaf litter to deposit several thousand eggs apiece. In May, as the forest starts to leaf out, these eggs release tiny, six-legged larvae called seed ticks. Over the summer, they live on the nutrients from their mothers' winter feast. Around September, these seed ticks start to form loose groups of up to 1,000, which then climb trees or shrubs up to heights of about four to six feet. There, these groups of poppy-seed-sized ticks, having linked their tiny limbs to form long, almost invisible chains, go out on a branch and, as tick biologists call it, "quest." They simply wait, and when a big, tall, blood-filled mammal walks by and brushes the branch, one or more of the ticks grasps the animal's fur and holds tight while the rest of the gang swings as a gossamer-thin thread onto the animal. Then they separate, spread out, follow fur to skin, and dig in.

Two main factors influence how many of these ticks a New England moose will pick up in any given year and area. The biggest factor is the weather from roughly October 1 to January 1, when the seed ticks are questing. A lot of cold and snow during that period, especially early on-normal weather for moose terrain-decimates questing ticks, so that wandering moose are apt to pick up only a few hundred.

The second crucial factor is moose density-that is, how many moose live in a given area and distribute in spring the pregnant tick females whose young will quest in the fall. More wandering moose per square mile increases not just the number of eggs laid, but the number of places they are laid-and thus the number of times that any given wandering moose will encounter questing ticks. When moose are many and winter late, young calves will meet far, far more strands of questers than usual-entire curtains of them-and end up carrying anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 through the winter.

Tick loads so large are unique to moose, perhaps because moose live almost exclusively in places where warm winters are rare, and have developed no defense against such infestations. Unlike their white-tailed deer cousins and most other furry mammals (including humans) that range more widely, moose don't groom one another, and they are not habitual or "obligate" groomers; they groom only themselves, and only when heavily infested. By that time, alas, the ticks are on to stay. In a warm fall, then, a dense moose population seems to prime tick populations for an explosion, and calves for a slow, sucking slaughter in the coming winter.

To the dismay of Cedric Alexander, Jake Debow, Pete Pekins, and many others, such winters became far more common just as moose were growing denser than ever through much of their upper New England range. In the mild, late-coming winters of 2008 and 2011, moose biologists in all three northern New England states, now on the alert, saw signs of more ticks and higher calf mortality. By 2013, New Hampshire and Maine had started an updated, five-year version of the earlier winter moose-collaring study, which Vermont joined in 2015. It is for this study that Jake Debow and Josh Blouin are doing field autopsies on dead, collared moose calves.
Read: As Earth warms, West Nile spreads
The study's results so far are sobering. Before every one of the study's first three winters (that is, the winters that carried into 2014, 2015, and 2016), the autumn was warm and short on snow; and at the end of every one of those winters, mainly in April, ticks sucked the life out of more than half of all collared calves in all three states. In 2016, when much of the study area had received very little snow before January, 80 percent of the collared calves succumbed.

The ticks didn't just kill calves. Their depletions made cows smaller and less fertile. In the decade ending in 2005, when ticks started to take their toll, Vermont moose cows averaged about 575 pounds. By 2015, that dropped to 525-a loss of almost 10 percent. Their ovulation rate dropped some 25 percent, to only 0.67 ova per cow in 2015-the lowest rate ever recorded, and the second consecutive year it was below one. The cows also brought fewer pregnancies to term. Cows, in other words, were having fewer calves to start with, and fewer of those calves were surviving their first winter.

Would cold winters make a difference? They did. In the fall of 2016, the first sustained snows began in October, and calf mortality the following winter-2017-dropped to 30 percent.

But the larger pattern remained alarming. While no one systematically counted tick loads from 2008 to 2012, the fall and winter weather in those four years roughly matched the warm, tick-friendly weather seen in the winters of 2014, 2015, and 2016. This means that, as of October 2018, five of the 10 most recent winters had probably produced epizootic events that killed more than half the calves. Moose in the wild generally live a bit longer than a decade. An entire generation of New England moose might have a top-heavy age structure. And it could get worse, both in New England and in moose range elsewhere in North America.

What is to become of these animals?

With the ticks counted, Debow and Blouin pulled the moose onto a flatter spot. "We'll go tongue to tail," Debow said, "a full field necropsy." They would find and observe every organ, note its condition, and take and pack samples to send to the University of New Hampshire veterinary diagnostic lab for microscopic examination. They would try not to slip and fall into the moose.

They laid the moose right side up, because the organs tend to present themselves better that way, and then set about removing the two right legs. Blouin, holding a leg near the hoof, would lever it ever farther away from the torso as Debow used a scalpel-sharp, white-handled, eight-inch fillet knife to carve through the basketball-sized mound of muscle holding the leg to the joint. It took a few minutes to cut through all the muscle, ligaments, and finally the joint itself. Blouin would then lift the released limb, itself almost as long as he was tall, and lay it gently on the ground.

Debow next removed the hide from the animal's right side. After slicing through the skin along the abdominal midline, he started the knife up at the top of the opening where the front leg had been and shimmied it down along the crease between skin and chest wall, slicing the subcutaneous connective tissue so that he and Blouin, pulling steadily on the animal's thick, tick-encrusted hide, slowly peeled it away. In less than five minutes, they had exposed the calf's rib cage and sack of belly. Blouin picked up a heavy pair of Fiskars tree-branch loppers and snapped through the top of each rib near the spine, the loppers making a crunchy cracking sound each time, then again at their junctions with the sternum. Finally they lifted the right half of the rib cage out as one piece and set it on the snow, concave side up. With its smooth, deep-red intercostal muscles and elegant curves, it looked like a huge, glossy serving dish.

The organs of the chest and abdomen now presented like an anatomy diagram. Despite the gore, the smell of digestion, and the animal's emaciated state, the calf's innards possessed an acute and unexpected beauty. His depletion-his body's desperation to extract from itself every joule of energy-had turned the calf's epithelia, the thin, stretchy linings that surround many organs, and which normally have a milky translucence marbled with pallid blotches of fat, into a gorgeously clear membrane. It was like a shrink-wrapped looking glass. When Debow pulled back the calf's head and opened the underside of its throat, the animal's thick windpipe, so cleanly displayed and perfectly formed and isolated, had the quality of a museum piece-with futuristic overtones, in its distinct, hoselike, mathematically regular segmentation, of the bones and strange tubes of the monster in Alien. No atlas or animation ever so beautifully displayed a trachea.

When possible, they dismantled him in systems. The entire trachea and the lungs soon lay in one piece on the snow. Blouin, snipping a sample of lung tissue for the lab, showed me the thin strands of lungworm: less a cause of illness than a sign of the moose's failing defenses. It went in a sample jar. Debow showed me a fat slice of the kidney, inch-thick like a steak but far smoother, its two lobes a glistening cherry red, brilliant and beautiful in its symmetry. The four chambers of the stomach-the moose is a ruminant-were sliced open and lain flat. The lining of each stomach is smoother and more granular in structure than the one previous. The rumen was like a 1970s shag carpet, color included: a deep pea-soup green from the moose's chawed, swampy vegetarian fare. The reticulum was more a modernist honeycomb; the omasum, minimalist, with stiff, short spikes like a startled pufferfish. Finally, the abomasum, far fleshier and less green, was folded into long, curved, anchored leaves that splayed, as Debow's anatomy teacher taught him, "like the pages of a Bible opened on a stand."

At the end they showed me the brain, first in its cup, with furry ears still behind it, then scooped out and held in Debow's black-gloved hands. It looked distinctly human. My cortex couldn't help but wonder what had been in his.

When done, Debow and Blouin realized they had forgotten to bring a garbage bag in which to carry out the hide and some other parts. They decided to leave all that here. The site was a bit of a slaughterhouse: a leg as long as Debow; the huge head, sans cranium, as big as many a human torso. The entrails, the rib-cage serving dish, and the main carcass with its underside and two attached legs still befurred. Most of it would be gone in three days, Debow said, if not before, as soon as the coyotes found it.

In May, when the snow was gone and the dead counted, the Vermont moose team found that of the 29 calves in their study that winter (one having shucked its collar), 15 died of tick infestation. Fifty-two percent. New Hampshire and Maine had similar results. Northern New England's moose had officially had their fourth tick epizootic event in five years, their sixth in 11.

Over the summer, the Vermont moose team, pondering this mess and reading the literature and talking to colleagues nearby and elsewhere, reached the uncomfortable conclusion that the only way to slow this wintry slaughter was ... to let more people shoot moose in the fall.

They were painfully aware that this would strike many people as nuts. Increase hunting to rescue a failing wildlife population? It appeared to be not just counterintuitive but contrary to the department's straight decade of shrinking the hunts. From 2008 through 2018, as Vermont's moose population dropped from almost 5,000 to fewer than 2,000, the department had reduced permits from 1,251 (in 2008) to just 13 for the 2018 season, which itself was down from 80 the year before. (Even for 2018, they had to settle on 13 because they couldn't get 14 approved.) Seven moose were taken. Walter Medwid, a founding member of the Vermont Wildlife Coalition, told Vermont's Seven Days in early 2018 that he was baffled that the Fish and Wildlife Department "continues to feel the need to put hunting pressures on a species that is truly imperiled." The moose population had plummeted straight past the target population in 2015-and they were going to hunt more? How the hell was that supposed to work?

The answer lies in the aforementioned relationship between moose density and tick numbers per moose. The magic density number seems to be about 0.75 to one moose per square mile, according to Pekins; let moose get denser than that, and you exponentially increase the moose's average tick load and the calves' mortality rate. Thus, as it were, the more moose, the fewer moose.
Read: The deer paradox
Fish and Wildlife can't do much about snow cover. But through hunting permits, they can do something about moose density when needed. On February 27, the department recommended to its board that no moose-hunting permits be issued this year to allow for uninterrupted research.

They could, of course, just let repeated tick irruptions reduce moose numbers. That would take longer and be less controllable. And it would leave unaddressed the huge hole that tick epizootics are eating in the moose population's age structure, with ever fewer moose of prime reproduction age-a trend that could make the moose population older, less fertile, and less resilient at a time when it is facing new challenges.

To some people, of course, letting the ticks do the job might seem a more natural solution. It's not, of course. One of the tragedies of this dilemma-the essence of it-is that whether we shoot the moose or let the ticks suck the young dry, it is we humans, whether through gunshot or climate change, that are killing moose. Jake Debow thinks the hunt would simply be more humane. These tick-ridden calves, he notes, don't just lie down peacefully one day and die. They suffer for months. He has found sites where coyotes came upon a tick-weakened calf and took it apart. "There's always blood," he says, "all over the place.

"And if you've seen one of these calves on the verge of death ..." We were back at the truck now. He thought a minute and then pulled out his phone. "Probably shouldn't do this. But here's one I came across last spring." The video shows a pathetically emaciated calf, probably only 20 feet away from Debow as he filmed it with his phone-far closer than a healthy calf would allow-trying to move away among some young trees. Except the calf can barely move. The slope is gentle and the snow only a couple of inches deep. Yet the calf, his legs a-wobble and his head moving uncertainly, looks ready to fall at any second. Repeatedly he tries to lift a foreleg and stride forward, but cannot. He seems to sense that if he falls, he will not rise. After several seconds, he finally succeeds. One step. Debow followed him until dark, he said, before he had to head home. The next morning he found the calf dead, just a few yards from where he had last seen him.

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Climate Change Enters Its Blood-Sucking Phase

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As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move. We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch.

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The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America - The New York Times

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The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America - The New York Times

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Becoming a mother used to be seen as a unifying milestone for women in the United States. But a new analysis of four decades of births shows that the age that women become mothers varies significantly by geography and education. The result is that children are born into very different family lives, heading for diverging economic futures.

First-time mothers are older in big cities and on the coasts, and younger in rural areas and in the Great Plains and the South. In New York and San Francisco, their average age is 31 and 32. In Todd County, S.D., and Zapata County, Tex., it's half a generation earlier, at 20 and 21, according to the analysis, which was of all birth certificates in the United States since 1985 and nearly all for the five years prior. It was conducted for The New York Times by Caitlin Myers, an economist who studies reproductive policy at Middlebury College, using data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

The difference in when women start families cuts along many of the same lines that divide the country in other ways, and the biggest one is education. Women with college degrees have children an average of seven years later than those without - and often use the years in between to finish school and build their careers and incomes.

People with a higher socioeconomic status "just have more potential things they could do instead of being a parent, like going to college or grad school and having a fulfilling career," said Heather Rackin, a sociologist at Louisiana State University who studies fertility. "Lower-socioeconomic-status people might not have as many opportunity costs - and motherhood has these benefits of emotional fulfillment, status in their community and a path to becoming an adult."

There has long been an age gap for first-time mothers, which has narrowed a bit in recent years, driven largely by fewer teenage births, Ms. Myers said. Yet the gap may be more meaningful today. Researchers say the differences in when women start families are a symptom of the nation's inequality -- and as moving up the economic ladder has become harder, mothers' circumstances could have a bigger effect on their children's futures.

A college degree is increasingly essential to earning a middle-class wage, and older parents have more years to earn money to invest in violin lessons, math tutoring and college savings accounts - all of which can set children on very different paths. Yet an education and a high-paying career also seem out of reach for many people.

"These education patterns do help drive inequality, because well-educated women are really pulling ahead of the pack by waiting to have kids," said Caroline Hartnett, a sociologist and demographer studying fertility and families at the University of South Carolina. "But if going to college and achieving an upper-middle-class lifestyle seems unattainable, then having a family might seem like the most accessible source of meaning to you."

College is a stronger factor than geography or home prices. The average age of first birth among college-educated women doesn't vary much between counties with large, expensive cities and those with smaller, more affordable ones. In Hennepin County, the home of Minneapolis, where Zillow says the typical home costs $259,000, the average age of first birth for a college-educated woman is 31. In Brooklyn, where the average home costs $788,000, it's 32.

Counties with the oldest first-time mothers

When do women enter motherhood in your county?

The gulf aligns with other disparities in the way Americans live - including differing attitudes about the role of women.

The law professors June Carbone and Naomi Cahn described in a 2010 book how red and blue families were living different lives. The biggest differentiating factor, they said, was the age that mothers had children. Young mothers are more likely to be conservative and religious, to value traditional gender roles and to reject abortion. Older mothers tend to be liberal, and to split breadwinning and caregiving responsibilities more equally with men, they found.

"In places where people have children earlier and younger, it doesn't mean they're less happy, but they are less gender equal in terms of economics," said Philip Cohen, a sociologist studying families and social inequality at the University of Maryland.

New parents tend to be older in general. The average age of first-time mothers is 26, up from 21 in 1972, and for fathers it's 31, up from 27. Women are having babies later in other developed countries, too: In Switzerland, Japan, Spain, Italy and South Korea, the average age of first birth is 31.

In the United States, it increased sharply in the 1970s, after abortion was legalized. Now, more people are going to college and marrying later, and there has been a large decline in teenage pregnancy and a rise in the use of long-acting birth control like IUDs.

But the experiences of American mothers look very different across the country. People are more likely than before to live in places surrounded by people like them. And local factors - job opportunities, housing prices and social mores about things like going to church and using contraception - all influence their family planning.

"It feels like no one here has babies under 35 anymore," said Mary Norton, interim chair of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Because of fertility treatments and genetic testing, there is less fear about health complications and less stigma about having babies after 35, she said.

By that age, parents are more likely to have one or more degrees and to be planning to invest in their children's educations. The wage penalty for women who have children is high, so many try to advance in their careers before giving birth. They are more likely than young mothers to be married, and less likely to divorce.

They're also less likely to live near their children's grandparents, or because their parents are older, they juggle child care with elder care. And they might have fewer children than they hoped, because fertility declines during a woman's 30s.

Ellen Scanlon, who lives in San Francisco, became a first-time mother three months ago at age 40. First she went to business school, built a career in finance and started a strategy consulting firm. She met her future husband when she was 31, but they were in no rush to start a family.

"We were just having a really good time," she said. "We love to travel, we were really happy we found each other, and I think I sort of believed you can have a baby when you want."

But after they married, when she was 36, they struggled with fertility. It took three and a half years of visiting specialists around the country before she became pregnant via in vitro fertilization.

Being further along in her career gave her flexibility to take time off for treatments and a long maternity leave, she said: "I have more confidence that it's not going to be that challenging to pull it back together."

It has also given her and her husband, who works in financial services, enough money to have already started a college savings account for their infant son, Lee, and to be able to enroll him in private school and to travel. "We're dying to take him places and just show him that the world is large," she said.

Women who have children young tend to live in areas that view family ties as paramount. Parents might be physically healthier because of their youth, and the children's grandparents are younger and often live nearby. But parents are less likely to have significant savings or a college degree and career. Their pregnancies are more likely to be unintended, and three-quarters of first-time mothers under 25 are unmarried.

Natalia Maani, an obstetrician at Starr County Hospital in Rio Grande City, Tex., where the average age of first birth is 22, said very few of her pregnant patients are married, and she can count on two hands the number of pregnancies that were planned. Many can't afford birth control, she said. Most wouldn't consider abortion, and there is no provider nearby. And the cultural norm is to start families young.

"People here don't have a population going from high school to college," she said. "There's no thoughts about getting your degree, becoming independent or traveling the world."

Sadie Marie Groff, who lives in Missoula, Mont., was 20 when she had her first son, Dahvon. It wasn't planned, and she wasn't married. She had two more boys, Allen and Zayden, with a different man, who is now her husband.

She hadn't thought much about college before becoming pregnant, she said, but her goal now is to get a degree in radiologic technology, once she has time to take courses. Now 28, she takes care of her children during the day and works three-hour shifts as a health aide at night.

Being a young mother has benefits, she said: "I still have a lot of energy to deal with them, and when they get older, I won't be too old."

But it has been financially difficult. When she was pregnant with her second baby, she temporarily moved into a home run by Mountain Home Montana, a nonprofit aimed at helping young mothers. It also provides child care and employment counseling, and she receives government assistance for housing and health care.

