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Hi I'm Adalee! I am environmental science major and someone who loves the outdoors.

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Environmental Justice in the Face of Colonialism

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Environmental Justice in the Face of Colonialism

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I found an interesting article examining how settler colonialism disrupts humans relationship with the environment through eradicating indigenous practices and dominating indigenous land. I feel it is important to acknowledge the history of the U.S. in order to fully understand our own systematic issues that have influenced our own perspectives, politics and social affairs surrounding the environment.

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Settler Colonialism, Ecology and Environmental Injustice

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Settler colonialism is a form of domination that violently disrupts human relationships with the environment. Settler colonialism is ecological domination, committing environmental injustice against Indigenous peoples and other groups. Focusing on

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I created a collage to express my own ecological identity. The image depicts a girl in water, metaphorically representing nature that is portrayed as a cold and an uninviting place. The girl is saddened by the discourse associated around environmental injustice, neglect and misunderstanding. The 3 circles represent my own growth of knowledge concerning the environment which I learned through science, my own culture background and conducting educational outreach.

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I found an interesting website that communicates the meaning and causes of overexpoitation. On the website they use the example of over-fishing that causes some species of fish to be endangered or extinct; in order to go in depth about the consequences, results and how overexploitation occurs. The images and tables used on the website are effective models of scientific and  educational communication.

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This is a great speech from a young native american woman advocating for environmental justice. She makes her speech to fight for the proper representation of her culture anindigenous people in the environmental movement.

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Eriel Deranger - Reclaiming Our Indigeneity and Our Place in Modern Society | Bioneers

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Here is a quick video about The tragedy of the Commons. It is a very useful video to understand how National Parks help address the concept of tragedy of the commons.

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This year's 2019 Indigenous People's march. A young white male taunted a Native American Man, represents a social/political division in today's  society.

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march for life teen's confrontation with native american reveals an ugly divide (opinion)  - cnn

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March For Life teen's confrontation with Native American reveals an ugly divide

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Since the March for Life and many of its attendees put their support behind this President, who treats people poorly in word and deed, pro-lifers should not be surprised at how their march--and an incident involving some who attended--has been widely perceived, writes Jenn Morson.

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This is a really old film about the Tohono O'odoham , a native tribe to Tucson. The video talks about the Tohono O'odham uses of natural resources for food and tools. You can get an idea of how the tribe used native plants and foods for survival.

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TOHONO O'ODHAM TRIBE  NATIVE AMERICAN INDIANS  TUCSON, ARIZONA  U.S. GOVERNMENT FILM   88304

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"Using toxic runoff found in the Ohio River region, artist and professor John Sabraw produces his own DIY pigments — bold yellows and reds that are sourced from the oxidized sludge of abandoned coal mines. Rather than using imported iron oxide from China to make his paint colors, he taps into the water’s heavy metals left over from abandoned coal mines, bringing to light the region’s pollution problem in the process"
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/15/environmental-art_n_5585288.html

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A research team studies a whale's health and activity in order to potentially save it.

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Scarlet is a wild, 3-year-old orca (Orcinus orca) in poor health, but scientists are trying to save her.

Credit: Katy Foster/NOAA Fisheries permit #18786

A specialized response team in northwest Washington made a valiant attempt last weekend to save a starving young killer whale ( Orcinus orca) named Scarlet, or J50.

On Sunday (Aug. 12), fishers with the Lummi Nation, a Native American tribe in the state, assisted researchers by releasing eight hatchery-raised, live salmon from their boat, about 75 to 150 yards (69 to 137 meters) in front of Scarlet. Observers watched Scarlet dive down toward the fish, but from their view, they couldn't confirm whether she ate the fish. The researchers also observed Scarlet socializing with members of her pod occasionally, though she frequently fell behind when swimming in strong currents - signs of her poor condition.

Scarlet is a 3-year-old female (born in December 2014) who is part of the J pod, one of three small groups of orcas within the endangered Southern Resident killer whale subpopulation. The J pod also includes J35, or Tahlequah, a female whose calf died a half-hour after it was born on July 24. Biologists watched the grieving mother carry her dead calf around for 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) for 17 days. [ In Photos: Response Teams Try to Save Starving Killer Whale]

As biologists were tracking Tahlequah, they also started paying close attention to Scarlet. "She has always been small for her age, but researchers over the last few months have noticed increased emaciation," Jim Milbury, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said during a press call Monday (Aug. 13).

But before scientists could decide how to help Scarlet, the orca and her pod had traveled offshore into open water, which meant they were out of the reach of response teams for a couple of days. In that time, biologists, fishers and concerned citizens worked together to develop two plans, Live Science previously reported - first, to administer antibiotics to Scarlet with a dart, and second, to feed her live salmon served from a boat. Both plans would be logistically challenging and require calm ocean conditions and a clear path to Scarlet.

On Aug. 6, Scarlet reappeared with her pod in Canadian waters near the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, according to NOAA. Boat-bound response teams followed her, monitoring her condition and keeping tabs on her as they prepared for action.

Fortunately, on Aug. 9, the conditions were right for the Vancouver Aquarium's veterinarian and assistants to administer Scarlet an antibiotic through a dart and collect a breath sample, which will help determine if she has an infection, NOAA reported.

The research teams continued to track Scarlet by boat in the days following the antibiotic injection. They watched her fall behind her pod by as much as half a mile (1 km) when swimming against a strong current. The researchers noticed she wasn't eating, either, even though the salmon were plentiful in the area. The researchers were still very concerned about Scarlet's health and decided to move forward with the feeding experiment.

So, on Sunday, favorable conditions allowed the response teams to try feeding Scarlet live salmon. Fishers from the Lummi Nation launched the live fish from their boat using a tube-shaped slide to direct the fish toward Scarlet, but they couldn't tell if she ate the fish, or even if she saw the food, NOAA reported.

Now, the researchers are reviewing aerial footage captured by drones, to see if they can determine whether Scarlet actually ate the fish. If it looks like she did, the teams may consider another attempt to feed her - this time, with fish containing antibiotics or medication, depending on what researchers learn from her breath sample.

While the researchers were conducting the feeding experiment, they also collected a fecal sample. But they aren't sure yet if it's from Scarlet, her mom or her sibling, who are also part of the J pod and were in the vicinity of Scarlet at the time of collection. Once analysts determine which orca the sample belongs to, they can use it to test for clues about the animal's health.

As of yesterday (Aug. 14), the J pod was seen heading back out to open water; the response teams are taking stock of what they've learned. For now, teams in the U.S. and Canada are closely watching Scarlet and her pod, and they will continue to take fecal or breath samples whenever conditions allow.

Original article on Live Science.

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Scientists Are Trying Desperately to Save a Starving Orca. Will Their Efforts Pay Off?

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A specialized response team in northwest Washington made a valiant attempt last weekend to save a starving young killer whale ( Orcinus orca) named Scarlet, or J50. On Sunday (Aug. 12), fishers with the Lummi Nation, a Native American tribe in the state, assisted researchers by releasing eight hatchery-raised, live salmon from their boat, about 75 to 150 yards (69 to 137 meters) in front of Scarlet.

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A helpful website to learn about the history of the conservation movement.

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U.S. History

The Evolution of the Conservation Movement collection covers the movement to preserve and protect America's wildlife, wild lands, and other natural resources from 1890-1920. The collection complements key history content such as the Progressive era, the American frontier, eastern urbanization and population growth, and public policy.

1) The Progressive era brought reforms to American society including child labor laws, women's suffrage, and food and drug safety regulation. Progressives also supported environmental protection. This collection contains the writings of conservationists and nature lovers who helped convince Americans that preserving land, water, and wildlife was important national business. Search on John Burroughs, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, John Wesley Powell, Henry David Thoreau and others for images and writings of these influential people.

2) As cities became more crowded, citizens began to look for peaceful retreats. Leisure activities and the conservation movement came together as Americans took up camping, bird watching, and other outdoor recreation as a way to escape crowded cities.

The 1857 book, Wild Northern Scenes; Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod is an example of the connection between recreation and preservation. In this book, S.H. Hammond writes:

Hurrah! hurrah! We are in the countryóthe glorious country! Outside of the thronged streets; away from piled up bricks and mortar; outside of the clank of machinery; the rumbling of carriages; the roar of the escape pipe; the scream of the steam whistle; the tramp, tramp of moving thousands on the stone sidewalks; away from the heated atmosphere of the city, loaded with the smoke and dust, and gasses of furnaces, and the ten thousand manufacturies of villainous smells. We are beyond even the meadows and green fields. We are here alone with nature, surrounded by old primeval things. Tall forest trees, mountain and valley are on the right hand and on the left. Before us, stretching away for miles, is a beautiful lake, its waters calm and placid, giving back the bright heavens, the old woods, the fleecy clouds that drift across the sky, from away down in its quiet depths.