Research has shown that where children start in life strongly influences where they end up. Providing resources for young mothers and children - like the program that helped Ms. Groff, and policies like affordable child care and college - can help smooth the differences. "The strategy," Ms. Rackin, the L.S.U. sociologist, said, "is to provide the best opportunities for children."

The average age of first birth is based on birth certificate data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Data is not shown for counties where there were fewer than 10 first births. Data from each year is averaged with the previous two years.

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The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America

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Becoming a mother used to be seen as a unifying milestone for women in the United States. But a new analysis of four decades of births shows that the age that women become mothers varies significantly by geography and education. The result is that children are born into very different family lives, heading for diverging economic futures.

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2018's Cattiest Academic Fight Is Over the ‘Meghalayan’ - The Atlantic

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2018's Cattiest Academic Fight Is Over the ‘Meghalayan’ - The Atlantic

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Not that you would always know this from listening to them. "What the fuck is the Meghalayan?" a tenured professor of geology asked me in July. "It's silly," another said. Meanwhile, the new age's beleaguered advocates claimed an "incredible press campaign" had misrepresented their work.

This week, the fight spilled into the pages ofone of the country's most prestigious journals, as a critic raised a new concern with the embattled age. A short article published Thursday in Science contends that the Meghalayan is premised on faulty archaeology. There is scant evidence, it says, that the worldwide mega-drought around 2200 B.C., which started the Meghalayan, brought ancient society to its knees.

"There was no sudden, universal civilizational collapse," writes Guy Middleton, a visiting archaeologist at Newcastle University, in the piece. "Overall, the archaeological and historical evidence suggests that 2200 B.C. was not a threshold date."

Middleton's point is larger than just the Meghalayan: He is siding with a group of scholars, mostly at European universities, that argues that climate change has almost never led to war or total ruin in the past. He writes as much in his piece: "Climate change never inevitably results in societal collapse, though it can pose serious challenges, as it does today."
Does climate change cause more war?
The Meghalayan's architects did not mince words in their response.

"This is a totally misleading piece of writing, which displays a lamentable grasp of the facts," said Mike Walker, a professor at the University of Wales and the leader of the team that proposed the Meghalayan.

"I do not see a single accurate claim," agreed Harvey Weiss, a professor of archaeology at Yale who, also helped write the Meghalayan proposal.

In a series of emails, Weiss lambasted his critic's credentials. "Middleton, a pop-archeology writer, failed archaeology Ph.D., and English-as-a-second-language instructor in Japan, now claims archeo-expertise in matters about which he knows nothing, and gets great audience in Science -of all journals!" he wrote.

"For me, the most intriguing question is, 'Why does Science publish this rubbish?'" he said in another message, sent several hours later under the subject line "and Weiss added ... "

"I see you've been talking to Harvey Weiss!" Middleton replied when I told him about some of these charges without identifying their source. Middleton is the author of a book about societal collapse, and he holds a doctorate in Aegean prehistory. He has also "proudly" taught English for Academic Purposes classes at Tokyo University and Northumbria University, he said, writing: "It has put bread on the table since 2002 and paid me through my Ph.D."

It wasn't always clear that the Meghalayan would arouse this level of controversy. The new age was meant to be an aid for geologists and climate scientists who study the past 11,700 years of Earth's history. This period of time-called the Holocene epoch-contains nearly all of modern human history and is crucial to the study of contemporary climate change.

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Geologists Are Feuding About the Collapse of Civilization

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Not that you would always know this from listening to them. "What the fuck is the Meghalayan?" a tenured professor of geology asked me in July. "It's silly," another said. Meanwhile, the new age's beleaguered advocates claimed an "incredible press campaign" had misrepresented their work.

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The Japanese population is shrinking faster than every other big country — Quartz

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The Japanese population is shrinking faster than every other big country — Quartz

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Japan is shrinking. Fast.

The health ministry recently announced that only 946,060 babies were born in Japan in 2017, the fewest births since official statistics began in 1899. At the same time, 1,340,433 Japanese people died last year. This means that the non-immigrant population declined by nearly 400,000 people.

It's an astonishing shift. The Japanese population grew steadily throughout the 20th century, from around 44 million in 1900 to 128 million in 2000. The gains were primarily due to increased life expectancy, but also buoyed by families that typically had at least two children. But beginning in the late 1970s, birth rates crashed. While the average Japanese woman had 2.1 kids in the 1970s, today, they only have about 1.4-far lower than in comparably wealthy countries like the US and Sweden.

Today, Japan is a land of aging baby boomers and young adults who don't want to have kids. By median age, Japan is the oldest large country in the world. More than half of its population is over the age of 46. By comparison, in Nigeria, just over a tenth of the population is over that age.

The oldest countries by median age, 2015

Demographers forecast a steep population decline for Japan this century. The Japanese Statistics Bureau (pdf) estimates that the Japanese population will fall to just over 100 million by 2050, from around 127 million today. The United Nations estimates that Japan's population will decline by a third from current levels, to 85 million, by 2100. That would make it the fastest-contracting country among the world's 30 most populous nations.

How low can it go? At the pace of decline projected by the UN, and assuming no change in migration or fertility rates, the Japanese population would fall to 8.5 million by 2300. By 2800, it would be less than 2 million. The laws of math mean it would decline very slowly from there.

The decline isn't inevitable if Japanese women choose to have more children, or the country decides to take in more immigrants. The government's clear preference is for the former.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Japan's government enacted a number of programs to make having kids more appealing for young adults. These were supposed to reduce the costs of childcare and force companies to adopt more parent-friendly policies. The plan doesn't seem to have worked-though perhaps it stopped the decline from getting even worse.

To avoid massive population declines, Japan will almost certainly have to turn to immigrants. The government seems to reluctantly acknowledge this. The number of foreign workers skyrocketed over the past decade, from 300,000 in 2007 to nearly 1.3 million in 2017. Yet few of these workers are offered permanent resident status, and to discourage them from staying most are not allowed to bring over their families.

Yet to truly solve Japan's population problem, it will need to embrace immigrants in a way it never has before. If it doesn't, some day there may be barely any Japanese left at all.

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The world is running out of Japanese people

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Japan is shrinking. Fast. The health ministry recently announced that only 946,060 babies were born in Japan in 2017, the fewest births since official statistics began in 1899. At the same time, 1,340,433 Japanese people died last year. This means that the non-immigrant population declined by nearly 400,000 people.

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Japan, Short on Babies, Reaches a Worrisome Milestone - The New York Times

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Japan, Short on Babies, Reaches a Worrisome Milestone - The New York Times

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Newborns at a hospital in Misato, a city in Japan's Saitama prefecture, in 2014. Credit Credit Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Corbis, via Getty Images

TOKYO - Since Japan began counting its newborns more than a century ago, more than a million infants have been added to its population each year.

No longer, in the latest discomforting milestone for a country facing a steep population decline. Last year, the number of births in Japan dropped below one million for the first time, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said on Friday.

The shrinking of the country's population - deaths have outpaced births for several years - is already affecting the economy in areas including the job and housing markets, consumer spending and long-term investment plans at businesses.

For now, the Japanese economy is growing despite a dwindling number of workers and consumers. Output rose for a fifth straight quarter at the start of this year, and the stock market reached its highest level in a year and a half on Friday, with the Nikkei-225 index exceeding the symbolic 20,000 mark. Growing global demand for Japanese products is one reason.

But the real decline has barely begun.

After Japan's population hit a peak of 128 million at the start of the current decade, it shrank by close to a million in the five years through 2015, according to census data. Demographers expect it to plunge by a third by 2060, to as few as 80 million people - a net loss of a million a year, on average.

About 40 percent fewer children were born in Japan last year than in 1949, at the peak of the country's post-World War II baby boom. The number had not fallen below one million since 1899, when comprehensive record-keeping began. At that time, Japan's population was smaller than it is today, but individual families tended to have more children.

For some, the latest numbers offer advantages. Unemployment was 2.8 percent in April, the lowest in decades, and construction in Japan's famously crowded cities has slowed.

Yet the prevailing view of Japan's demographic future is grim.

Fewer young people means fewer workers to support a growing cohort of retirees, adding strains to pension and health care systems. Already, in some rural areas, a majority of residents are over 65, and empty houses are a spreading blight.

In a speech to business leaders this week, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for a "national movement" to address Japan's demographic challenges. The government has taken steps to keep older workers in their jobs longer, and to encourage companies to invest in automation.

"The labor shortage is getting serious," he said. "To overcome it, we need to improve productivity."

Japanese governments have been promising to tackle the population decline for decades, but with little apparent effect.

Official efforts to encourage women to have more children have had only modest results, and there is little public support for large-scale immigration - something that has helped to stabilize populations in other wealthy countries with low birthrates.

Birthrates have, in fact, risen slightly compared with a decade ago. But with women marrying later - in part, specialists say, to avoid pressure to give up their careers - prospects for a more decisive turnaround look remote.

And as the population decline accelerates, economic growth will be harder to pull off. How much the population size will fall is difficult to predict, but the basic trajectory is clear, demographers say.

Japan's birthrate has long been lower than what demographers call the "replacement rate."

As a result, rates have been low long enough that each new generation of potential mothers is also smaller, compounding the downward pull.

Individual Japanese will not necessarily be poorer just because the economy is smaller. But some economists argue that traditional definitions of growth and prosperity will need to be rethought.

"A lot of the things we're used to in Japan are really products of an era of population growth, like single-breadwinner families and mandatory retirement ages," said Takaaki Tahara, research director at the Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training. "The mind-set will have to change."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Worries Grow in Japan as Annual Births Fall Below One Million for the First Time. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Japan, Short on Babies, Reaches a Worrisome Milestone

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TOKYO - Since Japan began counting its newborns more than a century ago, more than a million infants have been added to its population each year. No longer, in the latest discomforting milestone for a country facing a steep population decline.

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THE pyramid is a traditional way of visualising and explaining the age structure of a society. If you draw a chart with each age group represented by a bar, and each bar ranged one above the other-youngest at the bottom, oldest at the top, and with the sexes separated-that is the shape you get. The pyramid was characteristic of human populations since the day organised societies emerged. With lifespans short and mortality rates high, children were always the most numerous group, and old people the least. Now the shape of the global population is changing. Between 1970 and 2015 the dominating influence on the global population was the fertility rate, the number of children a woman would typically bear during her lifetime. It fell dramatically over the period, meaning that the world shifted from having larger to smaller families. The age groups start to become markedly smaller only about the age of 40, so the incline starts much further up the chart than with the pyramid. The shape looks more like the dome of the Capitol building in Washington, DC. Between 2015 and 2060 the biggest influence upon the population will be ageing. Small families are already becoming the norm, the fall in fertility is slowing down and now almost everyone is living longer than their parents-dramatically so in developing countries. So, by 2060, the dome will have come and gone and the shape of the population will look more like a column (or perhaps an old-fashioned beehive).

Read the full article from The World In 2015.

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THE pyramid is a traditional way of visualising and explaining the age structure of a society. If you draw a chart with each age group represented by a bar, and each bar ranged one above the other-youngest at the bottom, oldest at the top, and with the sexes separated-that is the shape you get.

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Since 1800, the world's population has multiplied seven and a half times. Shutterstock

Gilles Pison, based on United Nations data, CC BY

In 1800 the world's population was around 1 billion people. Since then it has increased more than sevenfold to reach over 7.5 billion in 2017 (see figure 1), and is forecast to top 10 billion by 2050. Will population growth inevitably continue? Will it level off over the long term? Should we try to reduce or stop this growth?

Simply put, the world's population is increasing because the number of births outnumber deaths by three to one. A surplus of births first occurred two centuries ago in Europe and North America, when mortality started to decline. This marked the beginning of what scientists call the demographic transition. This transition subsequently spread to the rest of the planet as social and economic progress, combined with advances in hygiene and medicine, began to reduce mortality rates.

Rapid population growth in Africa

Gilles Pison, based on United Nations data, CC BY

Still, the annual population growth rate actually peaked half a century ago at more than 2%, and has fallen by half since then, to 1.1% in 2017 (see figure 2). This trend should continue in coming decades because fertility is decreasing at global level, from 5 children per woman in 1950 to 2.5 today. In 2017, the regions where fertility remains high (above 3 children per woman) include most countries of intertropical Africa and an area stretching from Afghanistan to northern India and Pakistan (see map below). These are the regions that will drive future world population growth.

A key trend in future decades will be population growth in Africa. Including North Africa, the continent's population could quadruple over the next century, rising from 1 billion inhabitants in 2010 to an estimated 2.5 billion in 2050 and more than 4 billion in 2100, despite the negative impact of the AIDS epidemic and other factors. While, globally speaking, one person in six currently lives in Africa, the proportion will probably be more than one in three a century from now. Growth should be especially rapid in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population may rise from just over 800 million in 2010 to 4 billion in 2100.
World fertility (2017), average number of children per woman

Gilles Pison, based on United Nations data., CC BY

What will happen in the coming decades?

These figures are projections, and no one can predict what the future will bring. That said, demographic projections are quite reliable for forecasting population size over the next 10, 20 or 30 years. Most of the people who will be alive in 2050 have already been born, their number is known and we can estimate quite accurately the proportion among those currently alive who will die. Likewise, the women who will bear children over the next 20 years are already alive today, and can be counted. By estimating their potential fertility we can determine the number of future births with relative accuracy.

It would be unrealistic to imagine that population trends can be modified over the short term. Depopulation is not an option. Indeed, how could it possibly be achieved? Through increased mortality? No one hopes for that. Through mass emigration to Mars? Unrealistic. Through a drastic and durable decrease in fertility to below replacement level (2.1 children)? This is already taking place in many parts of the world, as couples decide to have fewer children so as to give them the best chances for a long and fulfilling life.

But for reasons of demographic inertia, this does not result in an immediate population decline. Even if world fertility were just 1.6 children per women, as is the case in Europe and China, the population would continue to increase for several more decades; there are still large numbers of adults of childbearing age who were born when fertility was still high, so the number of births also remains high. The proportion of old and very old people is very small, on the other hand, so deaths are far less numerous.

The question of fertility decline

Demographers were taken by surprise in the 1960s and 1970s when surveys revealed the onset of a sharp decline in fertility in many countries of Asia and Latin America, and demographic projections for these regions of the world were revised strongly downward.

Another more recent surprise concerns intertropical Africa. Fertility decline in the region was expected to begin later than in Asia and Latin America because of slower social and economic development. But it was assumed that, while delayed, the transition would follow the standard pattern, with a decline similar to that observed in other regions of the Global South. This is indeed the case in North and southern Africa, but not in intertropical Africa, where the decline is occurring more slowly. This explains the upward revision of projections for Africa, a continent which could be home to more than a third of the world's population by 2100.

Gilles Pison, based on United Nations data., CC BY

Fertility is in fact decreasing in intertropical Africa, but among the educated and urban populations and not in rural areas where most of the population still lives. While the fertility decline is still slower than that observed some decades ago in Asia and Latin America (see figure 4), the reason does not lie in an unwillingness to use contraception.

While most rural families have yet to adopt a two-child family model, they would prefer to have fewer children and to space them further apart. They are willing to use contraception for this purpose, but the necessary services are not available to them. National birth-control programmes exist but are ineffective because they lack resources and, above all, because their organisers and the personnel responsible for implementing them are unenthusiastic. Many are not convinced of the advantages of birth control, even at government level, even if this is not the official line adopted with respect to international organisations

This is one of the differences with respect to Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the obstacles to faster fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa.

Long-term outlook: explosion, implosion or equilibrium?

Beyond the next 50 years, however, the future is much more uncertain and there is no established forecasting model.

The demographic transition, which has served well to predict changes over the last two centuries, will be of little use for this distant future. There is much uncertainty about future fertility. If the small family becomes a dominant model over the long term, with mean fertility of less than two children per women, then the world population, after peaking at 10 billion, will gradually decrease to the point of extinction.

But another scenario is possible, in which fertility recovers in the countries where it is now very low, ultimately stabilising at more than two children per woman worldwide. This would result in continuous growth, and again in the extinction of the human race, this time due to overpopulation. If we cannot resign ourselves to these catastrophic scenarios of extinction through under- or over-population, then we must imagine a scenario of ultimate equilibrium.

It is lifestyle that matters

Of course, humans must start thinking today about the need for long-term equilibrium, but it is the next few decades that are of most urgent concern.

The world population will inevitably increase by 2 to 3 billion between now and 2050 because of demographic inertia that no one can prevent. Nonetheless, we have the power to change yet now our way of living - and there is an urgent need to do so - by ensuring greater respect for the environment and more efficient use of natural resources. All in all, the long-term survival of humankind depends more on its choice of lifestyle than on its population size.

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In 1800 the world's population was around 1 billion people. Since then it has increased more than sevenfold to reach over 7.5 billion in 2017 (see figure 1), and is forecast to top 10 billion by 2050. Will population growth inevitably continue? Will it level off over the long term?

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The U.S. birthrate hits another record low. Even women in their 30s are having fewer babies

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The U.S. birthrate hits another record low. Even women in their 30s are having fewer babies

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America's birthrate hit yet another record low in 2017, as mothers in nearly all age groups gave birth to fewer babies last year than they had the year before, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The U.S. birthrate has been falling for several years, led by declines among younger women in their teens and early 20s who seemed to be putting off motherhood until they were older. But in 2017, women in their 30s joined the trend as well.

Here's a closer look at the youngest Americans and their mothers, courtesy of birth records compiled by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.

That's how many babies were born in 2017 for every 1,000 women of childbearing age. This figure is known as the general fertility rate, and this is the lowest it has been since officials began keeping track, according to the report. (The CDC considers women between the ages of 15 and 44 to be of childbearing age.)

That's the percentage the general fertility rate declined from 2016 to 2017. It was the biggest one-year drop since 2010.