Search on camping, fishing, hunting, picnics, and recreation for photographs, documents, and laws that show how Americans' desire for nature-based recreation grew into an interest in preserving wildlife and wild lands.

3) Explorers of the American frontier brought back beautiful images of wild lands. When citizens saw these pictures of the nation's wilderness, they began to appreciate and value our country's natural wonders. Picturesque America, a popular 1872 book, included eye-catching engravings of our nation's scenic lands.

Search on Picturesque America for engravings of Mirror Lake and other sites. Search on drawings, engravings, paintings, photographs, and prints to find more beautiful, early images of America's wilderness.

4) An example of nature writing that influenced Americans is Wild Animals I Have Known, a best-selling book published in 1898. In this book, Ernest Seton Thompson wrote warm stories about wildlife. His stories made people feel sympathetic toward animals they might have otherwise feared. In the chapter Lobo The King of Currumpaw, Thompson wrote about a captured gray wolf that lost its mate:

I set meat and water beside him, but he paid no heed. He lay calmly on his breast, and gazed away past me down through the gateway of the caÒon, over the open plains - his plains - with those steadfast yellow eyes; nor moved a muscle when I touched him. When the sun went down he was still gazing fixedly across the prairie. I expected he would call up his band when night came, but... he would never call again. A lion shorn of his strength, an eagle robbed of his freedom, or a dove bereft of his mate, all die, it is said, of a broken heart; ... This only I know, that when the morning dawned, he was lying there still in his position of calm repose, but his spirit was goneóthe old king-wolf was dead.

Read more animal stories in Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Seton Thompson. Search on nature writing and natural history for other interesting nature books, journals, and articles written in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The conservation movement had an important effect on government policy in the United States. Many laws were passed, including those that established national parks, national forests, and policies for protecting fish and wildlife throughout the nation.

Examples of landmark legislation for the conservation movement include the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, of Yosemite National Park in 1890, and the creation of the National Park Service in 1916.

The law establishing Yellowstone, " An Act to set apart a certain Tract of Land lying near the Head-waters of the Yellowstone River as a public Park," [1872] says:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the tract of land in the Territories of Montana and Wyoming, lying near the head-waters of the Yellowstone river, ...is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people... .

Search on National Park Service, Yellowstone, Yosemite and other national parks by name to see images of and read the laws that created our country's national parks. Search on birds, fishing, game, parks, timber, and water to find out about laws that helped conserve America's natural resources.

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The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920 History

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The Evolution of the Conservation Movement collection covers the movement to preserve and protect America's wildlife, wild lands, and other natural resources from 1890-1920. The collection complements key history content such as the Progressive era, the American frontier, eastern urbanization and population growth, and public policy.

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Population will not double in the 21st century!  Over the first fifty years of the 20th century annual growth increased to up to 2.1%—the highest annual growth rate in history, which was recorded in 1962. Since peaking, the growth rate has systematically been going down, with projections estimating an annual rate of 0.1% for 2100.

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Population growth is one of the most important topics we cover at Our World in Data.

For most of human history, the global population wasa tiny fraction of what it is today. Over the last few centuries, the human population has gone through an extraordinary change. In 1800, there were one billion people. Today there are more than 8 billion of us.

But after a period of very fast population growth, demographers expect the world population to peak by the end of this century.

On this page, you will find all of our data, charts, and writing on changes in population growth. This includes how populations are distributed worldwide, how this has changed, and what demographers expect for the future.

Key insights on Population Growth

Population cartograms show us where the world's people are

Geographical maps show us where the world's landmasses are; not where people are. That means they don't always give us an accurate picture of how global living standards are changing.

One way to understand the distribution of people worldwide is to redraw the world map - not based on the area but according to population.

This is shown here as a population cartogram: a geographical presentation of the world where the size of countries is not drawn according to the distribution of land but by the distribution of people. It's shown for the year 2018.

As the population size rather than the territory is shown in this map, you can see some significant differences when you compare it to the standard geographical map we're most familiar with.

Small countries with a high population density increase in size in this cartogram relative to the world maps we are used to - look at Bangladesh, Taiwan, or the Netherlands. Large countries with a small population shrink in size - look for Canada, Mongolia, Australia, or Russia.

You can find more details on this cartogram in our article about it:

What you should know about this data

This map is based on the United Nation's 2017 World Population Prospects report. Our interactive charts show population data from the most recent UN revision. This means there may be minor differences between the figures shown on the map and the latest estimates in our other charts.

The world population has increased rapidly over the last few centuries

The speed of global population growth over the last few centuries has been staggering. For most of human history, the world population was well under one million.¹

As recently as 12,000 years ago, there were only 4 million people worldwide.

The chart shows the rapid increase in the global population since 1700.

The one-billion mark wasn't broken until the early 1800s. It was only a century ago that there were 2 billion people.

Since then, the global population has quadrupled to eight billion.

Around 108 billion people have ever lived on our planet. This means that today's population size makes up 6.5% of the total number of people ever born.²

This increase has been the result of advances in living conditions and health that reduced death rates - especially in children - and increases in life expectancy.

What you should know about this data

This data comes from a combination of sources, all detailed in our sources article for our long-term population dataset.

Population growth is no longer exponential - it peaked decades ago

There's a popular misconception that the global population is growing exponentially. But it's not.

While the global population is still increasing in absolute numbers, population growth peaked decades ago.

In the chart, we see the global population growth rate per year. This is based on historical UN estimates and its medium projection to 2100.

Global population growth peaked in the 1960s at over 2% per year. Since then, rates have more than halved, falling to less than 1%.

The UN expects rates to continue to fall until the end of the century. In fact, towards the end of the century, it projects negative growth, meaning the global population will shrink instead of grow.

Global population growth, in absolute terms - which is the number of births minus the number of deaths - has also peaked. You can see this in our interactive chart:

The world has passed "peak child"

Hans Rosling famously coined the term " peak child " for the moment in global demographic history when the number of children stopped increasing.

According to the UN data, the world has passed "peak child", which is defined as the number of children under the age of five.

The chart shows the UN's historical estimates and projections of the number of children under five.

It estimates that the number of children in the world peaked in 2017. For the coming decades, demographers expect a decades-long plateau before the number will decline more rapidly in the second half of the century.

What you should know about this data

These projections are sensitive to the assumptions made about future fertility rates worldwide. Find out more from the UN World Population Division.

Other sources and scenarios in the UN's projections suggest that the peak was reached slightly earlier or later. However, most indicate that the world is close to "peak child" and the number of children will not increase in the coming decades.

The 'ups and downs' in this chart reflect generational effects and 'baby booms' when there are large cohorts of women of reproductive age, and high fertility rates. The timing of these transitions varies across the world.

The UN expects the global population to peak by the end of the century

When will population growth come to an end?

The UN's historical estimates and latest projections for the global population are shown in the chart.

The UN projects that the global population will peak before the end of the century - in 2086, at just over 10.4 billion people.

What you should know about this data

These projections are sensitive to the assumptions made about future fertility and mortality rates worldwide. Find out more from the UN World Population Division.

Other sources and scenarios in the UN's projections can produce a slightly earlier or later peak. Most demographers, however, expect that by the end of the century, the global population will have peaked or slowed so much that population growth will be small.

Explore data on Population Growth

Research & Writing

More Key articles on Population Growth

Hannah Ritchie and Edouard Mathieu

Hannah Ritchie, Edouard Mathieu and Lucas Rodés-Guirao

Hannah Ritchie and Edouard Mathieu

Demographic change

Definitions and sources

Other articles related to population growth

Interactive charts on Population Growth

Endnotes

1. See, for example, Kremer (1993) - Population growth and technological change: one million BC to 1990. In the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 108, No. 3, 681-716.

2. As per 2011 estimates from Carl Haub (2011), " How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? " Population Reference Bureau.

Cite this work

Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:

Hannah Ritchie, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Edouard Mathieu, Marcel Gerber, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Joe Hasell and Max Roser (2023) - "Population Growth". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owidpopulationgrowth, author = {Hannah Ritchie and Lucas Rodés-Guirao and Edouard Mathieu and Marcel Gerber and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Joe Hasell and Max Roser}, title = {Population Growth}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2023}, note = {https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth} }

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The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution.

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Explore global and country data on population growth, demography, and how this is changing.

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This website talks about the pros and cons of using Vertical farming and hydroponics as an alternative to a more sustainable farming practice.

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Hydroponic and aeroponic growing has received a lot of attention in recent years as the future of farming, since it's been linked with the associated concept of vertical farming. Vertical farming is having something of a moment, with the tech industry pouring money into it and arguing that it's the answer to feeding the urban masses fresh, local food, as we roll further into a century facing huge population growth.

What is vertical farming?

The concept of vertical farming is the brainchild of Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier, who developed it in discussion with students he was teaching as part of a course on Medical Ecology. The idea behind it was to grow food 'vertically' in disused urban spaces, using a hydroponic or aeroponic (where plant roots are misted rather than submerged) system. Despommier argued that foregoing soil offered a way of mitigating widespread soil degradation, and that vertical farming could provide a local food source within cities, where the space to grow food in soil, on a significant scale, is minimal.

Supporters of vertical farming argue for its sustainability - but this necessitates leaving a belief in the importance of soil behind. At its best, it is a 'closed loop' system, that recycles inputs; and its efficiency in minimising water is an important part of why proponents feel vertical farming is sustainable. It has much to offer urbanites in the production of fresh food throughout the year. Aerofarms, one of the largest vertical farming businesses, is a global company, producing food across four continents, but their focus in on growing food for a local market. Their growing cloth medium is reusable and made from BPA-free, post-consumer recycled plastic.

Hydroponics and organic food

There is fierce debate, however, over vertical farming and the hydroponic and aeroponic production systems it overwhelmingly depends on, and it's an argument that reaches into the heart of how we define 'sustainability'. Hydroponic growing has been in commercial use since the early 20 th century. Plants are grown in water or in an inorganic fabricated substrate, in buildings that may or may not have windows - if not, LED-lighting is used. The biggest criticism it faces is that plants are fed with artificial nutrients, because they don't have access to the microbiology of healthy soil.

This goes against one of the most fundamental early articulations of organic farming principles from Lady Eve Balfour, the leading founder of the UK's Soil Association, that, "the health of soil, plant, animal and Man is one and indivisible." For that reason, the UK's Soil Association has refused to give organic certification to produce not grown in soil, and critics see it as 'wet' chemical farming, where chemicals are simply added to water instead of the soil.

However, proponents argue that, because conditions can be completely controlled in the sterile environment the plants are grown in, there is no need for pesticides and vertical farms can produce higher yields on much less ground. This is an argument for efficiency and control that was widely used to support the factory farming of livestock; but it is now apparent that many diseases spread even more rapidly in these indoor situations than in free-range systems. So might the same eventually be the case with vertical farming? The question also arises whether a sterile environment produces sterile food - and if it it does, what will be the long term impact of that on the gut microbiome and on our immune systems which depend on it? There is much debate on the nutritional value of hydroponic plant production, but the jury is still out on that front.

The SFT's chief executive and former Soil Association director Patrick Holden has long-standing doubts about the sustainability of hydroponic systems. As an organic farmer, he depends on the fertility of his soil to produce wholesome food to feed his herd of Ayrshire cows whose milk is turned into Hafod Cheddar, an award-winning cheese. He also sees the symbiosis between ruminants and the land as critically important in building and maintaining soil organic matter so that it can absorb water and mitigate the damaging impact of both heavy rain and drought. By locking up carbon in organic matter, healthy soils also avoid the need for chemical fertilisers and help to reduce global warming.

Patrick also believes that the widespread advocacy of hydroponics is misplaced. He says, "Feeding plants through chemical nutrients in solution is analogous to feeding a human patient in hospital by intravenous solution. That is valuable in treating serious ill-health in humans, but in relation to food production, it excludes the vital role of soil as 'the stomach' of the plant in breaking down organic matter and completing nutrient cycles, on which many planetary ecosystems ultimately depend."

The issue of the organic certification of hydroponic production threatens to become a potiical hot potato in the UK because of Brexit. The National Organic Standards Board, a committee which advises the United States Department of Agriculture has voted narrowly to allow crops grown hydroponically and aeroponically to carry an organic label in the US. This has upset traditional organic producers. Dave Chapman, an organic tomato grower in Vermont has been quoted as calling it a 'tragic failure'.

The question which arises, therefore, is whether such produce will also be on sale as organic in the UK if a trade deal with the US is concluded, as those pro-Brexit hope and expect?

The spectrum of sustainability

On a smaller scale, companies like Grow Bristol, whose tagline is 'Fresh. Local. Sustainable.' provide one example of the social and agricultural role that vertical farming with hydroponics can play in an urban city centre. Dermot O'Regan, who runs Grow Bristol, has a background in environmental policy. He was interested in providing food year-round to the local community in Bristol. O'Regan was concerned by the heavy water use in agriculture, and, since there wasn't much soil in downtown Bristol anyway, it made logical sense to buy a shipping container and start a hydroponic farming enterprise inside it.

Grow Bristol is set-up as a Community Interest Company with a social mission, and education and engagement is a component of what they do, inviting groups in to visit and offering training opportunities for volunteers and eventually, possibly, jobs to the local community. At the moment they grow micro-greens for a range of restaurants and shops through the city. Like many committed to vertical farming, they see Grow Bristol as a component of the wider food system, one aligned with sustainability, rather than with the environmental degradation of industrial farming.

Grow Bristol has also explored a related system - aquaponics - which arguably remedies the issue with artificial nutrient solutions that the industry is dependent on. In an aquaponic system, fish waste provides the nutrients for the plants that are grown - often in soil. Aquaponics is a long-standing practice in Asia, reaching back centuries, and it incorporates microbiology in the system. The production system has been expanding in the US in recent years, however, its tenuous financial viability - Grow Bristol dismantled its aquaponic system after a nine month trial - remains an issue.

Vertical farming's viability

Vertical farming has also struggled with financial viability and this has consequently limited what can be grown this way. The cost of energy can be significant, and some crops are much more expensive than others. Consequently, this system has been primarily used for the production of greens such as kale and spinach, and micro-salads. The energy that goes into producing more substantial vegetables like potatoes and other root vegetables makes these crops prohibitively expensive. Stan Cox of the Land Institute has pointed out in an interview that, "if you got a plant like tomato or sweet corn...that produces a fleshy product, that requires about 1200 kilowatt hours of electricity for lighting to produce one kilogram of food minus the water that's in the food. That's about the annual energy consumption of the average American refrigerator for a year, all to produce just two and a quarter pounds of dry matter." So, in recent years, the narrative around this production method has focused more and more on its role as a part of the wider food system, rather than as a replacement for it.

It is this issue of cost that raises the thorniest question around vertical farming and hydroponic production - if financial viability lies only in the production of high-end micro-salads, lettuce and greens, how much of a part in the wider food system can it really play? The question is a significant one, particularly as more and more wealth is being centralised in cities with gentrification now one of the most prevalent forms of urban development across the globe. Vertical farming based on hydroponic production may be serving a niche market with a niche price, for Silicon Valley entreprenuers in the tech industry looking for the next cool food, but whether it is a genuinely sustainable way to provide staple affordable foods for the population as a whole, is clearly debatable.

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Vertical farming and hydroponics on the spectrum of sustainability - Sustainable Food Trust

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Hydroponic and aeroponic growing has received a lot of attention in recent years as the future of farming, but how sustainable is it really? With the recent decision to allow hydroponically grown crops to be certified organic in the US, what will this mean for Britain as we approach post-Brexit trade deals?

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People are still going hungry. Not because there isn't enough food but, because of poor food distribution and production practices. How do we fix this issue? This is a really good interactive website that tells the stories of many from across America who are going hungry.

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Millions of working Americans don't know where their next meal is coming from. We sent three photographers to explore hunger in three very different parts of the United States, each giving different faces to the same statistic: One-sixth of Americans don't have enough food to eat.

Osage, Iowa

Hunger in
the Land of Cars

Houston, Texas

Hunger in
the City of Plenty

Bronx, New York

On a gold-gray morning in Mitchell County, Iowa, Christina Dreier sends her son, Keagan, to school without breakfast. He is three years old, barrel-chested, and stubborn, and usually refuses to eat the free meal he qualifies for at preschool. Faced with a dwindling pantry, Dreier has decided to try some tough love: If she sends Keagan to school hungry, maybe he'll eat the free breakfast, which will leave more food at home for lunch.

Dreier knows her gambit might backfire, and it does. Keagan ignores the school breakfast on offer and is so hungry by lunchtime that Dreier picks through the dregs of her freezer in hopes of filling him and his little sister up. She shakes the last seven chicken nuggets onto a battered baking sheet, adds the remnants of a bag of Tater Tots and a couple of hot dogs from the fridge, and slides it all into the oven. She's gone through most of the food she got last week from a local food pantry; her own lunch will be the bits of potato left on the kids' plates. "I eat lunch if there's enough," she says. "But the kids are the most important. They have to eat first."

The fear of being unable to feed her children hangs over Dreier's days. She and her husband, Jim, pit one bill against the next-the phone against the rent against the heat against the gas-trying always to set aside money to make up for what they can't get from the food pantry or with their food stamps, issued by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Congressional cuts to SNAP last fall of five billion dollars pared her benefits from $205 to $172 a month.