The percentage decline in the actual number of babies born in the U.S. in 2017 compared to 2016. If you add up all the births across the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Northern Marianas, you get 3,853,472 babies. (Figures were not available for the Virgin Islands or American Samoa.)

The most recent year in which the total number of U.S. births was lower than it was in 2017.

That's the total number of births expected for a hypothetical group of 1,000 American women over the course of their lives. Statisticians call this the total fertility rate, and they calculate it according to the birthrates for women of different age groups.

The decline in the total fertility rate between 2016 and 2017. It's the biggest one-year drop since 2010.

That's the last year the total fertility rate was lower than it was in 2017.

That's how many babies this hypothetical group of 1,000 women would need to have over their lifetimes for their generation to replace itself. The actual U.S. total fertility rate has generally been below 2,100 for 46 years.

The number of babies born in 2017 for every 1,000 women between the ages of 30 and 34. This was the age group with the highest birthrate, even though it fell 2% from 2016 after rising steadily since 2012.

The number of other age groups with a birthrate above 100. It was 71 per 10,000 for women ages 20 to 24, 97.9 per 1,000 for women ages 25 to 29, and 52.2 per 1,000 for women ages 35 to 39.

The increase in the birthrate for women ages 40 to 44. This was the only age group to see its birthrate go up in 2017, with 11.6 births for every 1,000 women in their early 40s.

The number of babies born for every 1,000 women ages 45 to 49. This birthrate was unchanged from 2016.

The decline in the teen birthrate between 2016 and 2017.

The number of babies born per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19 in 2017. This is the lowest birthrate on record for U.S. teens and is 70% below its most recent peak in 1991.

The number of babies born for every 1,000 girls between the ages of 10 and 14. This birthrate has not changed since 2015.

The percentage of all women who gave birth in the U.S. last year and began receiving prenatal care in their first trimester.

Early access to prenatal care was not spread evenly among all racial and ethnic groups, however. First-trimester care was reported for 82.5% of white mothers, 81.1% of Asian mothers, 72.3% of Latina mothers, 66.6% of black mothers, 63.5% of American Indian and Alaska Native mothers and 52.1% of Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander mothers.

The percentage of women who gave birth last year without seeing a doctor during their pregnancy. This was the case for 20.3% of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, 12.6% of American Indians and Alaska Natives, 10.2% of black mothers, 7.7% of Latina mothers, 5.1% of Asian mothers and 4.4% of white mothers.

The number of consecutive years that the preterm birthrate - the percentage of all births that occurred before 37 weeks' gestation - has increased in the U.S. In 2017, it was 9.93%.

The percentage of all infants who weighed less than 2,500 grams (or 5 pounds, 8 ounces) at birth. That qualified them as low birthweight babies. Like the preterm birthrate, the low birthweight rate also increased for the third year in a row.
karen.kaplan@latimes.com Follow me on Twitter @LATkarenkaplan and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook. MORE IN SCIENCE To prevent recurrent strokes, should aspirin have a wingman? Maybe not FDA approves Lucemyra to treat symptoms of opioid withdrawal and help patients overcome addiction Yanny or Laurel? Why people hear different words

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centers for disease control and prevention

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The U.S. birthrate hits another record low. Even women in their 30s are having fewer babies

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America's birthrate hit yet another record low in 2017, as mothers in nearly all age groups gave birth to fewer babies last year than they had the year before, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S.

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A nurse taking care of a newborn this month in Beijing. Almost three years after easing its "one child" policy, the Chinese government is trying to stimulate a baby boom. Credit Credit Giulia Marchi for The New York Times

BEIJING - For decades, China harshly restricted the number of babies that women could have. Now it is encouraging them to have more. It is not going well.

Almost three years after easing its "one child" policy and allowing couples to have two children, the government has begun to acknowledge that its efforts to raise the country's birthrate are faltering because parents are deciding against having more children.

Officials are now scrambling to devise ways to stimulate a baby boom, worried that a looming demographic crisis could imperil economic growth - and undercut the ruling Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping.

It is a startling reversal for the party, which only a short time ago imposed punishing fines on most couples who had more than one child and compelled hundreds of millions of Chinese women to have abortions or undergo sterilization operations.

The new campaign has raised fear that China may go from one invasive extreme to another in getting women to have more children. Some provinces are already tightening access to abortion or making it more difficult to get divorced.

"To put it bluntly, the birth of a baby is not only a matter of the family itself, but also a state affair," the official newspaper People's Daily said in an editorial this week, prompting widespread criticism and debate online.

Image

A maternity ward at a Beijing hospital in 2013. The campaign to raise the birthrate has raised fear that China may go from one invasive extreme to another. Credit Andy Wong/Associated Press

In what appeared to be a trial balloon to test public sentiment, the provincial government in Shaanxi, in central China, last month called on Beijing to abolish all birth limits and let people have as many children as they want.

The proposal is politically fraught because removing the last remaining checks on family size would be another reminder that a policy that touched every Chinese family and reshaped society - most Chinese millennials, for example, have no siblings - may have been deeply flawed.

"Among regular people, among scholars, there's enough consensus already about the policy," said Wang Huiyao, president of the Center for China and Globalization, a research organization in Beijing. "It's just a matter of time before they can lift this policy."

A plan to end the two-child limit was floated during the legislative session in Beijing last spring and now appears to be under consideration with other measures, the National Health Commission said in a statement.

Experts say the government has little choice but to encourage more births. China - the world's most populous nation with more than 1.4 billion people - is aging quickly, with a smaller work force left to support a growing elderly population that is living longer. Some provinces have already reported difficulties meeting pension payments.

It is unclear whether lifting the two-child limit now will make much of a difference. As in many countries, educated women in Chinese cities are postponing childbirth as they pursue careers. Young couples are also struggling with economic pressures, including rising housing and education costs.

The "one child" policy also resulted in more boys than girls being born. Some parents obtained abortions because the fetuses were female, reflecting traditional preferences for male children, though such selective abortions were illegal. Because of that and other factors, there are now simply fewer women to marry and bear children.

The number of women between the ages of 20 and 39 is expected to drop by more than 39 million over the next decade, to 163 million from 202 million, according to He Yafu, a demographer and the author of a book on the impact of China's population controls.

"Without the introduction of measures to encourage fertility, the population of China will drop sharply in the future," he said.

In advance of any policy changes nationally, local governments are already taking steps to promote childbirth.

In Liaoning, a province in the northeast with one of the nation's lowest birthrates, officials last month proposed an array of new benefits for young families, including tax breaks, housing and education subsidies and longer maternity and paternity leaves, as well as investments in clinics and preschools.

In Jiangxi Province, in the southeast, the government has adopted a more intrusive approach, reissuing guidelines for when women can get abortions. Though the rules were not new, the move raised fears that the authorities intend to enforce them more strictly, including a requirement that women who are more than 14 weeks pregnant obtain three signatures from medical personnel before an abortion.

Officials said the guidelines were meant to enforce the law prohibiting couples from aborting a female fetus in hopes of having a boy - though they acknowledged that keeping the official birthrate up was also a consideration.

Two other provinces have tightened the requirements for couples to divorce, saying the changes were made in part to keep alive the possibility of new offspring.

Such measures have revived longstanding complaints about the government's invasive control over women's bodies.

"Women cannot decide what happens to their own ovaries," one user complained on Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, after Jiangxi detailed the abortion guidelines in July.

The "one child" policy was introduced in 1979 as a way to slow population growth and bolster the economic boom that was then just beginning. The party built a vast bureaucracy of "planned birth" workers to enforce the policy, sometimes with violence. Resistance in the countryside was especially fierce, in part because of a rural preference for male children who could help with farm work.

In 1984, the government allowed rural couples whose first child was a girl to have a second child, and there were other exceptions for ethnic minorities. In 2013, recognizing the implications of an aging population, the government allowed parents who were only children themselves to have two children. Two years later, the limit was raised to two children for everyone, effective Jan. 1, 2016.

The birthrate jumped that year, reflecting the exuberance of those longing for a second child, but it dropped again in 2017, prompting the reconsideration now underway.

One recent government study estimated that China's labor force could lose 100 million people from 2020 to 2035, then another 100 million from 2035 to 2050. It warned of pressure on "economic and social development," budget resources and the environment.

The economic imperatives have prompted some private companies to act on their own.

Ctrip, the world's second-largest online travel company after Priceline, already offers a variety of benefits to support parents, like taxi rides to and from the office during pregnancies and bonuses when employees' children reach school age. Last month, it announced that it would also begin subsidizing the cost of freezing the eggs of some managers - said to be a first for a Chinese company.

The company's chief executive, Jane Sun, said Ctrip was acting out of a sense of social responsibility but also responding to economic factors: A declining population hurts growth. James Liang, a co-founder of Ctrip, has written a book warning of the impact of China's shifting demographics on technological innovation.

"The generation before us only had one child, so in their mind having only one child is the normal thing," Ms. Sun said in an interview in the company's Shanghai headquarters.

"I think we really need to have a sense of urgency - from the top down and the bottom up - to encourage families to resume a healthy birthrate," she added.

In a written response to questions, the National Health Commission said the "two child" policy was working. While the total number of births dipped to 17.2 million last year - compared with nearly 17.9 million in 2016 - the percentage of families with two children has climbed from 36 percent in 2013 to 51 percent today, it said.

The commission acknowledged that couples faced many obstacles to having a second child and said the government was working on policies in areas like taxation and education that would address them.

"To eliminate the concerns of the masses and sustain the birthrate, we need to focus on the practical difficulties in fertility and child-rearing," it said.

Demographic experts warn that it will be difficult to change people's reproductive behavior.

Shang Xiaoyuan, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and an expert on child welfare in China, said the government needed to help the families most likely to have a second or third child.

"This kind of family should be given more support and should have more invested in child welfare: early education, maternal and child health," she said.

Better benefits and services will not be enough to persuade everyone.

Sun Zhongyue, a 27-year-old accountant in Beijing who is pregnant with her first child, said she had already ruled out having a second, citing workplace discrimination, the costs of education and the social strains on extended families.

While grandparents often help with child care in China, the majority of Ms. Sun's generation are only children who are expected in turn to support their aging parents.

"Although elders can help us look after the kid, they cannot once their health worsens," she said during a visit to a government office to obtain reimbursement for her maternity care.

"Raising a child is stressful," she added. "It costs money and manpower."

Steven Lee Myers reported from Beijing and Shanghai, and Olivia Mitchell Ryan from Beijing. Research was contributed by Claire Fu, Zoé Mou and Charlotte Pu in Beijing, and Tiffany May in Hong Kong.

Follow Steven Lee Myers on Twitter: @stevenleemyers.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Once Strict on Births, China Races for a Boom. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Burying 'One Child' Limits, China Pushes Women to Have More Babies

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BEIJING - For decades, China harshly restricted the number of babies that women could have. Now it is encouraging them to have more. It is not going well. Almost three years after easing its "one child" policy and allowing couples to have two children, the government has begun to acknowledge that its efforts to raise the country's birthrate are faltering because parents are deciding against having more children.

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JAKARTA

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The Indonesian capital of Jakarta is home to 10 million people but it is also one of the fastest-sinking cities in the world. If this goes unchecked, parts of the megacity could be entirely submerged by 20 5 0, say researchers. Is it too late?
It sits on swampy land, the Java Sea lapping against it, and 13 rivers running through it. So it shouldn't be a surprise that flooding is frequent in Jakarta and, according to experts, it is getting worse. But it's not just about freak floods, this massive city is literally disappearing into the ground.

"The potential for Jakarta to be submerged isn't a laughing matter," says Heri Andreas, who has studied Jakarta's land subsidence for the past 20 years at the Bandung Institute of Technology.

"If we look at our models, by 2050 about 95% of North Jakarta will be submerged."

It's already happening - North Jakarta has sunk 2.5m in 10 years and is continuing to sink by as much as 25cm a year in some parts, which is more than double the global average for coastal megacities.

Jakarta is sinking by an average of 1-15cm a year and almost half the city now sits below sea level.

The impact is immediately apparent in North Jakarta.

In the district of Muara Baru, an entire office building lies abandoned. It once housed a fishing company but the first-floor veranda is the only functional part left.

The submerged ground floor is full of stagnant floodwater. The land around it is higher so the water has nowhere to go. Buildings that are so deeply sunk are rarely abandoned like this, because most of the time the owners will try to fix, rebuild and find short-term remedies for the issue. But what they can't do is stop the soil sucking this part of the city down.

An open air fish market is just a five-minute drive away.

"The walkways are like waves, curving up and down, people can trip and fall," says Ridwan, a Muara Baru resident who often visits the fish market. As the water levels underground are being depleted, the very ground market-goers walk on is sinking and shifting, creating an uneven and unstable surface.

"Year after year, the ground has just kept sinking," he said, just one of many inhabitants of this quarter alarmed at what is happening to the neighbourhood.

North Jakarta has historically been a port city and even today it houses one of Indonesia's busiest sea ports, Tanjung Priok. Its strategic location where the Ciliwung river flows into the Java Sea was one of the reasons why Dutch colonists chose to make it their bustling hub in the 17th Century.

Today 1.8 million people live in the municipality, a curious mixture of fading port businesses, poor coastal communities and a substantial population of wealthy Chinese Indonesians.

Fortuna Sophia lives in a luxurious villa with a sea view. The sinking of her home is not immediately visible but she says cracks appear in the walls and pillars every six months.

"We just have to keep fixing it," she says, standing beside her swimming pool with her private dock just a few metres away. "The maintenance men say the cracks are caused by the shifting of the ground."

She's lived here for four years but it has already flooded several times: "The seawater flows in and covers the swimming pool entirely. We have to move all our furniture up to the first floor."

But the impact on the small homes right by the sea is magnified. Residents who once had a sea view now see only a dull grey dyke, built and rebuilt in a valiant attempt to keep seawater out.

"Every year the tide gets about 5cm higher," Mahardi, a fisherman, said.

None of this has deterred the property developers. More and more luxury apartments dot the North Jakarta skyline regardless of the risks. The head of the advisory council for Indonesia's Association of Housing Development, Eddy Ganefo, says he has urged the government to halt further development here. But, he says, "so long as we can sell apartments, development will continue".

The rest of Jakarta is also sinking, albeit at a slower rate. In West Jakarta, the ground is sinking by as much as 15cm annually, by 10cm annually in the east, 2cm in Central Jakarta and just 1cm in South Jakarta.

Coastal cities across the world are affected because of rising sea levels caused by climate change. Increased sea levels occur because of thermal expansion - the water expanding because of extra heat - and the melting of polar ice. The speed at which Jakarta is sinking is alarming experts.

It may seem surprising but there are few complaints from Jakartans because for residents here the subsidence is just one among a myriad of infrastructure challenges they have to deal with daily.

And that is part of the story of why this is happening.

The dramatic rate at which Jakarta is sinking is partly down to the excessive extraction of groundwater for use as drinking water, for bathing and other everyday purposes by city dwellers. Piped water isn't reliable or available in most areas so people have no choice but to resort to pumping water from the aquifers deep underground.

But when groundwater is pumped out, the land above it sinks as if it is sitting on a deflating balloon - and this leads to land subsidence.

The situation is exacerbated by lax regulation allowing just about anyone, from individual homeowners to massive shopping mall operators, to carry out their own groundwater extractions.

"Everyone has a right, from residents to industries, to use groundwater so long as this is regulated," says Heri Andreas. The problem is that they take more than what is allowed.

People say they have no choice when the authorities are unable to meet their water needs and experts confirm that water management authorities can only meet 40% of Jakarta's demand for water.

A landlord in central Jakarta, known only as Hendri, runs a dormitory-like block called a kos-kosan and has been pumping his own groundwater for 10 years to supply tenants. He is one of many on his street who do this.

"It's better to use our own groundwater rather than relying on the authorities. A kos-kosan like this needs a lot of water."

The local government has only recently admitted it has a problem with illegal groundwater extraction.

In May, the Jakarta city authority inspected 80 buildings in Central Jakarta's Jalan Thamrin, a road lined with skyscrapers, shopping malls and hotels. It found that 56 buildings had their own groundwater pump and 33 were extracting water illegally.

Jakarta's Governor Anies Baswedan says everyone should have a licence, which will enable the authorities to measure how much groundwater is being extracted. Those without a licence will have their building-worthiness certificate revoked, as would other businesses in the same building.

Authorities are also hoping that the Great Garuda, a 32km outer sea wall being built across Jakarta Bay along with 17 artificial islands, will help rescue the sinking city - at a cost of about $40bn.

It's being supported by the Dutch and South Korean governments and creates an artificial lagoon in which water levels can be lowered to allow the city's rivers to drain. It will help with the flooding which is an issue when the rains come.

But three Dutch non-profit groups released a report in 2017 which cast doubt on whether the sea wall and artificial islands could solve Jakarta's subsidence problem.

Jan Jaap Brinkman, a hydrologist with the Dutch water research institute Deltares, argues it can only ever be an interim measure. He says it will only buy Jakarta an extra 20-30 years to stop the long-term subsidence.

"There is only one solution and everybody knows the solution," he says.

That would be to halt all groundwater extraction and solely rely on other sources of water, such as rain or river water or piped water from man-made reservoirs. He says Jakarta must do this by 2050 to avoid major subsidence.

It is not a message that is being taken to heart yet and Jakarta's Governor Anies Baswedan thinks a less drastic measure will do.

He says people should be able to extract groundwater legally as long as they replace it using something called the biopori method.

This involves digging a hole, 10cm in diameter and 100cm deep, into the ground to allow water to be reabsorbed into the soil.
Additional reporting by Tom de Souza. Interactive elements Arvin Surpriyadi, Davies Surya, and Leben Asa.
Critics say this scheme would only replace water at a superficial level, whereas in Jakarta water is often pumped out from several hundred metres below ground level.