On this particular afternoon Dreier is worried about the family van, which is on the brink of repossession. She and Jim need to open a new bank account so they can make automatic payments instead of scrambling to pay in cash. But that will happen only if Jim finishes work early. It's peak harvest time, and he often works until eight at night, applying pesticides on commercial farms for $14 an hour. Running the errand would mean forgoing overtime pay that could go for groceries.

It's the same every month, Dreier says. Bills go unpaid because, when push comes to shove, food wins out. "We have to eat, you know," she says, only the slightest hint of resignation in her voice. "We can't starve."

Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don't summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. "This is not your grandmother's hunger," says Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at the City University of New York. "Today more working people and their families are hungry because wages have declined."

In the United States more than half of hungry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult-typically in a full-time job. With this new image comes a new lexicon: In 2006 the U.S. government replaced "hunger" with the term "food insecure" to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn't have enough food to eat. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012-a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s. Privately run programs like food pantries and soup kitchens have mushroomed too. In 1980 there were a few hundred emergency food programs across the country; today there are 50,000. Finding food has become a central worry for millions of Americans. One in six reports running out of food at least once a year. In many European countries, by contrast, the number is closer to one in 20.

To witness hunger in America today is to enter a twilight zone where refrigerators are so frequently bare of all but mustard and ketchup that it provokes no remark, inspires no embarrassment. Here dinners are cooked using macaroni-and-cheese mixes and other processed ingredients from food pantries, and fresh fruits and vegetables are eaten only in the first days after the SNAP payment arrives. Here you'll meet hungry farmhands and retired schoolteachers, hungry families who are in the U.S. without papers and hungry families whose histories stretch back to the Mayflower. Here pocketing food from work and skipping meals to make food stretch are so common that such practices barely register as a way of coping with hunger and are simply a way of life.

It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you're really hungry, then how can you be-as many of them are-overweight? The answer is "this paradox that hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin," says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, "people making trade-offs between food that's filling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity." For many of the hungry in America, the extra pounds that result from a poor diet are collateral damage-an unintended side effect of hunger itself.

As the face of hunger has changed, so has its address. The town of Spring, Texas, is where ranchland meets Houston's sprawl, a suburb of curving streets and shade trees and privacy fences. The suburbs are the home of the American dream, but they are also a place where poverty is on the rise. As urban housing has gotten more expensive, the working poor have been pushed out. Today hunger in the suburbs is growing faster than in cities, having more than doubled since 2007.

Yet in the suburbs America's hungry don't look the part either. They drive cars, which are a necessity, not a luxury, here. Cheap clothes and toys can be found at yard sales and thrift shops, making a middle-class appearance affordable. Consumer electronics can be bought on installment plans, so the hungry rarely lack phones or televisions. Of all the suburbs in the country, northwest Houston is one of the best places to see how people live on what might be called a minimum-wage diet: It has one of the highest percentages of households receiving SNAP assistance where at least one family member holds down a job. The Jefferson sisters, Meme and Kai, live here in a four-bedroom, two-car-garage, two-bath home with Kai's boyfriend, Frank, and an extended family that includes their invalid mother, their five sons, a daughter-in-law, and five grandchildren. The house has a rickety desktop computer in the living room and a television in most rooms, but only two actual beds; nearly everyone sleeps on mattresses or piles of blankets spread out on the floor.

Though all three adults work full-time, their income is not enough to keep the family consistently fed without assistance. The root problem is the lack of jobs that pay wages a family can live on, so food assistance has become the government's-and society's-way to supplement low wages. The Jeffersons receive $125 in food stamps each month, and a charity brings in meals for their bedridden matriarch.

Like most of the new American hungry, the Jeffersons face not a total absence of food but the gnawing fear that the next meal can't be counted on. When Meme shows me the family's food supply, the refrigerator holds takeout boxes and beverages but little fresh food. Two cupboards are stocked with a smattering of canned beans and sauces. A pair of freezers in the garage each contain a single layer of food, enough to fill bellies for just a few days. Meme says she took the children aside a few months earlier to tell them they were eating too much and wasting food besides. "I told them if they keep wasting, we have to go live on the corner, beg for money, or something."

Stranded in a Food Desert

Jacqueline Christian is another Houston mother who has a full-time job, drives a comfortable sedan, and wears flattering clothes. Her older son, 15-year-old Ja'Zarrian, sports bright orange Air Jordans. There's little clue to the family's hardship until you learn that their clothes come mostly from discount stores, that Ja'Zarrian mowed lawns for a summer to get the sneakers, that they're living in a homeless shelter, and that despite receiving $325 in monthly food stamps, Christian worries about not having enough food "about half of the year."

Christian works as a home health aide, earning $7.75 an hour at a job that requires her to crisscross Houston's sprawl to see her clients. Her schedule, as much as her wages, influences what she eats. To save time she often relies on premade food from grocery stores. "You can't go all the way home and cook," she says.

On a day that includes running a dozen errands and charming her payday loan officer into giving her an extra day, Christian picks up Ja'Zarrian and her seven-year-old, Jerimiah, after school. As the sun drops in the sky, Jerimiah begins complaining that he's hungry. The neon glow of a Hartz Chicken Buffet appears up the road, and he starts in: Can't we just get some gizzards, please?

Christian pulls into the drive-through and orders a combo of fried gizzards and okra for $8.11. It takes three declined credit cards and an emergency loan from her mother, who lives nearby, before she can pay for it. When the food finally arrives, filling the car with the smell of hot grease, there's a collective sense of relief. On the drive back to the shelter the boys eat until the gizzards are gone, and then drift off to sleep.

Christian says she knows she can't afford to eat out and that fast food isn't a healthy meal. But she'd felt too stressed-by time, by Jerimiah's insistence, by how little money she has-not to give in. "Maybe I can't justify that to someone who wasn't here to see, you know?" she says. "But I couldn't let them down and not get the food."

Of course it is possible to eat well cheaply in America, but it takes resources and know-how that many low-income Americans don't have. Kyera Reams of Osage, Iowa, puts an incredible amount of energy into feeding her family of six a healthy diet, with the help of staples from food banks and $650 in monthly SNAP benefits. A stay-at-home mom with a high school education, Reams has taught herself how to can fresh produce and forage for wild ginger and cranberries. When she learned that SNAP benefits could be used to buy vegetable plants, she dug two gardens in her yard. She has learned about wild mushrooms so she can safely pick ones that aren't poisonous and has lobbied the local library to stock field guides to edible wild plants.

"We wouldn't eat healthy at all if we lived off the food-bank food," Reams says. Many foods commonly donated to-or bought by-food pantries are high in salt, sugar, and fat. She estimates her family could live for three months on the nutritious foods she's saved up. The Reamses have food security, in other words, because Kyera makes procuring food her full-time job, along with caring for her husband, whose disability payments provide their only income.

But most of the working poor don't have the time or know-how required to eat well on little. Often working multiple jobs and night shifts, they tend to eat on the run. Healthful food can be hard to find in so-called food deserts-communities with few or no full-service groceries. Jackie Christian didn't resort to feeding her sons fried gizzards because it was affordable but because it was easy. Given the dramatic increase in cheap fast foods and processed foods, when the hungry have money to eat, they often go for what's convenient, just as better-off families do.

It's a cruel irony that people in rural Iowa can be malnourished amid forests of cornstalks running to the horizon. Iowa dirt is some of the richest in the nation, even bringing out the poet in agronomists, who describe it as "black gold." In 2007 Iowa's fields produced roughly one-sixth of all corn and soybeans grown in the U.S., churning out billions of bushels.

These are the very crops that end up on Christina Dreier's kitchen table in the form of hot dogs made of corn-raised beef, Mountain Dew sweetened with corn syrup, and chicken nuggets fried in soybean oil. They're also the foods that the U.S. government supports the most. In 2012 it spent roughly $11 billion to subsidize and insure commodity crops like corn and soy, with Iowa among the states receiving the highest subsidies. The government spends much less to bolster the production of the fruits and vegetables its own nutrition guidelines say should make up half the food on our plates. In 2011 it spent only $1.6 billion to subsidize and insure "specialty crops"-the bureaucratic term for fruits and vegetables.

Those priorities are reflected at the grocery store, where the price of fresh food has risen steadily while the cost of sugary treats like soda has dropped. Since the early 1980s the real cost of fruits and vegetables has increased by 24 percent. Meanwhile the cost of nonalcoholic beverages-primarily sodas, most sweetened with corn syrup-has dropped by 27 percent.

"We've created a system that's geared toward keeping overall food prices low but does little to support healthy, high-quality food," says global food expert Raj Patel. "The problem can't be fixed by merely telling people to eat their fruits and vegetables, because at heart this is a problem about wages, about poverty."

When Christina Dreier's cupboards start to get bare, she tries to persuade her kids to skip snack time. "But sometimes they eat saltine crackers, because we get that from the food bank," she said, sighing. "It ain't healthy for them, but I'm not going to tell them they can't eat if they're hungry."

The Dreiers have not given up on trying to eat well. Like the Reamses, they've sown patches of vegetables and a stretch of sweet corn in the large green yard carved out of the cornfields behind their house. But when the garden is done for the year, Christina fights a battle every time she goes to the supermarket or the food bank. In both places healthy foods are nearly out of reach. When the food stamps come in, she splurges on her monthly supply of produce, including a bag of organic grapes and a bag of apples. "They love fruit," she says with obvious pride. But most of her food dollars go to the meat, eggs, and milk that the food bank doesn't provide; with noodles and sauce from the food pantry, a spaghetti dinner costs her only the $3.88 required to buy hamburger for the sauce.

What she has, Christina says, is a kitchen with nearly enough food most of the time. It's just those dicey moments, after a new bill arrives or she needs gas to drive the kids to town, that make it hard. "We're not starved around here," she says one morning as she mixes up powdered milk for her daughter. "But some days, we do go a little hungry."

Crops Taxpayers Support With Subsidies

How Subsidized Crops Affect Diet

Tracie McMillan is the author of The American Way of Eating and a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. Photographers Kitra Cahana, Stephanie Sinclair, and Amy Toensing are known for their intimate, sensitive portraits of people.

The magazine thanks The Rockefeller Foundation and members of the National Geographic Society for their generous support of this series of articles.

Maps and graphics by Virginia W. Mason and Jason Treat, NGM Staff. Help for the Hungry, sources: USDA; Food Research and Action Center; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Stranded in a Food Desert, sources: USDA; City of Houston; U.S. Census Bureau. Crop Subsidies, research: Amanda Hobbs. Sources: Mississippi Department of Human Services; Environmental Working Group; National Cancer Institute.

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Why are people malnourished in the richest country on Earth?

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This web-page is good at discussing the issue of Famine across the world and throughout history. Famine is an important aspect of human population in terms of mortality rates, food consumption.

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This entry focuses on the history of famine and famine mortality over time. Our data include information only up to 2016. This does not include any data on the current food emergencies affecting Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Ethiopia. More information on these crises can be found at FEWS.net.
A famine is an acute episode of extreme hunger that results in excess mortality due to starvation or hunger-induced diseases.¹

It is this crisis characteristic that distinguishes it from persistent malnutrition, which we discuss in another entry on this website. As we discuss in the Data Quality and Definition section below, the term 'famine' can mean different things to different people and has evolved over time. It is only in recent years that more precise, measurable definitions - in terms of mortality rates, food consumption and physical signs of malnutrition - have been developed.

But despite these ambiguities, it is nonetheless very clear that in recent decades the presence of major life-taking famines has diminished significantly and abruptly as compared to earlier eras. This is not in anyway to underplay the very real risk facing the roughly 80 million people currently living in a state of crisis-level² food insecurity and therefore requiring urgent action. Nevertheless, the parts of the world that continue to be at risk of famine represent a much more limited geographic area than in previous eras, and those famines that have occurred recently have typically been far less deadly - as we will go on to show in this entry.

For this entry we have assembled a new global dataset on famines from the 1860s until 2016. We estimate that in total 128 Million people died in famines over this period.³

Famines have always occurred as the result of a complex mix of 'technical' and 'political' factors,⁴ but the developments of the modern industrial era have generally reduced the salience of natural constraints in causing famine. This includes many developments discussed in other pages of Our World in Data, such as the increasing availability of food per person, made possible through increasing agricultural yields; improvements in healthcare and sanitation; increased trade; reduced food prices and food price volatility; as well as reductions in the number of people living in extreme poverty. Over time, famines have become increasingly "man-made"-phenomena, becoming more clearly attributable to political causes, including non-democratic government and conflict. Paradoxically, over the course of the 20 th century famine was virtually eradicated from most of the world, whilst over the same period there occurred some of the worst famines in recorded history. This is because many of the major famines of the 20 th century were the outcome of wars or totalitarian regimes. As such, the waning of the very high levels of warfare over the last decades (as seen in the reduced number of battle deaths in recent times) and the spread of democratic institutions has also played a large part in the substantial reduction in famine mortality witnessed in recent decades.

Thus, overall, we can see in the rapid decline of famine mortality one of the great accomplishments of our era, representing technological progress, economic development and the spread of stable democracies. Viewed in this light, however, it also serves to highlight the appalling continued presence of famines which are, in the modern world, entirely man-made.

The entry is based on a global dataset of famines since the mid-19th century produced by us. This 'Our World in Data-Dataset of Famines' can be found at the very end of this document and is preceded by a discussion of how this dataset was constructed and on which sources it is based.

All our charts on Famines

Famine across the world since 1860

Compared to earlier historical periods, very few people have died in famines in recent decades. Here we show two bar charts based on our dataset of famines. The blue bars show the number of famine deaths in each decade since 1860. The number of famine deaths varies hugely from decade to decade depending on the occurrence of individual catastrophic famines. Nevertheless the last four decades have seen low numbers of famine deaths by historical standards.

The red bars show famine mortality relative to the growing world population over this time. Viewed in this way, the trend is all the more notable. The chart shows the rate of famine deaths globally, expressed as the number of people dying each year per 100,000 people of the world population. The chart presents this rate averaged across each decade since 1860. You can see that the famine mortality rate fell to very low levels over the second half of the 20th century onwards.

The sharp reduction in famine mortality represents "one of the great unacknowledged triumphs of our lifetime", as famine researcher, Alex de Waal describes it.⁶

As de Wall explains, a continued decline is by no means assured: the future of famine will depend largely on the nature and prevalence of war. However, as we discuss here, the long-run developments that have contributed to the sharp decline in famine mortality do suggest that the type of catastrophic famine seen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is very unlikely to return.

The number of famine victims by decade, 1860s-2010s⁷

The rate of famine deaths by decade, 1860s-2010s⁸

The geographic spread of famines has also reduced over this period, as we can see in these two charts, which give two ways of visualizing famine deaths by continent.

While in earlier periods Asia suffered heavily from major famines, this came to a halt over the mid-20th century. Since then, famines have almost exclusively been restricted to Africa, with the famine in North Korea being a stark exception.

Famines by world region, 1860s-2016⁹

Famines deaths by world region, 1860s-2016¹⁰

This chart shows the estimated number of people dying in individual famines since the 1860s, based on our dataset of famines. The length of each line shows the duration of the famine and the color shows the continent in which the famine occurred.

What this chart doesn't show however is the significant uncertainty that surrounds many of these estimates. As we discuss in our section on Data Quality, historical famine estimates are frequently based on very scant demographic information, and even where such evidence is available there is still disagreement in its interpretation.

As such, many of the famines included in our dataset are associated with a wide range of plausible mortality estimates. In our data, these are represented by upper- and lower-bound estimates, with the mid-point being shown in the visualization above. Two apt examples are the famines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which took place amidst the Second Congo War beginning in 1998, and that of North Korea from 1995 to 1999. These famines stand out in recent decades for their particularly high mortality. But in both cases, the range of mortality estimates available in the literature is large, with high and low estimates varying by several millions of deaths.¹²

Where such differences are present, our midpoint estimates are clearly very sensitive to our choice of upper and lower bounds. We have not simply taken the highest and lowest figures published in the public domain, given that more accurate estimates often emerge with time. As noted by the World Peace Foundation, "generally speaking, better demographic calculations lead to lower estimations of excess deaths than those provided by journalists and other contemporary observers." Rather, we have sought to select upper and lower estimates based on the balance of opinion in commonly-cited sources, all of which are detailed (for each individual event) in our dataset of famines. Inevitably though, this meant us taking a position in some controversial cases, discussed in detail here.

But whilst the number of deaths caused by individual famines is often subject to a good deal of uncertainty, the overall trend over time is very clear: compared to earlier historical periods, far fewer people have died in famines in recent decades. Whether we consider high or low estimates, or something in between, does not affect this conclusion.

Long-run view of famine in single countries

In today's developed countries peacetime famines had largely ceased by the mid-19th century.¹³

In England this was achieved at least a century earlier. This graph shows estimates of the crude population increase - the number of births minus the number of deaths divided by the population - taken from Campbell (2009).¹⁴

These figures are based on a national sample of parish register entries, which are available with good coverage from 1538 when the registration of baptisms, marriages and burials become enforced. By comparing the price of grain (which was well documented in England from the twelfth century onwards) with estimates for real wages and grain yields, the author was able to make reasoned speculations about which of the documented sudden drops in population were likely to have resulted from famine, as opposed to disease epidemics unrelated to food shortages. The idea is that even if harvests were bad, if there was no simultaneous rise in grain prices it seems more likely that disease would have been the main driver of population losses, as opposed to famine (the lower population reducing the demand for food, thereby offsetting the reduced supply to keep prices roughly level).