There is technology to replace groundwater deep at its source but it's extremely expensive. Tokyo used this method, known as artificial recharge, when it faced severe land subsidence 50 years ago. The government also restricted groundwater extraction and businesses were required to use reclaimed water. Land subsidence subsequently halted.

But Jakarta needs alternative water sources for that to work. Heri Andreas, from Bandung Institute of Technology, says it could take up to 10 years to clean up the rivers, dams and lakes to allow water to be piped anywhere or used as a replacement for the aquifers deep underground.

Jakarta's residents adopt a somewhat fatalistic attitude to their future in this sinking city.

"Living here is a risk," says Sophia Fortuna in her home. "The people here have all accepted that risk."

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The Indonesian capital of Jakarta is home to 10 million people but it is also one of the fastest-sinking cities in the world. If this goes unchecked, parts of the megacity could be entirely submerged by 20 5 0, say researchers. Is it too late?

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Sand seems like a limitless resource, but mounting evidence suggests this is far from the case.

We use sand as a key ingredient in the production of glass, electronics and - most importantly - concrete, but the growing need for construction materials means in some parts of the world, supplies of sand are dwindling rapidly.

Sand and gravel are now the most extracted materials in the world by weight, and since these products take thousands of years to form by erosion, demand is beginning to outstrip supply.

The United Nations Environment Programme estimated that in 2012 the world used nearly 30 billion tons of these materials just to make concrete - enough to construct a wall 27m high by 27m wide around the equator.

While much has been made of the impact infrastructure developments such as roads and buildings have on the surrounding environment, little attention has been paid to the impact of extracting raw materials such as sand to build that infrastructure.

As scientists wake up to this new problem, it is becoming clear that sand scarcity is an issue with significant sociopolitical, economic and environmental implications.

Dr Aurora Torres, an ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, is one of a handful of scientists investigating this issue.

Two years ago she began to research sand scarcity in depth, and soon found the problem was far bigger than she initially thought.

"As we were digging into this topic, we started to find lots of conflict across the world, and lots of evidence that sand is becoming increasingly scarce - especially this year," says Torres.

Torres and her collaborators outlined their findings in a recent paper in the journal Science titled "A looming tragedy of the sand commons".

Historically, sand has been a common-pool resource extracted and used locally. But a combination of regional shortages, increased regulation and appreciation of sand mining's environmental impact has turned sand from a local product into an expensive, globalised commodity.

The trade value of sand has increased by almost six fold in the last 25 years. In the US alone, where sand production has increased by 24 per cent in the past five years, the sand industry is worth nearly $9bn (£6.7bn).

Though sand extraction rates are high across Europe and North America, the biggest consumers of sand are fast-growing Asian nations.

"Where it tends to happen is India, China, places where you have rapid and large amounts of construction," says Dr John Orr, an engineer and expert in concrete structures at the University of Cambridge.

Singapore, meanwhile, has become by far the world's largest importer of sand, adding 130 square kilometres to its land area over a 40 year period. The island nation has achieved this by dumping millions of tons of sand into the ocean.

As these countries expand, constructing endless roads and megacities, their demand for sand continues to grow. So enormous is China's appetite for construction, in fact, that between 2011 and 2013 it used more concrete than the US got through in the entire 20th century.

This means that, at national and local levels at least, these regions are facing a genuine sand shortage. According to Pham Van Bac, director of Vietnam's Department of Construction Materials, the country may well run out of sand by 2020.

Moreover, as sand becomes big business, the sand trade has attracted criminals.

"Because sand has suddenly become a very valuable resource, 'sand mafias' have appeared operating the sand mining business," says Torres. This problem has been particularly noted in India, but according to Dr Pascal Peduzzi in a UN report titled "Sand, rarer than one thinks", illegal sand mining operations have become widespread thanks to weak governance and corruption.

"In the past year there have been hundreds of people murdered because of conflicts between sand mafias," says Torres.

Despite this alarming turn of events, it is still difficult to imagine how sand can be in short supply when the world's deserts apparently contain a never-ending supply of the stuff.

But not all sand is created equal. The fine grained sand of the Sahara, for example, does not make an appropriate building material. Instead, sand miners must look to the banks of local rivers and coastlines, and this brings a whole host of environmental and human problems.

Sand extraction in Kenya has been linked with damage to coral reefs, while in India it threatens critically endangered crocodiles and in Indonesia islands have literally vanished due to excessive mining.

Sand extraction causes coastal erosion, destroys ecosystems, creates environments that facilitate disease transmission, and even sows the seeds for natural disasters.

"One of the more clear impacts on human systems is the increased vulnerability to natural hazards such as storms and tsunamis," says Torres. This has been demonstrated in Sri Lanka, where research has revealed that intensive sand mining prior to the 2004 tsunami made the waves more devastating than they otherwise would have been.

"The beaches disappeared, and so there was no natural barrier stopping the flooding," says Torres.

Sand's common-pool status has made it difficult to monitor or control its extraction. Nevertheless, with such potentially catastrophic outcomes, some nations are under pressure to regulate their sand mining.

Earlier this year, the California Coastal Commission made moves to end coastal sand mining in the US by closing down operations in the Monterey Bay area that have been linked with beach erosion. Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who participated in the talks to end mining, described the resulting agreement as "an historic victory for environmental conservation nationwide".

But where will the US, and other developed nations that are becoming squeamish about sand mining, extract their building materials if not from their own land? One option increasingly being used in the UK is to mine sand from the sea floor. Another is to import sand from elsewhere.

When she first heard about the scarcity of sand, Dr Mette Bendixen, a coastal morphologist at the University of Copenhagen, thought immediately of her work investigating how the coast of Greenland responds to climate change.

"Because of the warming temperatures we have melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and with that melt comes huge amounts of sand and gravel," she says.

For Greenland, Bendixen thought, exporting sand could be a way to develop an economy that is in need of a boost. She envisioned a burgeoning industry that would enable the people of Greenland to become independent from the Danish subsidies they currently rely on, all thanks to sand.

But sand is heavy, and expensive to transport long distances. What's more, whether sand is extracted from the sea bed or from Greenland, the environmental issues are simply being shifted elsewhere.

As outcry about the effects of sand mining increases in countries like India, pressure is mounting to find alternatives for use in construction.

Recycling concrete by crushing it down into rubble is a possibility, but not one that works for rapidly developing countries that lack the old infrastructure to tear up.

Finding sand alternatives is another option, but a complicated one. Sand is a special material because it has historically been so abundant and cheap. Producing a replacement with those qualities is difficult, but projects are under way to produce such a material.

Orr was enlisted to help with just such a project back in 2014, when Indian researchers based in Goa approached him to work on an initiative that would address two of their country's most pressing concerns: the lack of sand and the abundance of waste plastic.

"The idea they had was: why don't we use some of this waste plastic, shred it up and make it into the right sized particles to make concrete," says Orr.

"We ended up using plastic sand essentially, which is actually a by-product of recycling industry procedures. They shred up plastic, and that can be put into the concrete mixtures," he says.

Besides plastic, wood and various other concrete alternatives have all been suggested, but none have yet caught on in any significant way. Ultimately, as sand stocks diminish and prices soar, developers will be forced to find alternatives.

If sand scarcity is to be addressed in a serious way, those involved in the issue agree that a major challenge is making people aware that it is an issue in the first place.

"A large discrepancy exists between the magnitude of the problem and public awareness of it," wrote Peduzzi back in 2014.

A recent up swell of interest has raised its profile since then, but Torres warns that this issue goes beyond a mere lack of sand. "The challenges we are going to face in mining of many different resources are not a matter of absolute abundance, or of scarcity," she says. "It's going to be more about the implications that this is having for climate change, environments and consequences for human systems."

We are unlikely to completely run out of sand, but quite aside from the diminishing stocks the devastating impacts of sand mining mean this is no longer something that can continue unchecked.

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The global sand shortage that people need to know about

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Sand seems like a limitless resource, but mounting evidence suggests this is far from the case. We use sand as a key ingredient in the production of glass, electronics and - most importantly - concrete, but the growing need for construction materials means in some parts of the world, supplies of sand are dwindling rapidly.

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Four decades after his controversial book, The Population Bomb, scientist Paul Ehrlich still believes that overpopulation - now along with overconsumption - is the central environmental crisis facing the world. And, he insists, technological fixes will not save the day.

Over some 60 million years, Homo sapiens has evolved into the dominant animal on the planet, acquiring binocular vision, upright posture, large brains, and - most importantly - language with syntax and that complex store of non-genetic information we call culture. However, in the last several centuries we've increasingly been using our relatively newly acquired power, especially our culturally evolved technologies, to deplete the natural capital of Earth - in particular its deep, rich agricultural soils, its groundwater stored during ice ages, and its biodiversity - as if there were no tomorrow.

The point, all too often ignored, is that this trend is being driven in large part by a combination of population growth and increasing per capita consumption, and it cannot be long continued without risking a collapse of our now-global civilization. Too many people - and especially too many politicians and business executives - are under the delusion that such a disastrous end to the modern human enterprise can be avoided by technological fixes that will allow the population and the economy to grow forever. But if we fail to bring population growth and over-consumption under control - the number of people on Earth is expected to grow from 6.5 billion today to 9 billion by the second half of the 21st century - then we will inhabit a planet where life becomes increasingly untenable because of two looming crises: global heating, and the degradation of the natural systems on which we all depend.

"If we fail to bring population growth and overconsumption under control, then we will inhabit a planet where life becomes increasingly untenable."

Our species' negative impact on our own life-support systems can be approximated by the equation I=PAT. In that equation, the size of the population (P) is multiplied by the average affluence or consumption per individual (A), and that in turn is multiplied by some measure of the technology (T) that services and drives the consumption. Thus commuting in automobiles powered by subsidized fossil fuels on proliferating freeways creates a much greater T factor than commuting on bikes using simple paths or working at home on a computer network. The product of P, A, and T is Impact (I), a rough estimate of how much humanity is degrading the ecosystem services it depends upon.

The equation is not rocket science. Two billion people, all else being equal, put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than one billion people. Two billion rich people disrupt the climate more than two billion poor people. Three hundred million Americans consume more petroleum than 1.3 billion Chinese. And driving an SUV is using a far more environmentally malign transportation technology than riding mass transit.

The technological dimensions of our predicament - such as the need for alternatives to fossil fuel energy - are frequently discussed if too little acted upon. Judging from media reports and the statements of politicians, environmental problems, to the degree they are recognized, can be solved by minor changes in technologies and recycling (T). Switching to ultra-light, fuel-efficient cars will obviously give some short-term advantage, but as population and consumption grow, they will pour still more carbon dioxide (and vaporized rubber) into the atmosphere and require more natural areas to be buried under concrete. More recycling will help, but many of our society's potentially most dangerous effluents (such as hormone-mimicking chemicals) cannot practically be recycled. There is no technological change we can make that will permit growth in either human numbers or material affluence to continue to expand. In the face of this, the neglect of the intertwined issues of population and consumption is stunning.

Many past human societies have collapsed under the weight of overpopulation and environmental neglect, but today the civilization in peril is global. The population factor in what appears to be a looming catastrophe is even greater than most people suppose. Each person added today to the population on average causes more damage to humanity's critical life-support systems than did the previous addition - everything else being equal. The reason is simple: Homo sapiens became the dominant animal by being smart. Farmers didn't settle first on poor soils where water was scarce, but rather in rich river valleys. That's where most cities developed, where rich soils are now being paved over for roads and suburbs, and where water supplies are being polluted or overexploited.

As a result, to support additional people it is necessary to move to ever poorer lands, drill wells deeper, or tap increasingly remote sources to obtain water - and then spend more energy to transport that water ever greater distances to farm fields, homes, and factories. Our distant ancestors could pick up nearly pure copper on Earth's surface when they started to use metals; now people must use vast amounts of energy to mine and smelt gigantic amounts of copper ore of ever poorer quality, some in concentrations of less than one percent. The same can be said for other important metals. And petroleum can no longer be found easily on or near the surface, but must be gleaned from wells drilled a mile or more deep, often in inaccessible localities, such as under continental shelves beneath the sea. All of the paving, drilling, fertilizer manufacturing, pumping, smelting, and transporting needed to provide for the consumption of burgeoning numbers of people produces greenhouse gases and thus tightens the connection between population and climate disruption.

So why is the topic of overpopulation so generally ignored? There are some obvious reasons. Attempts by governments to limit their nation's population growth are anathema to those on the right who believe the only role for governments in the bedroom is to force women to take unwanted babies to term. Those on the left fear, with some legitimacy, that population control could turn racist or discriminatory in other ways - for example, attempting to reduce the numbers of minorities or the poor. Many fear the specter of more of "them" compared to "us," and all of us fear loss of liberty and economic decline (since population growth is often claimed necessary for economic health). And there are religious leaders who still try to promote over-reproduction by their flocks, though in much of the world their efforts are largely futile (Catholic countries in Europe tend to be low-birthrate leaders, for example).

But much of the responsibility must go to ignorance, which leads mainstream media, even newspapers like The New York Times, to maintain a pro-natalist stance. For example, the Times had an article on June 29 about a "baby bust" in industrialized countries in which the United States (still growing) was noted as a "sparkling exception." Beyond the media, great foundations have turned their "population programs" away from encouraging low fertility rates and toward topics like "changing sexual mores" - avoiding discussion of the contribution demographics is making to a possible collapse of civilization.

"Some leading economists are starting to tackle the issue of overconsumption, but the problems and its cures are tough to analyze."

Silence on the overconsumption (Affluence) factor in the I=PAT equation is more readily explained. Consumption is still viewed as an unalloyed good by many economists, along with business leaders and politicians, who tend to see jacking up consumption as a cure-all for economic ills. Too much unemployment? Encourage people to buy an SUV or a new refrigerator. Perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell, but third-rate economists can't think of anything else. Some leading economists are starting to tackle the issue of overconsumption, but the problem and its cures are tough to analyze. Scientists have yet to develop consumption condoms or morning-after-shopping-spree pills.

And, of course, there are the vexing problems of consumption of people in poor countries. On one hand, a billion or more people have problems of underconsumption. Unless their basic needs are met, they are unlikely to be able to make important contributions to attaining sustainability. On the other hand, there is also the issue of the "new consumers" in developing economies such as China and India, where the wealth of a sizable minority is permitting them to acquire the consumption habits (e.g., eating a lot of meat and driving automobiles) of the rich nations. Consumption regulation is a lot more complex than population regulation, and it is much more difficult to find humane and equitable solutions to the problem.

The dominant animal is wasting its brilliance and its wonderful achievements; civilization's fate is being determined by decision makers who determinedly look the other way in favor of immediate comfort and profit. Thousands of scientists recently participated in a Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that outlined our current environmental dilemma, but the report's dire message made very little impact. Absent attention to that message, the fates of Easter Island, the Classic Maya civilization, and Nineveh - all of which collapsed following environmental degradation - await us all.

We believe it is possible to avoid that global denouement. Such mobilization means developing some consensus on goals - perhaps through a global dialogue in which people discuss the human predicament and decide whether they would like to see a maximum number of people living at a minimum standard of living, or perhaps a much lower population size that gives individuals a broad choice of lifestyles. We have suggested a forum for such a dialogue, modeled partly on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but with more "bottom up" participation. It is clear that only widespread changes in norms can give humanity a chance of attaining a sustainable and reasonably conflict-free society.

How to achieve such change - involving everything from demographic policies and transformation of planet-wide energy, industrial, and agricultural systems, to North-South and interfaith relationships and military postures - is a gigantic challenge to everyone. Politicians, industrialists, ecologists, social scientists, everyday citizens, and the media must join this debate. Whether it is possible remains to be seen; societies have managed to make major transitions in the recent past, as the civil rights revolution in the United States and the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union clearly demonstrate.

We'll continue to hope and work for a cultural transformation in how we treat each other and the natural systems we depend upon. We can create a peaceful and sustainable global civilization, but it will require realistic thinking about the problems we face and a new mobilization of political will.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich are in the Department of Biology and the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, where he is Bing Professor of Population Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences and she is the policy coordinator at the Center for Conservation Biology. More →

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Four decades after his controversial book, The Population Bomb, scientist Paul Ehrlich still believes that overpopulation - now along with overconsumption - is the central environmental crisis facing the world. And, he insists, technological fixes will not save the day.

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GUANGZHOU, China - The rains brought torrents, pouring into basements and malls, the water swiftly rising a foot and a half.

Graphics by Derek Watkins and Jeremy White. Design by Matt Ruby and Rumsey Taylor.

The city of Dongguan, a manufacturing center here in the world's most dynamic industrial region, was hit especially hard by the downpour in May 2014. More than 100 factories and shops were inundated. Water climbed knee-high in 20 minutes, wiping out inventory for dozens of businesses.

Next door in Guangzhou, an ancient, mammoth port city of 13 million, helicopters and a fleet of 80 boats had to be sent to rescue trapped residents. Tens of thousands lost their homes, and 53 square miles of nearby farmland were ruined. The cost of repairs topped $100 million.

Chen Rongbo, who lived in the city, saw the flood coming. He tried to scramble to safety on the second floor of his house, carrying his 6-year-old granddaughter. He slipped. The flood swept both of them away.

Flooding has been a plague for centuries in southern China's Pearl River Delta. So even the rains that May, the worst in the area in years, soon drifted from the headlines. People complained and made jokes on social media about wading through streets that had become canals and riding on half-submerged buses through lakes that used to be streets. But there was no official hand-wringing about what caused the floods or how climate change might bring more extreme storms and make the problems worse.

A generation ago, this was mostly farmland. Three vital rivers leading to the South China Sea, along with a spider's web of crisscrossing tributaries, made the low-lying delta a fertile plain, famous for rice. Guangzhou, formerly Canton, had more than a million people, but by the 1980s, China set out to transform the whole region, capitalizing on its proximity to water, the energy of its people, and the money and port infrastructure of neighboring Hong Kong.