Those population crises potentially consisting of famine conditions are indicated with an 'F' in this visualization. The last was in 1741-2 which was "brought on by an extreme short-term weather anomaly of at least three-years' duration" that affected much of northwest Europe, causing an even more severe famine in Ireland.

Estimated crude rates of natural increase in England, 1550-1849, with possible famines highlighted - Campbell (2009)

Saito (2010) has created a chronology of famines in Japan since the 6th century. Before the 14th century data is judged to be incomplete (although the records for the 8th and 9th are surprisingly complete - there were more than 35 famines in each of the two centuries).

The number and intensity of famines is shown as 'points' in Saito's visualisation shown here: 1 point being given to widespread famines, 0.5 points being given to more localised events.

Overall Saito's chronology comprises information on 281 famines. None of these 281 famines happened in the twentieth century and the graph here shows that the end of starvation in Japan arrived gradually. Before 1550 there were more than 10 famines per 50 year-interval and since then famines have became less and less common in Japan.

How frequent were famines in the distant past?

It is very difficult to know how common famines were in the distant past given the absence of historical record.

As noted by the World Peace Foundation, "generally speaking, better demographic calculations lead to lower estimations of excess deaths than those provided by journalists and other contemporary observers. We might therefore reasonably expect an upward bias in the figures for earlier famines on the record." On the other hand, there is an obvious risk that existing historical records underreport long-past famines and the number of their victims due to the lack of documentation being made at the time or their being lost subsequently. Loveday, an early researcher of Indian famines, noted in 1914 that, "The frequency of the mention of famine in the later history [...] increases in exact proportion with the precision and accuracy in detail of her historians."¹⁶

At least in proportionate terms, it seems safe to conclude that the nineteenth century suffered far more intensely from famine than did the twentieth century, with Ó Gráda (2007) considering one hundred million deaths a 'conservative estimate' for the nineteenth century as a whole: higher than the combined figure for the twentieth century, and in the context of a much lower population.¹⁷

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that famines dominated to the degree assumed by some early famine scholars such as Robert Malthus, not least because 'normal' mortality rates would have been very high anyhow. "Given that life expectancy was low even in noncrisis years, frequent famines would have made it impossible to sustain population", concludes Ó Gráda (2007).

Based on consideration of a patchwork of burial records and other historical accounts, Menken and Watkins (1985) conclude that famines in which death rates doubled for two years or more were 'rare', and that famines of even greater intensity were 'highly unusual', if they occurred at all.¹⁸

From what evidence there is, it seems unlikely that famine served as a primary check to population growth in the past, with non-crisis malnutrition and disease generating high enough death rates to act as "more potent positive checks on population growth in the long run than the Third Horseman."¹⁹

Why do famines happen?

We might naturally tend to associate famine with drought or other natural phenomena, and indeed most documented famines have occurred in the context of harvest failures, often due to droughts or flooding. However, in recent times, aggregate food availability per person has increased dramatically, and given the comparable ease of transportation and communication, localized shortfalls can - in theory at least - be met by importing food from surplus areas far quicker and at a much lower cost nowadays. As such, lack of overall food availability per se plays a less prominent role in causing famine today than it did historically.

Better integrated food markets have on the whole helped to ease acute localized food price volatility due to bad harvests. Food shortages that lead to higher prices create an incentive for traders to increase the supply of food, thereby preventing shortages developing into outright food crises.

Thus the absence of markets, or presence of badly functioning markets, can be a key part of why people are not able to obtain enough food. Where means of transport is lacking, trade between surplus and deficit regions can be hampered, as well as making the distribution of food aid much harder during crises. Comparable climatic conditions that sparked two famines in northern China, in the 1870s and 1920s respectively, brought about 9-13 million deaths in the first case and half a million in the latter. One important difference that can explain this moderated impact is the availability of greatly improved transport infrastructure that was constructed in the interim which allowed for prompt relief efforts to take place. The more limited development of transport infrastructure in parts of Africa has played a contributory role in a number of recent famines on the continent.²⁰

Where markets function badly, supply may be restricted 'artificially'. For example, Amartya Sen argues that 'speculative withdrawal and panic purchase of rice stocks' was one of the primary causes of the Bengali famine of 1943, which turned a 'moderate short-fall in production... into an exceptional short-fall in market release'.²¹

Where traders have some monopoly power over local markets, hoarding can be a way of increasing profits by making prices rise. Even without monopoly power, where traders collectively expect prices to increase, for whatever reason, it can make sense for them not to sell storable food to final consumers immediately, but rather wait for the higher prices, thereby restricting the current overall supply to consumers. Again, this is part of the normal functioning of a market which encourages food to be transferred from periods of relative plenty to those of relative scarcity. But where such trading leads to excessive speculation on price increases, 'price bubbles' can emerge such that prices no longer bear any relation to the actual relative scarcity any more. In this sense badly functioning markets can produce 'artificial' scarcities, where food is prevented from reaching final consumers not because of actual falls in production, but only due to the anticipation of higher future prices.

Such self-fulfilling expectations of price increases can occur simply where people have mutually reinforcing, but nonetheless mistaken beliefs about future supply. According to Ravaillion (1987), such a dynamic was indeed at play during the Bangladesh famine, in which food prices soared despite there being no significant drop in food production or in overall food availability per person.²² He suggests that the severe flooding that occurred during the famine created the expectation of a shortfall and related price increases, but that the resulting panic buying and price speculation themselves brought about the scarcity, rather than any realised drop in production. It is argued by others that food price speculation at the time was directed towards a perceived weakness in the government's ability to continue with a policy of buying food at below-market prices in order to keep prices from rising too much.²³

For instance, where a weather event (such as the severe flooding that occurred during the Bangladesh famine of 1974) makes people think there will be shortages, resulting panic buying and price speculation can itself then produce scarcity artificially.

The chart shown, taken from Ó Gráda (2006), shows the very dramatic peak in food prices during the Bangladesh famine that happened despite there being no decline in overall food availability. It also shows a sharp increase in the differences in food prices between different regions in Bangladesh (as measured by the standard deviation). This is evidence that, during the famine, markets became more spatially segregated - i.e. that food was not able to move to those regions where it was in highest demand, and thereby lower local price differences. The absence of properly functioning markets thus contributed to the localized scarcities.

International aid continues to play a large role in addressing food security, both in emergency situations and to help relieve more persistent periods of food insufficiency (the World Food Program collects data on the quantity and value of international food aid and is available here). The development of better monitoring systems, such as the Famine Early Warning System, has given the international relief community more advanced notice of developing food crises, although such early warnings by no means guarantee a sufficient aid response, nor that secure access to affected areas will be granted.

Thus, whilst drought or flood-caused crop failure might naturally seem to be high up on a list of causes of famine, this was far truer of famines in the past. Nowadays, crop failure is better understood as an important contributing factor rather than a sufficient cause of famine: food crises due simply to localized drops in production do not tend to develop into full-blown famines with high excess mortality unless exacerbated through more overtly human influences.

As Amartya Sen argued, the fact that there may be enough food available in aggregate within a given area does not necessarily mean that everyone will be able to afford it.²⁵

Food crises are often precipitated by spikes in the price of food relative to wages, or the collapse in the price of assets owned. The latter commonly accompanies famines due to many people all at once trying to sell their assets (for instance their livestock) in order to be able to buy more food. Such shocks can mean that those already living close to the level of subsistence may find their 'exchange entitlement' - that which they can obtain on the market in exchange for their labour or other assets - fails to provide them with enough food, even if the aggregate local supply is sufficient.

Wealthy countries have very few people living in such extreme absolute poverty, both because of higher incomes before tax and benefits, but also due higher government expenditures and transfers. It is therefore unsurprising that those countries in which famines occur do tend to be very poor. Here we show the inflation-adjusted income per capita of each country at the time they experienced a famine, with some reference points on the vertical axis. As you can see, most countries in which a famine took place had, at the time, average incomes less than half of that of the UK at the outset of its industrial revolution. You can see that average incomes in India - a country that historically suffered very heavily from famine - has grown rapidly in recent decades, and at the same time has been famine free. African countries, conversely, have on the whole has remained very poor and make up the majority of recent famines.

As well as proxying for the presence of extreme poverty, this relationship also reflects the fact that poorer countries also tend have less adequate facilities like transport infrastructure, sanitation and systems of healthcare that play a key role in preventing or moderating the impacts of food shortages.