Rushing to catch up after decades of stagnation, China built a gargantuan collection of cities the size of nations with barely a pause to consider their toll on the environment, much less the future impact of global warming. Today, the region is a goliath of industry with a population exceeding 42 million.

But while prosperity reshaped the social and cultural geography of the delta, it didn't fundamentally alter the topography. Here, as elsewhere, breakneck development comes up against the growing threat of climate change. Economically, Guangzhou now has more to lose from climate change than any other city on the planet, according to a World Bank report. Nearby Shenzhen, another booming metropolis, ranked 10th on that World Bank list, which measured risk as a percentage of gross domestic product.

While it is difficult to attribute any single storm or heat wave to climate change, researchers say there is abundant evidence that the effects of climate change can already be seen - in higher water levels, increasing temperatures and ever-more severe storms.

And climate change not only poses a menace to those who live and work here, or to the immense concentration of wealth and investment. It is also a threat to a world that has grown dependent on everything produced in the area's factories.

The rising South China Sea and the overstressed Pearl River network lie just a meter or so below much of this new multitrillion-dollar development - and they are poised to drown decades of progress, scrambling global supply chains and raising prices on a world of goods like smartphones, T-shirts, biopharmaceuticals and even the tiny springs inside your ballpoint pens.

As always, climate change works like an opportunistic pathogen, worsening existing woes, not acting alone. This can make it hard to pin down, easy to dismiss. Notoriously, China today is crippled by air pollution, linked to local emissions from coal-fired power plants, steel factories and cars. New research shows that rising temperatures and stagnant air resulting from climate change - caused largely by worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide - are exacerbating China's smog crisis, which has contributed to millions of premature deaths.

The Chinese government has become an outspoken voice on climate change. President Xi Jinping, who is meeting this week with President Trump, has urged the signatories of the 2015 Paris climate accord to follow through on their pledge, while state-run Chinese media has criticized the Trump administration for "brazenly shirking its responsibility on climate change."

China is now the world leader in domestic investment in renewable energy, and over the past decade the central authorities in Beijing have made environmental performance a higher priority for civil servants. But stronger mandates haven't yet overcome the pace of expansion, a decentralized fiscal system, lax enforcement and a culture that frequently pits growth against green. The country continues to consume as much coal as the rest of the world combined, and to increase its steel capacity.

Here in Guangdong Province, all the new cars, the concrete and the belching factories spike temperatures, endangering sick and elderly people, creating urban heat islands and incubating pandemics like dengue fever, an outbreak of which slammed Guangzhou in 2014, afflicting 47,000 people.

On top of this are the floods and tidal surges, worsened by a mix of increasingly severe storms and land sinking under the sheer weight of development - amplifying the impact of rising waters. The flooding and surges overwhelm hastily planned, often shoddily constructed buildings and neighborhoods with overstressed sewage systems in poorly conceived areas of urban sprawl. The Chinese authorities like to show off the region's shiny new office towers and airports, which generate cash and enhance the country's prestige. Fixing costly sewers that no one sees is not a high priority.

In the meantime, the costs of inaction rise like the tides and temperatures.

One afternoon, I met Cai Yanfeng at a Starbucks in Shenzhen. The Starbucks occupies a ground-floor corner in a factory complex where her parents used to work, now converted into high-end rental lofts and art galleries. Fashionable young Chinese sipped Frappuccinos and stared at smartphones.

Shenzhen was still a sleepy fishing village of some 35,000 during the late 1970s when the Chinese authorities declared it a Special Economic Zone, bringing in huge investments and waves of migrants from the countryside who have helped make what today is a metropolis of 11 million. Ms. Cai arrived during the early 1980s as a toddler with her parents. Now trained as an urban designer, she has seen the city's evolution and, at 36, is a relative old-timer.

Graphics by Derek Watkins and Jeremy White. Design by Matt Ruby and Rumsey Taylor.

She was recalling her childhood, when she would cross the street up the block from where the Starbucks is now to play in the mangrove swamps hugging the bay. Ms. Cai gestured out the window, as if pointing at something, although the world she was conjuring up had long ago vanished. Today, the street she used to cross is the size of an American Interstate. Where the mangroves started, not far from the Starbucks, a hospital campus flanks a shopping mall. The mangroves were ripped out and bulldozed, replaced by landfill, and smothered by acres of concrete, asphalt, office towers, high-rise apartments and industrial development.

"It started with amusement parks along the beach," Ms. Cai remembered. "Then the city built another big road near the sea, with the area filled in between with residential blocks. Things sped up after that."

The destruction of the wetlands where Ms. Cai once played is now one of the region's biggest climate challenges. Mangroves provide a natural buffer from the sea, shielding the coastline, reducing the impact of waves and rising water, filtering out salt that can infiltrate freshwater reserves, absorbing exceptional quantities of carbon and lowering ambient temperatures. But about 70 percent of the mangrove forests in Shenzhen are gone. And their disappearance is accelerating: 2,100 acres paved over between 1979 and 1985; 6,700 more acres during the next decade; thousands and thousands more since.

Recently, Chinese officials announced plans to add yet another 21 square miles of landfill along Shenzhen's coast. The problem isn't just the destruction of mangroves. Landfill is notoriously vulnerable to rising waters. When Hurricane Sandy socked Lower Manhattan in 2012, it swamped streets built on landfill, peaking where the island's long-obscured natural shore had once been. In the end, nature always finds its level. Along the Huishen Highway in Shenzhen, rising seawater recently eroded a stretch of landfill three football fields long, leaving a shambles of asphalt and concrete. When a typhoon pounded the delta in 2008, a third of the sea wall in Zhuhai crumbled, letting water reach the city.

By contrast, Zhuhai's nature preserve, where the mangroves had not been cut down, absorbed the brunt of the water and survived.

In Shenzhen, I came across Xiyong Beach, which local fishermen say has been shrinking, gradually swallowed up by rising waters that experts here link to climate change. Chen Tegu, a professor in Guangzhou with the State Oceanic Administration, has been taking measurements since the mid-1980s, watching coastline disappear. Mr. Chen ticked off statistics about temperatures, storms and drought, predicting that the South China Sea could rise almost as much as a foot and a half by the end of this century.

That increase, exacerbated by the sinking of the land, will mean more salt water infiltrating the delta, which, combined with drought, threatens drinking water. A drought several years ago caused water shortages for millions of delta residents, and five major saltwater incursions from the South China Sea have hit the region in the past 20 years alone. These incursions corrupt not only the water that people drink but also the water used by factories, corroding equipment and raising production costs, with ripple effects all along the distribution network. Local agricultural yields have been hurt as well. China has been building water treatment plants, but the pace hasn't kept up with the threat.

I asked Ms. Cai whether she thought people in Shenzhen worried much about climate change. "Some NGOs talk about it," she said, "but people here still focus on the economic side of things, on jobs and G.D.P. They care about whether we are a first-tier city yet. Are we beating Guangzhou?"

Liang Bo, who works for the Shenzhen Mangrove Wetlands and Conservation Foundation, agrees. I walked with her through a waterfront park that's more or less where Ms. Cai once played in the mangroves. Along the shore, garbage washed up on the rocks from the murky, gray water in the bay.

"It's worse at low tide," Ms. Liang said. "You really see how filthy it has become." Because of all the landfill and new development, she said, water no longer flows in and out of the bay as it once did. So garbage gets trapped, stagnation gets worse, fish are killed off. That scenario is repeated throughout the delta, where small rivers and tributaries have been filled in and paved over to make way for new highways, office parks and housing developments, adding to the strains on an already inadequate system of drains and sewers.

"The sea, the wetlands and mangroves used to be part of people's lives here," Ms. Liang pointed out. "But most of the people who live here now weren't around when the mangroves were still here. They see this park, which makes us more vulnerable to rising seas and typhoons, as they do all the tall buildings and highways. They equate it with progress."

"Air pollution is a direct challenge to people, it's right in their face," said Ma Jun, founder and director of the citizen-led Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing. "It's about the food they put on their table for their children. So they've made noise, and things have changed in terms of air pollution policy by the Chinese authorities. On the other hand, climate change is happening at a different speed. Sea level rise is not something you easily notice."

This is the challenge everywhere. Storms, like hot days, happen all the time - and they have always happened. So people don't automatically chalk them up to climate change. Climate change is like the tortoise. Development is the hare. "The problem isn't unique to China," Mr. Ma said. "There is no obvious, short-term solution to climate change problems, no clear strategy everybody agrees is what needs to happen to offset climate change. And there's no certainty about how to pay for what needs to be done. So there's reluctance to address the issue. What's the business model?"

That's a trillion-dollar question, according to the World Bank, which projected the potential cost of damage to coastal cities worldwide from rising seas to be somewhere near that figure. It estimates that China is already losing 1.4 percent of its annual G.D.P. to climate change. Last spring, residents in Guangzhou woke again to flooded streets after a furious downpour swept across the delta and drowned entire neighborhoods of the city. Local news media, once more, said that there had been nothing like it in years. And as usual, Chinese social media sites buzzed with posts of people trapped in flooded cars. One man, named Pang, became an overnight celebrity for catching a fish with his umbrella, then going home and making soup with the head and tail. "It was fresh and tender," he told The Guangzhou Daily.

Rains brutalized many other cities throughout southern China last year: More than 160 people were killed by drowning and landslides, dozens went missing, 73,000 homes collapsed and more than a million acres of farmland were destroyed. The death tolls from floods across China have actually been trending downward, thanks to improved emergency relief efforts. But the damage is increasingly felt in urban areas, where overdevelopment continues to outpace the country's appetite for climate change adaptation and natural disaster preparedness.

That's partly because canals and waterways that once helped to drain cities like Guangzhou naturally have been filled in and paved over with concrete and asphalt. Especially in older, underserved areas, the infrastructure replacing the canals is shoddy. While Guangdong now claims more billionaires than any other province in the country, it is also home to millions of low-wage workers and migrants from the countryside who have settled in cheaper, poorly maintained neighborhoods, the crumbling legacy of humongous Socialist-era housing developments.

Zhou Jianyun, an architect and professor who moved to Guangzhou as a student in the early 1980s, took me one day to see some of the older parts of the city most prone to flooding. We toured the area around what used to be the ancient city gates. Streets once lined with handsome covered pedestrian arcades from the 1930s have been widened into boulevards to make more room for cars. Farther west, older neighborhoods spill toward the Pearl River. In many ways, these neighborhoods, like Guangzhou's ancient villages - crowded, labyrinthine vestiges of old Canton now dwarfed by giant new shopping malls and housing complexes - are the liveliest parts of the city. But they are also more and more frequently underwater because they are near the river, inadequately protected and ill served by the outdated sewage system.

To the east, an immense, modern district called Tianhe has risen from next to nothing in 30-odd years, its offices and apartment blocks now overshadowed by the super-tall skyscrapers of Guangzhou's Zhujiang New Town, with its opera house by Zaha Hadid and its signature Canton Tower. The picture-postcard image of New Town can bring to mind American downtowns from the late 20th century - cities like Atlanta or Phoenix, only glossier and on a vast scale. Advertised as more environmentally conscious than older parts of the city, with better flood protections, New Town is still a sprawling development conceived for cars and glass towers, with a carbon-heavy diet dependent on highways and air-conditioning.

"The cities we now have are partly based on what we saw in American movies - on the dream of big malls, airports, highways and tall buildings," Mr. Zhou said. "I belong to the generation that witnessed the biggest change. We had been almost like North Korea, closed off. Suddenly we could see American movies."

"This became our idea of progress," he added. "Only we wanted to do everything bigger, because we thought that is what it meant to be modern. The actual needs of the real city are ignored."

"In many ways, we are still living a dream," he said.

Clearly, the region's future depends on whether, and how fast, Chinese officials redefine that concept of progress.

"China's feelings about modernization keep changing," said Zhou Ming, an urban planner in Shenzhen who expressed some optimism for the future. We met one afternoon in the glittery hotel lobby at the top of KK100, a 1,400-foot skyscraper with a panoramic view that takes in Hong Kong.

"Before the opening to the outside world, people didn't have food to eat," he said. "So they focused on jobs and basic needs. Now wages are going up for workers, people are concerned about air pollution and they are starting to value traditional culture again, meaning neighborhoods that are human-scale and not just a bunch of skyscrapers. That's on top of pressure from international businesses whose employees care about environmental and climate issues and can decide whether they want to do business here."

Not incidentally, some factories have been leaving Guangdong. Rising wages and threats of stiffer pollution standards have prompted less scrupulous manufacturers to move their businesses to countries like Vietnam and Cambodia, where regulations are weaker. In turn, those countries are repeating mistakes, related to climate change preparedness, that China is paying for now.

But this exodus, seeking short-term profits, has also created an opportunity for China. Planners and environmentalists here talk about a chance to rebrand Guangdong Province as a global leader in green, cutting-edge industrial technology and urbanism - to go beyond token green skyscrapers and really get ahead of climate change. To make China the leading green global superpower.

The opportunity has increased as the Trump administration has retreated on the environment, attacking clean energy, promoting outmoded coal, seeking to undo longstanding federal protections even for drinking water and air. China recently announced that it wanted to create a national market for greenhouse gas quotas, suggesting that it was increasingly persuaded by the financial argument for climate adaptation. A recent report by Bloomberg Philanthropies made just that case, citing billions of dollars in climate-related engineering and construction opportunities.

Prosperity will ultimately belong to cities and nations around the world that find ways to capitalize on strategies of resilience against the inevitable impact of climate change. Those cities will retool themselves for new technologies and global businesses whose employees, reflecting a growing worldwide generational shift, want to walk, ride bikes and take mass transit.

China has demonstrated that it can be nimble and ingenious. Since 1997, Guangzhou has opened an entire new metro system with scores of stations, covering hundreds of miles; Shenzhen has done the same in only a dozen years. New York has barely managed to construct four subway stations in half a century.

But little of this infrastructure in China was conceived in anticipation of extreme conditions and climate change. Rising waters repeatedly reduced train traffic in the delta to a crawl last year, halting ferry service on the Pearl River and turning several of the new subway stations into swimming holes.

"What climate change says is that if you want to maintain the city as a good place to live and work for everyone, business as usual won't do," said Robert J. Nicholls, a professor of coastal engineering at the University of Southampton in England. He helped write the World Bank report that warned of the fiscal impact of climate change on the Pearl River Delta. "Disasters will become more likely. And the last thing the Chinese want is a Katrina event," he added, referring to the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005.

Flooding is not an insurmountable hurdle, he noted. The Chinese can build smarter cities - healthier, safer, more equitable and humane ones, with restored waterways and waterfronts, flood-proof buildings, wide-reaching air-pollution controls, earlier warning systems, levees that double as parks, retention ponds that provide recreation, neighborhoods less dependent on cars.

"The challenge for the Chinese, as it is for so many others," he said, "is taking the long view."

Which shouldn't really be so hard, considering the recent past. The government estimated regional losses from last summer's floods alone at $10 billion. For all of 2016, rainfall in China was 16 percent above average.

That was the highest level in recorded history.

Cao Li contributed research from Beijing and Guangdong Province.

Map by Jeremy White. Design by Danny DeBelius and Rumsey Taylor.

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Rising Waters Threaten China's Rising Cities

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GUANGZHOU, China - The rains brought torrents, pouring into basements and malls, the water swiftly rising a foot and a half. Graphics by Derek Watkins and Jeremy White. Design by Matt Ruby and Rumsey Taylor. The city of Dongguan, a manufacturing center here in the world's most dynamic industrial region, was hit especially hard by the downpour in May 2014.

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Mexico City, Parched and Sinking, Faces a Water Crisis (Published 2017)

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MEXICO CITY - On bad days, you can smell the stench from a mile away, drifting over a nowhere sprawl of highways and office parks. When the Grand Canal was completed, at the end of the 1800s, it was Mexico City's Brooklyn Bridge, a major feat of engineering and a symbol of civic pride: 29 miles long, with the ability to move tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater per second.

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Reuters/Issei Kato

It's midnight in Tokyo and Takehiro Onuki has just left the office, 16 hours after his shift began.

Onuki, a 31-year-old salesman, is headed to the train station to catch the 12:24 a.m. train, the last one of the night, back to his home in Yokohama. The train will quickly fill up with other professional working men.

At about 1:30 a.m., after having made a pit stop at a convenience store to grab a sandwich, Onuki arrives home. When he opens the bedroom door, he accidentally wakes his wife, Yoshiko, who just recently fell asleep after working an 11-hour day. She chides him for making too much noise and he apologizes.

Then, with his food still digesting and his alarm set for 7 a.m., he creeps into bed, ready to do it all again tomorrow.

Over the past two decades, stories like the Onukis' have become commonplace in Japan. Young couples are fighting to make relationships work amid a traditional work culture that expects men to be breadwinners and women to be homemakers. It's a losing battle. Many newlyweds are forced to watch their free time disappear, surrendering everything from the occasional date night to starting a family.

The daily constraints have made for a worrisome trend. Japan has entered a vicious cycle of low fertility and low spending that has led to trillions in lost GDP and a population decline of 1 million people, all within just the past five years. If left unabated, experts forecast severe economic downturn and a breakdown in the fabric of social life.

Mary Brinton, a Harvard sociologist, tells Business Insider that the situation will get only worse until Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his cabinet get with the times. Of the ongoing crisis, she says, "This is death to the family."

Issei Kato/Reuters

The demographic time bomb in action

Economists have a name for countries that contract because of these swirling forces: "demographic time bombs." In these nations, falling spending shrinks the economy, which discourages families from having kids, which shrinks the economy further. Meanwhile, people are living longer than ever before.

"An aging population will mean higher costs for the government, a shortage of pension and social security-type funds, a shortage of people to care for the very aged, slow economic growth, and a shortage of young workers," Brinton says.

Demographic time bombs are hard to defuse because they form over years, sometimes decades. In Japan's case, the story begins in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Yuriko Nakao/Reuters

During the early 1950s, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida made rebuilding Japan's economy his top priority. He enlisted major corporations to offer their employees lifelong job security, asking only that workers repay them with loyalty. The pact worked. Japan's economy is now the third largest in the world, and it's largely because of Yoshida's efforts 65 years ago.

But there was a clear downside to that economic growth. In the early 1950s, fertility rates hovered at a healthy 2.75 children per woman, UN data shows. By 1960, as businesses asked more and more of their employees, the fertility rate had fallen to 2.08. Japan had sunk to a critical threshold known as "replacement fertility," the bare minimum to avoid losing population.

"In those days, women's university enrollment rate exceeded 40%," Tokyo University economist Hiroshi Yoshida tells Business Insider. But as more women entered the workforce, fertility began to plummet. Today, more than 50 years later, Japan's fertility rate sits at 1.41, the population is falling, and brutally long work hours remain the norm.

Andy Kiersz/Business Insider

The new world of work

In downtown Tokyo, 36-year-old Natsuko Fujimaki runs a daycare that teaches English to Japanese kids. As much as she adores the children, she says it's the people who pop in one or two Saturdays a month whom she really looks forward to seeing.

On these weekends, a group of about 15 working mothers convene in the colorful one-room building. Among construction-paper art and signs that say "READ!," they swap stories of their hurried schedules, sharing tips for navigating motherhood and careerism. Fujimaki has been hosting the seminars for the past year. She says it's the ultimate passion project.

Natsuko Fujimaki

Fujimaki, who happens to be Yoshiko Onuki's older sister and herself a mother of one, was raised by a working mom. Her father left when she was young. It's an experience that has stayed with Fujimaki all her life. Where plenty of other women were happy to become housewives, Fujimaki says her mother's balancing act convinced her never to compromise on her dreams.

She tries to instill a similar mindset in the women who attend her seminar. After a long day at work and evenings spent cooking dinner and doing laundry, many have little free time left. They become lonely. "Nobody helps these career-oriented working mothers," Fujimaki tells Business Insider. "I want to help them."

Fujimaki's business is just one of the consequences of Yoshida's early efforts to rebuild Japan's economy - which he did. But a major reason for that growth is that men and women bought into the idea that each sex had a specific role to play. The emerging labor force doesn't see it that way, says Frances Rosenbluth, a political scientist at Yale University.

Following feminism's slow build in Japan since the 1970s, today's workers strive for equality between the sexes, something Japan's pyramid-style corporate structure just isn't built for. That's because institutional knowledge is viewed as a big deal in Japan, Rosenbluth says. Veteran accountants can't expect to leave their current job and start a new one at the same pay grade, as managers are of the opinion that skills don't transfer. As a result, both male and female workers stick around, even if conditions are miserable.

Chris Gladis/Flickr

On more than one occasion, Yoshiko has texted Natsuko complaining about how tired she is after spending 11 hours at her marketing job at Nissan.

"She's exhausted every day," Natsuko says. "She always texts me like, 'Oh so tired.'" Yoshiko admits the work is draining and hardly fulfilling. "I do not see any joy in my job right now," she tells Business Insider. Her husband echoes the sentiment, saying the routine of his job at a steel supply company has become "boring." They both say they want to look for new jobs, although neither could specify when that change might occur.

Yoshiko says she's considering a shake-up in a couple of years' time, when she's ready to have kids. But even here Rosenbluth says women often face a difficult dilemma. Exiting the labor force to raise kids can make it much harder to find work afterward. Social scientists call this the "mommy penalty."

"The mommy penalty is big in Japan," Rosenbluth tells Business Insider.

These opposing forces are something of a paradox, the unstoppable force of changing attitudes meeting the immovable object of traditional culture. "What do you do about the fact that firms' incentives don't align with the social desirability of changing this problem?" Rosenbluth says. "That's a hard one."

Japan first, the world second

The International Monetary Fund recently issued a warning to other Asian countries to be wary of Japan's trajectory of "getting old before becoming rich." And last year a UBS report showed changing attitudes toward work and gender roles could lead a number of industrialized nations, including the US, to face similar economic hardship.

UBS

But as Rosenbluth and Brinton agree, compared to other countries Japan's case is extreme, particularly as it pertains to aging. Adult diapers have outsold baby diapers in Japan for the last six years, and many jails are turning into de facto nursing homes, as Japanese elders account for 20% of all crime in the country. With no one else to care for them, many reoffend just to come back. Stealing a sandwich can mean two years of jail time, but it also means two years of free housing and meals.

Tokyo University's Yoshida says the most critical fact is death rates now fall well below birth rates. People just don't seem to be dying. The elderly now make up 27% of Japan's population. In the US, the rate is only 15%. Experts predict the ratio in Japan could rise to 40% by 2050. With that comes rising social-security costs, which the shrinking younger generations are expected to bear.

But as 42-year-old journalist Renge Jibu says, that means shifting priorities from the personal to the professional. And a lot of Japanese young people simply don't have an interest in committing even more of themselves to a job they hate.

"We need to think about what is happiness to us," says Jibu, a 2006 Fulbright scholar at the University of Michigan's Center for the Education of Women, "not think about happiness to company."

But Natsuko Fujimaki says the costs absorbed by younger people have led them to reassess their priorities between work, family, and social life anyway. She says the Japanese concept of "majime" helps explain why. People who are majime are a cross between perfectionists and goody two-shoes. They always play by the rules and try to do it as precisely as possible.

"Everyone is really majime to do their job," Fujimaki says. But after being so majime to buy food and pay their bills, many people feel they have time only for one other thing: climbing into bed at 2 a.m. with a bellyfull of hastily consumed food.

Small-scale solutions

Companies have taken a number of steps to make work-life balance less of a struggle.

Japanese ad agency Dentsu recently began forcing people to take at least five days off every six months. The policy followed a 24-year-old employee's suicide in 2015 and a string of work-related suicides in Japan. The phenomenon is known as "karoshi," or death by overwork. The company shuts the lights off every night at 10 as an incentive for people to head home.

KYODO/Reuters

At the Tokyo-based nursing-care business Saint-Works, employees wear purple capes that display the time they should leave the office. It's an effort to erase all doubt when the day is over. According to the South China Morning Post, people at Saint-Works are working half as many overtime hours since 2012, while profits continue to grow year over year.

But experts generally agree that equality must come from the government, not private industry. Fewer than 10% of managers in Japan are female, a disparity many say stems from a systemic bias against hiring women. Firms view female hires as bad investments, as pregnancy and maternity leave are viewed as a drain on company resources, Rosenbluth says. Neither she nor Brinton sees the government making strides in this area.

In the five years since his election, Prime Minister Abe has addressed Japan's fertility rate mainly as a matter of inconvenience, they say. His government has hosted speed-dating events to get people chitchatting and held fatherhood classes to help single guys seem themselves in a parenting role.

"It's great that [the government] is worried about it," Rosenbluth says. "But these things will not work."

Instead, she argues, the government has a responsibility to implement policies that favor women while also appealing to corporate interests. She imagines firms getting a tax break for hiring female managers over male candidates. But Brinton doesn't see that happening either.

"No matter what you say, what you hear out of Prime Minister Abe's mouth, it's not about gender equality," she says. "It's about productivity of the economy and addressing the fact that Japan is one of the most rapidly aging societies in the world and they're going to run out of labor unless women have more babies."

MasterCard

Humanoids instead of humans

To make up for an aging population and aversion toward immigrant work, Japan's tech sector has stepped up its efforts in robotics and artificial intelligence. In doing so, it has essentially turned a biological problem into an engineering one.

In 2014, Telecom giant SoftBank Robotics Corp. released the prototype for its Pepper robot, a friendly white humanoid with puppy-dog eyes and a chest-mounted tablet computer. The company envisioned Pepper welcoming guests at a dinner party, greeting business partners, or comforting hospital patients. Pepper comes equipped with emotion-recognition software that analyzes voice tones and facial expressions. It's all part of Japan's effort to replicate the things that humans can do, if only there were people to do them.

On a June weekend in 2015, SoftBank began selling 1,000 Pepper robots for consumer use, at a base price of $1,600 per robot. The supply sold out in one minute.

Reuters

The solutions to a lack of human labor have been small scale too.

In 2015, Tokyo's Haneda Airport partnered with technology company Cyberdyne to outfit airport employees with sleek, waist-level devices that give elderly workers the strength of a strapping young person. The device picks up electrical impulses inside the body to help the muscles contract - say, to lift heavy bags or wrangle a rogue toddler. The exoskeletons can sync with floor robots capable of carting around up to 400 pounds of luggage, potentially eliminating the needs for humans.

All hope isn't lost

For all the statistical doom and gloom, many people are still optimistic that a happy, well-balanced life is possible.

A 2016 study conducted by a Japanese research firm found that even though nearly 70% of unmarried Japanese men and 60% of unmarried Japanese women weren't in relationships, most people still say they want to get married.

Renge Jibu, the journalist, said she was so inspired by American working moms when she studied at the University of Michigan that she felt confident enough to have two kids of her own. Fujimaki told a similar story of her own mother. And though Takehiro and Yoshiko Onuki don't yet have any kids, both agree they'll probably have at least one within the next five years. They hope their jobs will be more enjoyable and come with more flexible hours.

But in the meantime, they'll continue texting during the workday and catching up from Friday to Sunday.

"We have some distance on the weekdays," Yoshiko says. "But we can talk a lot on the weekends, so I think that's very good to keep us ... " She trailed off, searching for the word.

"Married?" her husband said.

"Yes!" she said, and both of them fell into laughter.

SEE ALSO: 10 countries that desperately want people to have more sex

NOW WATCH: This Japanese artist creates life-size animals from thin rolls of newspaper

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'This is death to the family': Japan's fertility crisis is creating economic and social woes never seen before

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It's midnight in Tokyo and Takehiro Onuki has just left the office, 16 hours after his shift began. Onuki, a 31-year-old salesman, is headed to the train station to catch the 12:24 a.m. train, the last one of the night, back to his home in Yokohama.

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National Parks Struggle With a Mounting Crisis: Too Many Visitors - The New York Times

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National Parks Struggle With a Mounting Crisis: Too Many Visitors - The New York Times

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National Parks Struggle With a Mounting Crisis: Too Many Visitors

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Overcrowding has put a strain on a park system already grappling with climate change and funding problems, leading to proposals to limit access.

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I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. Here’s why. - Vox

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I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. Here’s why. - Vox

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I did an event with environmental journalist (and personal hero) Elizabeth Kolbert late last week, in which we discussed various matters related to journalism and climate change. Subsequently, one of the attendees wrote and asked why I hadn't talked about population. Isn't overpopulation the real root of our environmental ills?

Anyone who's ever given a talk on an environmental subject knows that the population question is a near-inevitability (second only to the nuclear question). I used to get asked about it constantly when I wrote for Grist - less now, but still fairly regularly.

I thought I would explain, once and for all, why I hardly ever talk about population, and why I'm unlikely to in the future.

Math confirms that population is indeed a factor in environmental impact

Human impact on the natural environment is summed up in a simple formula:

Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology

All are rising. (Bill Gates has a slightly more complicated formula related to carbon dioxide, but P is a variable in his too.)

The current global population has crossed 7.5 billion and is heading upward. The latest UN projections have it hitting 8.6 billion by 2030, 9.8 billion by 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100. Average fertility rate will decrease, but that effect will be overwhelmed by the absolute numbers. (There are many arguments out there that UN is overestimating population growth, but let's stick with their numbers for this post.)

The UN expects over half the growth out to 2100 to be concentrated in just nine countries, listed here in order of their expected contribution:

India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States of America, Uganda, and Indonesia.

Most of those people will be fairly poor (by Western standards, though hopefully less so than their forbearers), which means their per-capita consumption of resources will be fairly low. Nonetheless, cumulatively, adding 2.3 billion people by 2050 amounts to enormous additional resource use and pollution (including greenhouse gases).

Mitigating some substantial percentage of that population growth would be one way to better environmental conditions in 2050. It would also have more impact than virtually any other climate policy. (More on that later.)

However. That human numbers are, axiomatically, part of the story of human impact does not mean that human numbers have to take center stage. Talking about population growth is morally and politically fraught, but the best ways of tackling it (like, say, educating girls) don't necessitate talking about it at all.

Tackling population growth can be done without the enormous, unnecessary risks involved in talking about population growth.

Population's unsavory associations

When political movements or leaders adopt population control as a central concern ... let's just say it never goes well. In practice, where you find concern over "population," you very often find racism, xenophobia, or eugenics lurking in the wings. It's almost always, ahem, particular populations that need reducing.

History is replete with examples, but perhaps the most germane recent episode was less than 20 years ago, at the Sierra Club, which was riven by divisions over immigration. A group of grassroots members, with some help from powerful funders, attempted to take over the national organization.

These members advocated sharply restricting immigration, saying the US should be reducing rather than increasing its population. Their contention is that the country's open immigration policies are hurting the environment by bringing in poor immigrants and making them richer, thus increasing their environmental impact. Of course, they swore up and down that xenophobia had nothing to do with it.

The Sierra Club won that fight, and the "green anti-immigrant" movement has mostly been driven to the fringes, but conservative media is still getting ratings out of it. If you can stomach it, watch this entire segment with Tucker Carlson of Fox News - it hits all the usual notes, culminating in an interview with some professor who wrote a book about reducing immigration for environmental reasons.

I don't doubt that it's possible to be concerned about the environmental stresses population brings without any racism or xenophobia - I've met many people who fit that description, and there were well-meaning (if quite mistaken) population-focused groups in the '70s and '80s - but in terms of public discussion and advocacy, anyone explicitly expressing that concern starts out behind the eight ball. The mere mention of "population" raises all sorts of ugly historical associations.

Public health groups have largely cottoned to this. Even the ones that have "population" in the name focus on family planning rather than population as such. They've figured out something important - something not all greens have figured out - which is that the best ways to address population don't necessarily involve talking about it at all.

So what are those ways?

There are two ways of looking at the problem of growing population on a finite planet. Depending on which you think is most important, there are different ways to address it, none of which require discussing population.

Female empowerment is the most effective carbon mitigation strategy

The first way to look at population is as a pure numbers game. More people means more consumers and more emitters, so the thing to do is slow the rise of population. Specifically, since most of the new people are going to come from poor or developing countries, the question is specifically how to slow population growth there.

Luckily, we know the answer. It is family planning that enables women to have only children they want and choose, and education of girls, giving them access to income opportunities outside the home. We know that women, given the resources and the choice, will opt for smaller families.

Those are the two most powerful levers to bend the population curve. They are also, in and of themselves, an enormously powerful climate policy. When Paul Hawken and his team investigated and ranked carbon-reduction solutions for their Drawdown project, they found that the combination of the two (call it the female-empowerment package) carried the most potential to reduce greenhouse gases later this century, out of any solution. (Together they could prevent 120 gigatons of GHGs by 2050 - more than on- and offshore wind combined.)

So if you are concerned about the growth in population, make yourself a champion of female empowerment in the developing world. You will be contributing to the most effective solution to the problem without any of the moral baggage.

And next time you're at an environmental event, maybe instead of asking the population question, ask the female empowerment question. Why aren't climate hawks talking about it more? They should be!

Some population units consume and emit more than others

If your concern is the creation of new consumers and emitters, your gaze should be drawn to those who will consume and emit the most, i.e., the wealthy.

One way to prevent the creation of new high-consumers would be to persuade the wealthy to have fewer babies and to close off the borders of wealthy countries, preventing low-consumers from immigrating and becoming high-consumers. You could try, in short, to engineer population decline in wealthy countries.

That seems ... fraught.

For one thing, fertility tends to decline with wealth anyway. For another, any targeted attempt to engineer population decline is going to run into an unholy thicket of moral and political resistance.

Another way to approach the problem would be, rather than prevent the birth of extremely wealthy people, prevent the creation of extremely wealthy people. In other words, prevent the accumulation of massive wealth. You could do that by, for instance, taxing the shit out of wealthy people.

If you approached the problem that way, under the banner of reducing global income inequality, you would find many allies. Income inequality is a top-line concern of people and organizations all over the world, even some conservatives these days.

Reducing high-end consumption could have an enormous short-term impact on carbon emissions, as climate scientist Kevin Anderson is always saying. Shifting wealth within populations - reducing the number of very wealthy and the number in poverty - can have as much carbon impact as reducing overall population.

So maybe, at the next environmental event, you could ask the income inequality question rather than the population question.

There's much downside and not much upside to talking about population

So that, for the record, is why I hardly ever talk or write about population. (I will now send all future askers of the population question to this post.) It is high risk - very, very easy to step on moral landmines in that territory - with little reward.

And where talk of population control is rarely popular (for good reason), female empowerment and greater equality are a) goals shared by powerful preexisting coalitions, b) replete with ancillary benefits beyond the environmental, and c) unquestionably righteous.

So why focus on the former when the latter gets you all the same advantages with none of the blowback? That's how I figure it anyway.

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I'm an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. Here's why.

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I did an event with environmental journalist (and personal hero) Elizabeth Kolbert late last week, in which we discussed various matters related to journalism and climate change. Subsequently, one of the attendees wrote and asked why I hadn't talked about population. Isn't overpopulation the real root of our environmental ills?

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Study Finds 10 Million Fewer Childhood Deaths In India Than Predicted : Goats and Soda : NPR

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Study Finds 10 Million Fewer Childhood Deaths In India Than Predicted : Goats and Soda : NPR

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The study has a depressing name: The Million Death Study.

But its latest set of data, published in the journal on Wednesday, is anything but depressing when it comes to the topic of childhood deaths in India.

India has the tragic distinction of being a world leader in childhood deaths. Between 2000 and 2015, the death toll for children under the age of five was 29 million - a fifth of global childhood deaths.

That's an overwhelming number - but it could have been much worse. The findings from the study say that the overall child mortality rate slowed down significantly. The total deaths for that 16-year period would have been an estimated 39 million, based on deaths in the year 2000 of nearly 2.5 million children in that age bracket.