Whilst poverty certainly increases the vulnerability of a country, we should be careful not to think of it as the single, or even the most important, cause of famine, given the typically political nature of most outbreaks of famine.

Amartya Sen famously noted in his 1999 book Development as Freedom that "there has never been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy". He suggested that democratic authorities are incentivized by elections to be more responsive to food crises and that the presence of a free press can quickly draw attention to the event and hold government to account.

Whilst exceptions to this rule can be found - depending on the definition of 'democracy' and 'famine' being employed - the visualization here corroborates the idea that famines tend not to happen in democracies, by grouping them according to the political regime under which they took place. Here we use our list of famines since 1850 which can be found at the bottom of this page, and we define the political regime type according to the Polity IV score (discussed more in our entry on Democracy), collecting the various scores into three clusters: Democracy (>5), Autocracy or Anocracy (-10 to 5), and Colony (-20).

According to the definitions we have adopted, three famines since 1850 took place in democracies. However, in two of them the 'democratic' classification is rather ill-fitting. The St. Lawrence Island famine of 1878-80 is listed as occurring in the USA. However, it took place on a very remote Alaskan island populated by the indigenous Yupik people, that had relatively little interaction with mainland USA. In the case of Sudan, according to its Polity IV score, there was a brief spell of democracy, following elections held in 1986. But it is somewhat misleading to consider the famine occurring in southern Sudan in 1988 as happening under conditions of a functioning democracy. It took place during the Second Sudanese Civil War, which was organized primarily along a North/South division and marked by many human rights violations. According to Wikipedia, in the majority of seats in the southern regions voting was in fact suspended for the 1986 election.

In the third case, that of Maharashtra in India in 1972-3, whilst there is no ambiguity as to the political regime type, there has been some disagreement as to whether excess mortality in fact occurred. This is discussed further in the Data Quality and Definition section below. In any case, whilst in absolute terms it is certain that the drought caused enormous suffering, whatever excess mortality that did occur in Maharashtra was very much lower than the major famines occurring under totalitarian regimes in roughly the same period.

It is important to note, however, that the question of how often famines have occurred within democracies crucially depends upon the definition of famine being used. In particular, what, if any, excess mortality lower-bound is being used yields different answers. As Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer (2007) point out, a number of smaller-scale events in which drought-related mortality did occur have happened in functioning democracies.²⁸ As the authors argue, even within democracies it can still be politically advantageous for governments to allow small minorities to starve if in doing so they are able to win more votes by distributing benefits to others. As discussed in the Data Quality and Definition section below, in compiling our table we have omitted events where the excess mortality is estimated to be lower than one thousand deaths, to reflect that the term "famine" has in its common usage typically been reserved for larger-scale events with crisis characteristics. This leaves only the three democracy famine events discussed above. Regardless of the threshold though, the main point remains the same: famines tend not to occur in democracies, and none of the catastrophic life-taking famines documented in history have occurred in the context of functioning democratic institutions.

In terms of more recent events, from the second half of the 20th century onwards, famines in Africa have become increasingly associated with civil war, and include a number of crises in places that were not previously prone to famines at all, such as Mozambique and Biafra in Nigeria. In addition to the direct casualties, conflict can also generate disruption to production and trade and can encourage the spread of disease epidemics, particularly through forced migration.³⁰

Crucially, it can also block the arrival of humanitarian relief to those in need.

It is important to note that, as opposed to dying from literal starvation, the vast majority of people that die during famines actually succumb to infectious disease or other illnesses, with some diseases being more directly linked to diet than others. Famines brought on by drought often go hand-in-hand with a scarcity of clean drinking water that increases the threat of cholera and other diseases. Increased migration and the disruption of personal hygiene and sanitation routines and healthcare systems also increases the risk of outbreaks of infections diseases, all in the context of a population already weakened through malnourishment.

This is particularly true in places where such diseases are already endemic. Thus, in sub-Saharan Africa where vaccination rates for measles have been relatively low, the disease has been a big killer during modern famines in the region alongside other infectious and parasitic diseases common in non-crisis times.³²

The table here is taken from Ó Gráda and Mokyr (2002) and shows the percentages of excess deaths during a selection of famines attributable to different proximate causes, including the most typical famine diseases. In each case, it can be seen that communicable diseases were the ultimate cause of death in the majority of cases. (Note that, for India and Moscow, the excess mortality attributable to starvation is not available separately).

This is in contrast to some famines that occurred in industrialised countries during WWII, in a context of overall healthier populations and systems of sanitation that were maintained to some degree despite the crisis. In these instances disease played far less of a role, with deaths from starvation correspondingly higher. Ó Gráda (2009) gives the example of the siege of Leningrad in which "few of Leningrad's 0.8 million or so victims perished of contagious diseases," noting that the number of people dying from the main infectious diseases were actually lower in 1941 - amidst an overall vast increase in excess mortality - than they had been in 1940 before the blockade began.³⁴

What does a famine declaration declare?

In February 2017, parts of South Sudan were officially declared by the UN as being in famine - the first such declaration since 2011. By May the famine had apparently receded, thanks to an effective aid response that averted large-scale loss of life. And yet, the crisis was far from over. Indeed the overall food security situation in the country had, in fact, 'further deteriorated' over the same period, according to official reports³⁵ - even as the 'famine' status was being withdrawn.

Here we look in more detail into the famine declaration in South Sudan, in order to understand better how famine is defined today and how this fits in with our understanding of famines in the past.

In declaring famines, the UN follows the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) - you find all details in the IPC guidelines here, and the more general IPC Manual.

The IPC lays out thresholds across three dimensions of outcomes, all of which must be evidenced in order for a famine to be declared in a certain area:

Food consumption and livelihood change: At least one in five households faces an extreme lack of food, as evidenced by insufficient food consumption (in terms of quantity and/or quality) and by the coping strategies employed by or available to households (e.g. the extent to which assets like livestock or seed may have been sold off)

Nutritional status: More than 30% of the population is suffering from 'wasting' (being below 2 standard deviations below the median weight for a given height in the reference population)

Mortality (due to inadequate food consumption):³⁶ At least two people out of every 10,000 and at least four children under five out of every 10,000 are dying per day.³⁷

A few things are worth noting about this definition. Firstly, these thresholds represent only the most severe rank of the IPC food insecurity classification. The system ranges from Phase 1 to Phase 5, with 5 corresponding to a famine situation. Lower phases of food insecurity are categorized by lower thresholds in each of the three dimensions above.

Secondly, it is important to see that such thresholds are a measure of intensity rather than magnitude.³⁸ That is to say, rather than trying to capture the absolute number of people in a certain situation of food insecurity, it looks at proportions within given geographic areas. Thus different assessments of food security trends will often be made depending on the geographic level of analysis. An amelioration at a very local level is perfectly compatible with an overall deterioration of the food security status of a country as whole. And this is exactly what happened in South Sudan over the course of 2017.

Here we show two maps of South Sudan showing the IPC classification of each county of South Sudan, in January and May 2017. It was the intensity of the food security situation in Unity State in January (shown in dark red colors), which brought about the famine declaration later in February, with IPC Phase 5 thresholds being confirmed in some parts.

By May the situation in Unity State had somewhat abated due to humanitarian relief efforts, but the food security situation of most other parts of the country had deteriorated significantly. Thus while the 'famine' was over - in the very particular sense of there being no area where intensity thresholds met Phase 5 criteria - the food emergency had in fact become worse for most people.

IPC Phase Classification for South Sudan, January 2017³⁹

IPC Phase Classification for South Sudan, May 2017⁴⁰

Just as different parts of a country can have different food security statuses, different households can, and typically do, experience different levels of food insecurity within any given geographic area. Rather than looking at geographical subdivisions, one way of getting a sense of how different people are faring in a food emergency is to look at the numbers of individual households experiencing different levels of food insecurity.

The IPC sets out such a 'Household Group Classification' alongside the 'Area Classification' outlined above. It mirrors the area classification in providing a Phase classification from 1 to 5, with 5 consisting of a 'Catastrophe' situation for the household. Since nutritional status and mortality data are typically collected for whole populations in a given area, only the food consumption and livelihood change dimension is used to categorize food security at the household level - though signs of malnutrition or excess mortality within the household are used to confirm the presence of extreme food gaps at the higher insecurity rankings.⁴¹

So whilst the household-level classification considers fewer outcomes (only food deficits, as opposed to nutritional or mortality outcomes), it does allow for an assessment of the magnitude of a food emergency in terms of the absolute number of people being affected at different levels of severity. Looking at the household data for South Sudan over 2017 offers another angle on the evolution of the crisis. The two tables shown give the number of people estimated to be at a given level of insecurity across the different States in January (first table) and May (second table).