It's a challenge to track childhood deaths in India, where most deaths, especially of children, happen at home and without medical attention, says Prabhat Jha, head of the Centre for Global Health Research of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and the lead researcher of the study.

"Hospital data are good in the small number of hospitals that are monitored, but most hospitals don't record causes well," says Jha.

To get a more accurate picture of deaths in India, the Million Death Study linked up with the census bureau to get data not only about numbers but also causes. "Families know what happened to their loved ones, generally," he says, adding that this data set collected from home visits and first person accounts is more reliable than models or projections.

From the general data about deaths, Jha and his collaborators focused on deaths in children. They found that mortality rates among infants younger than one month fell from 45 per 1,000 births in 2000 to 27 in 2015. And the mortality rate for children between one month and five years old fell from 45.2 to 19.6. The gender gap also narrowed. The death rate for girls fell from 54.2 deaths per 1,000 girls in 2000 to 21.2 in 2015. For boys in 2000, the number of deaths averaged 37 per 1,000 live births and 18.1 in 2015.

The study found that these rates started falling in 2005 and declined faster between 2010 and 2015. They also found fewer child deaths in urban areas and richer states than in rural, poorer areas.

Over 15 years, about 900 trained surveyors from the census bureau interviewed more than a million households in randomly selected areas. But, for the Million Deaths Study, the researchers also probed the cause of death by including in their data what Jha calls "verbal autopsies- a detailed 2-page structured list of symptoms and a half-page narrative of the family's story of the death in the local language." Houses were surveyed every six months so the data on all deaths stayed current.

These reports were converted into electronic form and emailed independently and anonymously to two out of 400 trainedphysicians, who then checked and documented the probable underlying cause of death.

Specifically, the study found that during the survey period there was a 90 percent drop in neonatal deaths from tetanus and measles, two of the main causes of infant deaths in India. And for children ages one month to five years, mortality rates from pneumonia and diarrhea, the two leading causes of child deaths in the country, fell more than 60 percent.

"The point is that child mortality is falling, but it appears to have fallen faster after 2005 when there [were] more actions against some of the leading killers of children," says Jha. That same year, India launched the National Health Mission initiative to address the health needs of underserved rural areas by building more health centers, providing free diagnostics, surgeries and drugs. The project also introduced vaccine drives and special centers for pregnant women and newborns.

It's not all good news though. The authors believe that up to three times as many deaths could have been avoided, given the differences between child mortality between more developed and poorer states. Plus, they note, mortality rates for premature or low-birth-weight babies rose in the 15 years of study, especially in rural areas.

The most important feature in this study is the development of the "verbal autopsy" tool, says Abhay Bang, director of the Society for Education, Action, and Research in Community Health, a public health institution, who was not involved in the study. In their own research, Bang and his colleagues previously found the actual infant death rates in one state they surveyed were 33 percent higher than official estimates. "The right data on the cause of death is very important, because the solution and interventions depend on the diagnoses," says Bang.

The census has been collating causes for many decades but the new study, with its methodology of repeated home visits and a probing questionnaire, has made the data more specific and reliable, he points out.

"Every country wanting to improve health needs a map on how to get there," says Jha. "The Million Death Study is the GPS for better health in India, and can be replicated in other countries."

In India, though, to meet the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals of reducing child mortality by half, the authors urge the government to pay attention to factors such as the mother's wellness, nutrition and access to health care during pregnancy.
Chhavi Sachdev is a journalist based in Mumbai. Contact her

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Why Did India Have Ten Million Fewer Childhood Deaths Than Predicted?

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The study has a depressing name: The Million Death Study. But its latest set of data, published in the journal on Wednesday, is anything but depressing when it comes to the topic of childhood deaths in India. India has the tragic distinction of being a world leader in childhood deaths.

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What the Harvey deluge would look like where you live - The Washington Post

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What the Harvey deluge would look like where you live - The Washington Post

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Hurricane Harvey has already broken the record for the most rainfall from a single storm in the continental United States, even as its diminished remnants move on to drench Louisiana. The most rain recorded in a single place during the storm was an astonishing 51.88 inches in Cedar Bayou, Tex. - just shy of the 52-inch U.S. record for rainfall set in tropical Hawaii.

What does 51.88 inches of rain look like? Something like this:

It's a huge amount of water that fell across a remarkably wide area. As a meteorologist with Harris County, Tex., noted on Twitter, enough rain fell in Houston to sink the entire county under 33 inches of water. That's almost what happened, too, given Harris County's broad and flat contours.

That amount of rain has been tough to visualize. To that end, we've created a tool that imagines a 51.88-inch deluge drenching a number of points in a circle around where you live (or anywhere else) and visualizing what the effect would be: where in that circle the water would pool and how deep it would get. (For our purposes, we're imagining each point to receive 51.88 inches over a square yard of surface.)

Here's the tool, with an explanation to follow.

Let's look at the Penn Hills neighborhood near Pittsburgh, an appropriately hilly one. (Try entering "15235" on the tool.) There, the deluge would pool in a number of lower-lying areas.

How deep would it get? Again imagining that the water is constrained to this circle, it would get nearly 18 feet deep in the southwestern part of that region.

In effect, then, this shows us generally how any neighborhood might be affected - where the flooding would be worst and how bad it could get. It's a rough visualization but one that clearly shows how disparate the effects of a heavy storm can be.

In reality, of course, the water would continue to drain downward, along the paths of those streams and rivers. Which brings us back to Houston.

Here's a random point in the city:

Houston is much flatter than Pittsburgh, and the water barely pools anywhere. This is part of the current problem: Drainage is much slower.

There's no way in which this tool can fully capture the scale of what's happening on the Gulf Coast. What it can do, we hope, is give a sense of how dire the same situation might be in a context with which you might be more familiar.

Thanks to Mapzen for help creating this tool.

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Analysis | What the Harvey deluge would look like where you live

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Hurricane Harvey has already broken the record for the most rainfall from a single storm in the continental United States, even as its diminished remnants move on to drench Louisiana. The most rain recorded in a single place during the storm was an astonishing 51.88 inches in Cedar Bayou, Tex.

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Hurricane Harvey, and Public and Private Disaster in Houston | The New Yorker

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Hurricane Harvey, and Public and Private Disaster in Houston | The New Yorker

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When Houston floods, it turns into a locked circular labyrinth. The city, my home town, is laid out like a wagon wheel: downtown sits at the center, surrounded by three concentric circles, which are bisected by highways in every direction. The first loop, Interstate 610, is thirty-eight miles long, and corrals the Inner Loop neighborhoods. Another round of suburban neighborhoods surrounds the Loop, and is bounded by the eighty-eight-mile-long Beltway 8. Then, the truly sprawling suburbs (Spring, Sugar Land, the Woodlands) surround the Beltway. All told, the greater Houston area is gargantuan-at over ten thousand square miles, it's bigger than New Jersey-and, with upward of six million residents, it's far more populous and diverse than outsiders tend to guess. Houston is also, famously, largely unregulated: zoning laws are minimal, and the unceasing outward development has, with official permission, drastically inhibited drainage. The freeway system holds the city together, keeping a huge, dispersed population connected. But in a storm this lifeline becomes a trap. Houston is flat, and it sits just fifty feet above sea level; after the bayous overflow, the rain collects on the roads. When a flood hits, driving in Houston feels like a video game turned real and deadly. There are sudden impasses everywhere; ingenuity can't save you; once the spokes of the wheel go under, there's nowhere to go.

Houston is the fourth-largest city in America, and right now much of it is underwater. Things will get worse this week. Tropical Storm Harvey, which made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, is sluggishly lingering, and will continue to pummel the flooded city. Forecasts say that Houston may get fifty inches of rain from this storm-which is the city's average annual rainfall. Five people have died; many more will be injured. Houston's safety-net hospital started evacuations on Sunday. The Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, closed its submarine doors, designed, after Tropical Storm Allison, to protect the facility from flooding. Local news crews have struggled heroically to report on the disaster; one newscaster saved a truck driver's life on air. The National Guard saved between twenty and twenty-five nursing-home residents in Dickinson after a harrowing photo went viral. My dad, who got stuck in high water on Saturday night, is one of thousands who have been rescued by Houston police. Harris County has been calling for citizens to help conduct rescues. All over the city, the roads have turned into rivers. Much of what's visible looks like a nightmare; what makes me even sicker is imagining all the fear that we'll never see.

People have criticized Houston residents for not evacuating. Plenty did, and with more understanding of the context, you might excuse many of those who didn't. Evacuating a city like Houston, on these interlocked freeways-where a one-way commute might take two hours on a normal day-can very easily turn into a secondary disaster. The majority of Hurricane Rita deaths in Houston occurred in the evacuation, and two-thirds of flood fatalities happen in cars. Without financial resources, evacuation is a uniquely difficult experience, and 22.5 per cent of the population in increasingly unequal Houston lives under the poverty line. Official messages have also been uneven: Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, advised evacuation; the mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner-likely warding off the worst-case scenario of a hurricane hitting gridlock traffic-advised sheltering in place. (In Rockport, the mayor pro tem issued a mandatory evacuation order, telling people who refused it to write their Social Security numbers on their arms.) President Trump, who has been tweeting about Harvey as if it were a thrilling reality-show finale, and who recently rolled back an Obama-era executive order that infrastructure projects be designed to survive rising sea levels, offered a helpful " Good luck to everybody! " on Friday, before the storm.

Eight years ago, I spent all summer driving around Houston's endless looping freeways, passing picnic-table icehouse bars and stadium churches and the nondescript streets that birthed chopped-and-screwed. I was canvassing for an environmental nonprofit that was pushing for a long-overdue citywide recycling program, and we drove for hours to reach our neighborhood targets. The job was hard: we looked like scammers, and we were proselytizing about environmental responsibility in a city that at the time recycled less than three per cent of its own waste. But I liked the effort of trying to understand and appeal to a dizzying variety of strangers. I knocked on the doors of McMansions and decrepit bungalows, talked to immigrants and Texas-born white people, pitched liberals and conservatives and the politically averse. Houston, which is by one measure the most diverse city in America, took shape in my imagination as an enormous canvas of unpredictable, heterogeneous people who were connected, somehow, by a confusing combination of independence and generosity. As a state, Texas is fiercely individualistic -the land of bootstraps and no income tax and privatized solutions for all. Houstonians absorb this; they are loyal and responsible in a way that rarely extends across the city, which is, again, so big as to feel unfathomable-and those freeways, effectively, are our only public space.

And yet this week I suspect we'll mostly see another side of Houston: its scrappy sense of humor, and its extraordinary and very Texan largesse. Houston responds to disaster with fortitude: the city absorbed two hundred thousand Vietnamese refugees in the nineteen-seventies, and it currently resettles twenty-five of every thousand refugees that the United Nations resettles anywhere-that's more than any other city in America, and more than most countries. After Hurricane Katrina, Houston took in a quarter of a million evacuees, and, aided by Mayor Bill White's multimillion-dollar resettlement program, as many as forty thousand people stayed. Over the weekend, Houston teen-agers were out in the streets rescuing people via kayak. As Rebecca Solnit argues in her 2009 book, " A Paradise Built in Hell," disasters create a window into social desire and potential. We're normally encouraged to think of private life as precious and public life as a nuisance, she writes, but "disasters, in returning their sufferers to public and collective life, undo some of this privatization, which is a slower, subtler disaster all its own." Disasters remind us that ambitious, difficult things are not just possible but necessary; in Houston, Harvey is already showing how an individualistic work ethic and a spirit of collective generosity can and have to coexist.

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Hurricane Harvey, and Public and Private Disaster in Houston

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When Houston floods, it turns into a locked circular labyrinth. The city, my home town, is laid out like a wagon wheel: downtown sits at the center, surrounded by three concentric circles, which are bisected by highways in every direction. The first loop, Interstate 610, is thirty-eight miles long, and corrals the Inner Loop neighborhoods.

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How Houston's unregulated growth contributed to Harvey's flooding disaster - Washington Post

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How Houston's unregulated growth contributed to Harvey's flooding disaster - Washington Post

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This article has been optimized for offline reading on Washington Post apps. For a richer experience, you can find the full version here. An Internet connection is required.

Houston calls itself "the city with no limits " to convey the promise of boundless opportunity. But it also is the largest U.S. city to have no zoning laws, part of a hands-off approach to urban planning that may have contributed to catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Harvey and left thousands of residents in harm's way.

Growth that is virtually unchecked, including in flood-prone areas, has diminished the land's already-limited natural ability to absorb water, according to environmentalists and experts in land use and natural disasters. And the city's drainage system - a network of reservoirs, bayous and, as a last resort, roads that hold and drain water - was not designed to handle the massive storms that are increasingly common.

Certainly, the record-shattering rainfall on Houston and its surrounding area this week would have wreaked havoc even if stricter building limits and better runoff systems were in place. And local officials have defended the city's approach to development.

But the unfolding disaster - at least 22 people are dead and 30 percent of Harris County, which includes Houston, is underwater - is drawing renewed scrutiny to Houston's approach to city planning and its unique system for managing floodwater.

"You would have seen widespread damage with Harvey no matter what, but I have no doubt it could have been substantially reduced," said Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University's research center on severe storm prediction and disaster evacuation.

Over many years, officials in Houston and Harris County have resisted calls for more stringent building codes. Proposals for large-scale flood-control projects envisioned in the wake of Hurricane Ike in 2008 stalled. City residents have voted three times not to enact a zoning code, most recently in 1993.

Rather than impose restrictions on what property owners can do with their land, Houston has attempted to engineer a solution to drainage. The region depends on a network of bayous - slow-moving streams that run east into Galveston Bay - and concrete channels as the main drainage system. Streets and detention ponds are designed to carry and hold the overflow.

In previous public comments, the leaders of the Harris County Flood Control District have rejected the idea that the city's growth is responsible for massive flooding. They also have disputed the scientific assessments. Those officials were not available this week.

Bill St. John, a retired civil engineer and former project manager for the district, said in an interview: "There are people who would turn around and say there needed to be stronger rules and regulations. And in hindsight, it's real easy to say that. But the rules and regulations were what they needed to be at the time. There was no scientific proof it needed to be stronger at the time, so it wasn't."

But in a city built on a low-lying coastal plain, on "black gumbo," clay-based soil that is among the least absorbent in the nation, many experts say those approaches no longer suffice. They say that new homes should be elevated and that construction should be prohibited in some flood-prone areas.

Since 2010, at least 7,000 residential buildings have been constructed in Harris County on properties that sit mostly on land the federal government has designated as a 100-year flood plain, according to a Washington Post review of areas at the greatest risk of flooding. Some other cities also allow building in flood plains, with varying degrees of regulation.

"Houston is the Wild West of development, so any mention of regulation creates a hostile reaction from people who see that as an infringement on property rights and a deterrent to economic growth," said Sam Brody, director of the Center for Texas Beaches and Shores at Texas A&M University. "The stormwater system has never been designed for anything much stronger than a heavy afternoon thunderstorm."

At the same time, severe storms are becoming more frequent, experts said. The city's building laws are designed to guard against what was once considered a worst-case scenario - a 100-year storm, or one that planners projected would have only a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year. Those storms have become quite common, however. Harvey, which dumped up to 50 inches of rain in some places as of Tuesday afternoon, is the third such storm to hit Houston in the past three years.

In May 2015, seven people died after 12 inches of rain fell in 10 hours during what is known as the Memorial Day Flood. Eight people died in April 2016 during a storm that dropped 17 inches of rain.

Like other coastal areas, Houston and its surrounding areas have repeatedly turned to federal taxpayers for help rebuilding.

Harris County has received about $3 billion from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for losses in the past four decades, federal data show. It ranks third in the amount paid by the National Flood Insurance Program, behind Orleans and Jefferson parishes in Louisiana, which sustained significant damage during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

In the 1940s, the Army Corps of Engineers built two massive reservoirs that serve as holding areas during big downpours. In the following decades, the city carved out additional concrete channels and lined bayous with pavement to shunt water away.

"The system is dependent on bayous that have been there forever and had a certain capacity," said Gerry Galloway, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Maryland and a visiting professor at Texas A&M. "Over the years, that was probably a reasonable way to deal with this. As the city grew, and there was more development, there was less and less capacity to carry the runoff."

Houston's population climbed to 2.2 million in 2015, a 25 percent increase from 1995. Harris County had an even bigger bump over that time, 42 percent, and now has 4.4 million residents. As the population grew, the city expanded, covering fallow land that had served as a natural sponge.

Between 1992 and 2010, 30 percent of the surrounding county's coastal prairie wetlands were paved over, according to a 2010 report from Texas A&M.

Projects to widen the bayous and build thousands of retention ponds for excess water have not kept pace with the new rooftops, roadways and parking lots needed to accommodate about 150,000 new residents a year, experts say. As a backup, roads were built below grade and designed to take on excess water when storm drains overflow.

"The philosophy was: Wouldn't you rather have water in the street than in your house?" said D. Wayne Klotz, a water resources engineer and senior principal at RPS Klotz Associates and a former national president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

When the streets fill up, though, evacuation becomes more difficult.

In the days before Harvey struck, city officials urged residents to stay put. On social media, local officials knocked down predictions that as many as 50 inches of rain were expected - reports that overstated the forecast at the time but turned out to align more closely with the eventual rainfall.

When the rain came, roads turned into waterways, requiring door-to-door boat rescues.

In many areas of the city, especially the older parts, water that breaches the roadways flows into homes that sit on ground-level slabs. Blackburn said that requiring higher elevations of homes in flood-prone areas - the current requirement is one foot above the level of a "100-year storm" - would have stemmed the losses from Harvey and past storms.

John Jacob, director of the Texas Coastal Watershed Program and a professor at Texas A&M, said he was particularly incensed to hear about a nursing home in Dickinson, southeast of Houston, where residents in wheelchairs were sitting in waist-deep water. They were rescued after photos of them went viral on social media.

"That should never have been built," Jacob said of the nursing home that sits across the street from the floodplain boundary. "We're putting people in harm's way."

Jacob lives in a neighborhood east of downtown called Eastwood that he said was spared from flooding damage because many lots are above street level, and homes have been built on "pier and beam" foundations that include a crawl space of a few feet. That adds thousands of dollars to the cost and isn't required by city or county building codes.

All of Harris County's 34 municipalities have their own plans for addressing flooding issues whose causes and solutions extend beyond borders.

"There never has been a comprehensive plan that considered all the area that would affect Houston," Galloway said.

Last year, the state's high court dismissed a class-action lawsuit brought by 400 Harris County homeowners who suffered flood damage three times in five years - during Tropical Storm Frances in 1998, Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, and an unnamed storm in 2002.

The county argued in court that it had spent tens of millions of dollars on flood control and disputed the homeowners' claim that developers had free rein. A majority of the court agreed, saying residents failed to directly link development in one part of the watershed with flooding in their particular homes.

"Even by the homeowners' reckoning the flooding resulted from multiple causes," the court found, including "acts of God."

Aaron C. Davis, Jack Gillum and Andrew Tran contributed to this report.

Aaron Davis, Jack Gillum and Andrew Tran contributed to this report. Graphics by Aaron Steckelberg and Reuben Fischer-Baum. Design and development by Danielle Rindler.

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How Houston's 'Wild West' growth may have contributed to devastating flooding

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This article has been optimized for offline reading on Washington Post apps. For a richer experience, you can find the full version here. An Internet connection is required. Houston calls itself "the city with no limits " to convey the promise of boundless opportunity. But it also is the largest U.S.

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LAIKIPIA, Kenya - The two elders, wearing weather-beaten cowboy hats with the strings cinched under their chins, stood at the edge of an empty farm, covering their mouths in disbelief.

Their homes - neat wooden cabins - had been smashed open. All their cattle had been stolen. So had their chickens. House after house stood vacant, without another soul around. It was as if some huge force had barreled into the village and swept away all the life.

Sioyia Lesinko Lekisio, one of the elders, had no doubts who did this. Swarms of herders from another county had invaded, attacking any farm or cattle ranch in their path, big or small, stealing livestock, ransacking homes and shooting people with high-powered assault rifles.

"There's nothing we can do about it," he said. "They want our land."

Kenya has a land problem. Africa itself has a land problem. The continent seems so vast and the land so open. The awesome sense of space is an inextricable part of the beauty here - the unadulterated vistas, the endless land. But in a way, that is an illusion.

Population swells, climate change, soil degradation, erosion, poaching, global food prices and even the benefits of affluence are exerting incredible pressure on African land. They are fueling conflicts across the continent, from Nigeria in the west to Kenya in the east - including here in Laikipia, a wildlife haven and one of Kenya's most beautiful areas.

Large groups of people are on the move, desperate for usable land. Data from NASA satellites reveals an overwhelming degradation of agricultural land throughout Africa, with one recent study showing that more than 40 million Africans are trying to survive off land whose agricultural potential is declining.

At the same time, high birthrates and lengthening life spans mean that by the end of this century, there could be as many as four billion people on the continent, about 10 times the population 40 years ago.

It is a two-headed problem, scientists and activists say, and it could be one of the gravest challenges Africa faces: The quality of farmland in many areas is getting worse, and the number of people squeezed onto that land is rising fast.

"It's a looming crisis," said Odenda Lumumba, head of the Kenya Land Alliance, a group that works on land reform. "We are basically reaching the end of the road."

More than in any other region of the world, people in Africa live off the land. There are relatively few industrial or service jobs here. Seventy percent of Africa's population makes a living through agriculture, higher than on any other continent, the World Bank says.

But as the population rises, with more siblings competing for their share of the family farm, the slices are getting thinner. In many parts of Africa, average farm size is just an acre or two, and after repeated divisions of the same property, some people are left trying to subsist on a sliver of a farm that is not much bigger than a tennis court.

A changing climate makes things even harder. Scientists say large stretches of Africa are drying up, and they predict more desertification, more drought and more hunger. In a bad year, maybe one country in Africa will be hit by famine. This year, famine is stalking three, pushing more than 10 million people in Somalia, Nigeria and South Sudan to the brink of starvation.

But much of Africa's farmland is in danger for another, perhaps simpler, reason: overuse. Fast-growing populations mean that many African families can't afford to let land sit fallow and replenish. They have to take every inch of their land and farm or graze it constantly. This steadily lowers the levels of organic matter in the soil, making it difficult to grow crops.

In many areas, the soil is so dried out and exhausted that there is little solace even when the prayed-for rains finally come. The ground is as hard as concrete and the rain just splashes off, like a hose spraying a driveway.

"There are going to be some serious food-security issues," said Zachary Donnenfeld, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa. "More and more countries will be reliant on food imports. You'll increasingly see the international community come into more rescue-type situations."

The fact that several of Africa's biggest economies have grown impressively in the past 10 years may seem like an answer, but analysts say the newfound affluence may actually compound these pressures.

As people gain wealth, they consume more - more energy, more water and usually more meat, all of which intensify the pressures on the environment. In Kenya, a piece of meat is one of the first things people treat themselves to when they get a little extra cash, and as the nation's economy grows, so does the taste for beef. Cows have always been a traditional form of wealth; now they're big business. In the past 15 years, the number of cows in Kenya has shot up by more than 60 percent to around 20 million, driving a scramble for grazing lands.

Some parts of Kenya are now so overgrazed by cows and goats that all the grass roots have been eaten, leaving large stretches of bare earth, as measured by NASA satellite imagery that tracks net levels of carbon dioxide absorption. Herders from bare-earth zones in Kenya are often the ones invading ranches.

Private investors are tramping in as well. Since the 1990-2005 period, global food prices have increased by 50 to 75 percent. Many foreign companies and local businesspeople have speculated that despite soil degradation, African farmland is destined to become more valuable. Small landholders across the continent are increasingly getting priced out or even evicted to make way for big commercial farms. This has led to conflict even in usually peaceful places, like Malawi, where a land-defense movement recently started to fight back against foreign-owned tea plantations.

Farmland is also rapidly vanishing into housing tracts and shopping centers to serve Africa's growing and more affluent population. This is happening everywhere: quiet fields' suddenly being transformed by an army of tractors into a set of neat houses or a colossal mall.

And then there's the battle to protect Africa's wildlife. In the past decade, ivory poachers have slaughtered more than 100,000 elephants and rhinos. Cheetah and lion populations are also falling. Wildlife habitats are being threatened across the continent, in great part because of new farms and new fences, and activists say something drastic needs to be done to protect endangered species.

But just about every acre set aside for a wildlife reserve takes an acre of potential farmland or grazing land off the table (some wildlife refuges tolerate grazing, but it often gets quickly out of control). Scientists say that there still is fertile unspoken-for land available in Africa, but that it tends to be deep in rain forests, like in Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. And that raises another problem. Cutting down all those trees to make way for farms could have serious consequences for the climate of the entire earth, since rain forests soak up carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.

Laikipia County, a few hours' drive north of Nairobi, Kenya's capital, is a microcosm of many of these complicated issues. On this one rugged plateau, poor herders, rich landowners, large- and small-scale farmers, commercial cattle ranchers, tour operators, passionate wildlife activists, elephants, lions, hyenas, cows, goats and zebras are all competing for the same space.

People have always fought over territory, and Laikipia is no exception, with cattle-rustling and battles over pastureland part of its history. But many residents say this past year has been the bloodiest ever. At least 80 people have been killed, and the violence has not stopped. In mid-July, a large group of herders killed a half-dozen police officers and stole their weapons.

One reason is political meddling connected to Kenya's national and local elections, scheduled for August. But the continentwide land issues seem to be emerging from the background into the foreground, which may explain why Laikipia is becoming more violent.

"These ideas of land-abundant Africa are increasingly outdated," said Thomas Jayne, a leading agricultural economist based at Michigan State University. "Land disputes are going to become more and more common, and more and more severe."

"Laikipia," said Dr. Jayne, who conducts research across the continent, "is just the tip of the iceberg."

'Dangerous and Disturbed'

Kenya is one of Africa's most developed nations, with some of the best infrastructure and a fast-growing middle class. But as long as anyone can remember, Laikipia has been a bit lawless. Many farmers live on isolated properties and have been shot at by armed herdsmen. They've had their livestock stolen. They've ducked rocks and spears.

One farmer said such attacks used to happen from time to time, especially to newcomers, and he called it Laikipia hazing. But this past year has been different. Waves of young pastoralists from neighboring counties, moving in groups armed with AK-47 assault rifles, have invaded dozens of farms and ranches, bringing tens of thousands of skinny, ragged cows from drought-stricken areas.

Maria Dodds described an all-out assault on her family's cattle ranch in January and February. She said gunmen were so close to her house that she could see them raising their weapons and shooting at her. They shot to death one of her employees, Kariwo Lotome, an old cattleman who had been working for her for years.

Nancy Nakalee, his widow, now penniless, stared at her feet as she spoke of her dead husband.

"I can still see his face," she whispered.

As the ranch fell under siege, dozens of police officers arrived. When some began firing military-grade mortar rounds at the invaders from her garden, Ms. Dodds said, she found herself cheering them on.

"I was yelling, 'Shoot another, shoot another!"' she said.

She shook her head, laughing but also disgusted with herself. "It makes you rabid."

It is not clear how many herders were killed in the firefights. Ms. Dodds said the police were trying to "wing them," and not actually hit them, because that would only exacerbate the situation.

Her son now patrols the family ranch in a flak jacket and operates a new drone they bought for surveillance. The herders throw rocks at it.

About an hour away from that ranch lies the small village of Nadungoru, the one where Mr. Lekisio stood on an empty farm in disbelief. It is a stunningly beautiful place of thick green grass, wide-open skies and little wooden cabins, which, on a recent day, stood empty. The invading herders had stolen all of Mr. Lekisio's cows and ransacked his house.

"We feel bad, bad, bad, bad," he said.

The Kenyan government has deployed hundreds of police officers and soldiers, some in bulletproof cars and Humvees, declaring parts of Laikipia "dangerous and disturbed," which is like a local state of emergency that gives officers more power to crack down on invaders.

But Laikipia's farmers say they've never seen such timid men in uniform. So they sometimes confront the herders themselves.

Tristan Voorspuy, a former British military officer, lived on a ranch that was invaded in March. The security forces were doing little to help him, so he rode on horseback to the young trespassers in hopes of asking them to leave.

The men shot him in the face. They killed his horse, too.

The next month, Kuki Gallmann, the Italian-born author of the best-selling book "I Dreamed of Africa" and one of Kenya's celebrities, was rumbling across her property, the Laikipia Nature Conservancy. At 88,000 acres, it is one of Kenya's biggest pieces of privately owned land. Ms. Gallmann, 74, has set aside the expanse for protecting wildlife like elephants, leopards, lions and buffaloes, as well as the rare species of trees and plants that thrive in the gorges and hillsides of her sculpted property.

As she drove, with a contingent of armed wildlife rangers behind her, shots rang out. Several bullets flew threw Ms. Gallmann's car door and tore into her stomach. She remains at her Nairobi home, convalescing, with severe internal damage. She said many of the recent invaders came with no livestock, and she called them a militia.

On another Laikipia ranch, Anne Powys, whose hands shook as she sat by a window, surrounded by old pictures and dusty books, said she could not count on anyone protecting her. So she has made a choice: She is trying to make peace with her attackers.

She paid the same young men who had burned down her eco-lodge, which she said was part of her soul, to help clean it up.

"Isn't that insane?" she said.

Whites in a Black Country

A few months ago, a group of tourists staying at a fancy Laikipia lodge had to be airlifted to safety because heavy gunfights between the police and armed herders were coming closer and closer. On social media and in popular gathering spots, when some Kenyans talk about the crisis, one word keeps coming up: "mzungu," which means "foreigner" or, more commonly, "white man."

Some Kenyans see Laikipia's land problems as a black-white issue because most of the biggest ranches and wildlife conservancies are owned by a handful of families of European descent. Kenyans have complained about the size of the white-owned farms, saying many were stolen or unfairly acquired from Africans during colonial times. Some people in Kenya, black and white, are now making comparisons to Zimbabwe, where the government seized land from wealthy whites and redistributed it, often to well-connected elites. In many cases, the farms were run into the ground.

Trespassing pastoralists in Laikipia, who were brazenly grazing their herds on others' land, said they weren't necessarily targeting whites. Instead, they said they simply needed grass to keep their herds alive, because their own areas had already dried up.

"We know taking another man's land is like taking his wife," said Parashuno Lekadero, a herder who stood on a farm in Laikipia that he had recently invaded. There were no police officers for miles, and he spoke confidently and openly, knowing he had little chance of getting in trouble.

"There's a drought," he said. "We have many animals. We need the land."

Much of eastern Africa is in the grip of an intense drought, with pasturelands drying up, and the white-owned properties in Laikipia tend to have the best grass. This is because the white farmers are relatively wealthy and have invested in their properties, building dams, creating watering holes, pumping from springs and caring for their paddocks. All that keeps the pastures healthy, attracting the invaders.

But it's not like all of the 30 or so white-owned properties are luxurious. Warren Evans, a cattle rancher, lives in a low-slung house with farm machinery rusting on his lawn. The other day, as he sat down for a lunch of hot-dog stew, a muddy wart hog blasted through his living-room door and he jumped up to shoo it out.

Mr. Evans said that his family was hardly at the top of Kenya's socioeconomic pyramid and that "you can't pin the burden of history on 30 farmers."

Some white families now have second thoughts about staying.

"For the first time ever, you get that vibe that you're a mzungu - what are you doing here?" Ms. Powys said. "It's a bit grandiose to think we can continue to live like this when thousands of people out there don't have any land."

"It is Zimbabwe-esque," she said. "We're white people in a black country. If we're not welcome, what's the point?"

The Election

As a leading newspaper in Kenya recently said, "elections have the tendency to bring out the worst in Kenyans," and in August, they are happening nationwide.

Kenya is a democracy, but many describe it as more of an ethnocracy. Kenyans vote overwhelmingly along ethnic lines, and elections stir up ethnic tensions. Several elections have erupted in bloodshed, the worst in 2007 and early 2008, when more than 1,000 people were killed after government agents appeared to have rigged the votes and outrage exploded.

Political violence here is fueled by a cocktail of factors, including ethnic grievances, tensions over land ownership, friction between the classes and the quest for power. Firearms in rural areas, especially in northern Kenya, not too far from the Somali border, make matters even worse.

The Kenyan authorities say this dangerous mix is brewing in Laikipia. Several politicians have been arrested and questioned over inciting violence against landowners. Mathew Lempurkel, a member of Parliament representing a district here and a midtier figure in the country's leading opposition party, has been widely portrayed as the chief villain. Regarded as a brilliant mobilizer by even his detractors, he was arrested in March and again in July, accused of instigating herders to storm ranches. Several farmers said he provided the herders with cash, Red Bull and a cheap liquor called Trigger to rile them up.

Some contend that Mr. Lempurkel is trying to displace people in Laikipia who are not members of his ethnic group, the Samburu, so that he can bring Samburu into his district and get more votes. Many of the invading herdsmen are young Samburu, and ecologists say that in recent decades, the group's land has been thoroughly overgrazed, driving the herders to new areas, whether others are already living there or not.

Mr. Lempurkel, who declined to comment for this article, has publicly denied any role in the invasions, saying this was a problem of drought and climate change.

But it seems there is some larger hand. Many fences have been dismantled with bolt cutters, not equipment the average herdsmen carries. And Ms. Dodds said that during the fighting on her ranch, a mysterious truck brought the herders tea, sugar and other supplies so they could extend their siege. The truck, she said, was later traced to a paramilitary police officer.

In Search of Safety

Africa's land pressures may seem overwhelming, maybe even unstoppable. But scientists say there are solutions within reach. For example, the continent has the highest fertility rates in the world, but more African governments are pushing contraceptives, saying the best answer for densely populated countries is smaller families.

For arid regions, there are proven ways to replenish dry or overgrazed land, including spreading new types of grass seeds by airplane. Another approach would be a national plan letting herders graze certain areas at certain times but forbidding them from others, which would allow ruined pastureland to regrow.

But the issue, ecologists say, is that little of this is being done.

"The problem is too many people, too many cattle and too little planning," said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a wildlife activist in northern Kenya.

In the Nadungoru village, just about everybody has given up on the Kenyan government, even government employees.

At a new school, two teachers from another part of the country said they had been begging their bosses to transfer them to a safer area.

David Mbatia, one of the teachers, said he was afraid that the herdsmen who had invaded farms might kill him. The nearest police station was five miles away.

"At night, what if they knock at your door and you scream?" he asked. "Who will come?"

He said a big part of the problem was that the government was not enforcing a law requiring parents to send their children to school.

"I saw a 12-year-old herding cows, and he had been turned into a slave," said the other teacher, Charles Mwangi. "He has been denied the right to go to school, to see the light, and so he is uneducated, manipulated and brainwashed."

Outside the school, Mr. Lekisio and his comrade were waiting. They slowly led me around the village one last time, pointing out each smashed padlock, each knocked-down fence. The village was eerily quiet; we were the only ones there.

As we were finishing, Mr. Lekisio tilted his head.

"We should go," he said.

There was a pause in the wind, and in it, we could hear the faint tinkling of cowbells.

"That's the Samburu," Mr. Lekisio said.

The invaders weren't far away.

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Loss of Fertile Land Fuels 'Looming Crisis' Across Africa

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LAIKIPIA, Kenya - The two elders, wearing weather-beaten cowboy hats with the strings cinched under their chins, stood at the edge of an empty farm, covering their mouths in disbelief. Their homes - neat wooden cabins - had been smashed open. All their cattle had been stolen. So had their chickens.