With such a disaggregation we can see that the humanitarian provision, targeted to the most in need in Unity State, did indeed bring down the number of people experiencing the very worst food insecurity. It was on this basis that that country was no longer officially 'in famine'. However, if we look at the number of individuals in Phase 3 (Crisis) or worse food insecurity, we see not only a deterioration in the country as a whole (45.2 % of the population in May compared to 32.3% in January), but even in Unity State itself (with 58.7% and 54.7% respectively).

Thus whilst a binary 'famine/no-famine' categorization is very useful in terms of being able to draw international attention and relief efforts to the most dire situations, there are other dimensions that we should be aware of in trying to get a sense of the gravity of a food crisis, particularly in terms of its magnitude.

IPC Household Phase Classification, South Sudan by State, January 2017⁴²

IPC Household Phase Classification, South Sudan by State, May 2017⁴³

The Household Group IPC classification can be used to get a sense of the sense of the scale of the food emergencies currently underway. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS), for instance, publishes estimates for the number of people in need of emergency food assistance, defined as those experiencing, or imminently likely to experience Phase 3 ('Crisis') food insecurity or worse. This corresponds to households experiencing "food consumption gaps with high or above usual acute malnutrition" or those "marginally able to meet minimum food needs only with accelerated depletion of livelihood assets that will lead to food consumption gaps."

The numbers estimated to be in need of emergency assistance in 2017, as defined by FEWS, did represent a peak in recent times⁴⁵ - and humanitarian needs remained high in 2018.

It is these high estimated levels of emergency assistance need that led UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Stephen O'Brien, to announce in 2017 that the world was facing the 'largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the UN'. This, however, does not imply an expectation that famine mortality would rise to the levels seen in the mid-20th Century. The broad developments that have reduced populations' vulnerability to such severe famine mortality, discussed here, make this unlikely.

The IPC system is fundamentally geared towards preventing famines, rather than assessing their severity after the event. As stated in the IPC Manual,
"The purpose of the IPC... is not to classify various degrees of famine, nor is it to categorize the "worst famine". Rather, in order to inform real-time decision-making, the IPC thresholds for famine... are set to signify the beginning of famine stages."
In reference to the discussion above, this can be thought of as a measure of magnitude only along one dimension: mortality.

Official famine declarations based on the IPC Area classification, like that made for South Sudan in 2017, do not straightforwardly map on to such an analysis. For instance, given the larger population being affected, it is quite possible that more people have died due to food consumption deficits since early 2017 in Yemen than in South Sudan, despite the intensity of the former crisis not having brought about a famine declaration in any part of the country so far.⁴⁸

Does population growth lead to hunger and famine?

It's no good blaming climate change or food shortages or political corruption. Sorry to be neo-Malthusian about it, but continuing population growth in this region makes periodic famine unavoidable... Many of the children saved by the money raised over the next few weeks will inevitably be back again in similar feeding centres with their own children in a few years time.
- Blog entry from British environmentalist, Sir Jonathan Porrit, 11/07/2011⁴⁹

It is not uncommon to see arguments along the lines of this quote from Sir Jonathan Porritt, claiming that famines are ultimately caused by overpopulation. Porritt - former director of 'Friends of the Earth' and also former chairman of the UK Government's Sustainable Development Commission - was talking about the 2011 famine in Somalia that went on to kill roughly 250,000 people.⁵⁰ He seems certain that the rapid population growth witnessed in East Africa had made famine there 'unavoidable'.

There is something compelling about this logic: a finite land area, with a limited 'carrying capacity', cannot continue to feed a growing population indefinitely. From such a perspective, the provision of humanitarian aid to famine-afflicted countries, however well intended, represents only a temporary fix. In this view it fails to address the fundamental issue: there simply being too many mouths to feed.

As mentioned in the quote, this suggestion is commonly associated with the name of Thomas Robert Malthus, the English political economist writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. Malthus is famous for the assertion that in the absence of 'preventative checks' to reduce birth rates, the natural tendency for populations to increase - being 'so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man' - ultimately results in 'positive checks' that increase the death rate. If all else fails to curb population, 'gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world'.⁵¹

But does the evidence support this idea? Here we look into the relationship between population growth and famine, as well as that between population growth and hunger more generally.

This chart compares the number of famine deaths per decade - based on our famine dataset - with the world population over the same period.

Looking at the world as whole, it is very difficult to square Malthus' hypothesis with the simple but stark fact that, despite the world's population increasing from less than one billion in 1800 to more than seven billion today, the number of people dying due to famine in recent decades is only a tiny fraction of that in previous eras.

We might naturally think that the explanation for this trend lies in increasing agricultural production. Indeed, food supply per person has consistently increased in recent decades, as we can see in the interactive line chart shown. The large increase in global population being met with an even greater increase in food supply (largely due to increases in yields per hectare).

The same also applies for the most acutely food-insecure countries today.⁵³

It is also true of the 2011 famine in Somalia referred to above, in which food aid was greatly restricted, and in some cases diverted, by militant Islamist group al Shabaab and other armed opposition groups in the country.⁵⁴

Famine scholar Stephen Devereux of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, summarizes the trajectory of famines over the 20th century as follows: "The achievement of a global capacity to guarantee food security was accompanied by a simultaneous expansion of the capacity of governments to inflict lethal policies, including genocidal policies often involving the extraction of food from the poor and denial of food to the starving."⁵⁵

Thus, all in all, the recent history of famine mortality does not fit the Malthusian narrative particularly well. Firstly, contrary to what Malthus predicted for rapidly increasing populations, food supply per person has - in all regions - increased as populations have grown. Secondly, famines have not become more, but less frequent. Thirdly, in the modern era the occurrence of major famine mortality, and its prevention, is something for which politics and policy seem the more salient triggers.

Famine victims by decade and world population, 1860s-2010s

Given the typically political nature of outbreaks of such famine crises, it may make more sense to look for an effect of population growth on the longer-term trends of hunger and malnutrition.

But again, at the global level, we know that population growth has been accompanied by a downward trend in hunger. As we discuss in our entry on Hunger and Undernourishment, in recent decades the proportion of undernourished people in the world has fallen, and, although more muted, this fall is also seen in the absolute number. The number of people dying globally due to insufficient calorie or protein intake has also fallen, from almost half a million in the 1990s to roughly 300,000 in the most recent data, as shown in the visualisation.

We can also look at the experiences of individual countries, rather than just at the global level. Do those countries with particularly high population growth rates find it harder to adequately feed its population?

In order to get some idea about this, we can compare countries' Global Hunger Index (GHI) score with their population growth rates. GHI is a composite measure, out of 100, that combines four indicators: undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting, and child mortality.⁵⁷

The first scoring was conducted in 1992, and was then repeated every eight years with the most recent being in carried out in 2017. The score is based on data collected in the years leading up to the scoring year, and as such reflect the hunger levels in this period rather than solely capturing conditions in the year itself. All the countries for which there was GHI data available between 1992 and 2017 are shown in the three charts.⁵⁸ Crucially, this excludes a number of very food-insecure countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Somalia, which have also seen high levels of population growth.⁵⁹ This should be borne in mind when interpreting the following results.

Of the countries for which we do have GHI data, it is clear that those with higher levels of hunger have also tended to have had higher population growth over the last 25 years (first chart).⁶⁰

It is important to see though that among the countries for which we have GHI scores in both 1992 and 2017, the level of hunger went down in all but one - Iraq (second chart). Over the same period population went up in almost every case. Moreover, those countries that experienced higher levels of population growth in fact saw a bigger drop in their GHI score over this period.⁶¹

The countries that saw high population growth over this period started with higher levels of hunger in 1992. So what we are seeing here is that countries are converging towards lower levels of hunger: it fell quickest in countries with the highest levels of hunger (third chart).

So whilst countries that experience hunger do tend to have high levels of population growth, the idea that population growth necessarily leads to increased hunger is clearly mistaken: many countries with high population growth have recently managed to decrease levels of hunger substantially.

'Malthusian' explanations of famine and hunger thus fall short for the following reasons, the evidence for which we reviewed above:

Per capita food supply has increased as populations have grown, largely due to increasing yields.

Famine deaths have decreased, not increased, with population growth.

Food scarcity has played a smaller role in famines than suggested by the Malthusian narrative. It ignores other factors like conflict, poverty, access to markets, healthcare systems, and political institutions.

Population growth is high where hunger is high, but that does not mean that population growth makes hunger inevitable. On the contrary, we see that hunger has fallen fastest in countries with high population growth.

If we want to put an end to hunger, we need to understand the diverse causes that bring it about. Oversimplifications that mistakenly see hunger and famine as an inevitable consequence of population growth do not contribute to this end.

Do famines curb population growth?

English political economist, Thomas Robert Malthus, writing at the turn of the 19th century, is famous for describing famine as " the last, the most dreadful resource of nature" which acts to " level the population with the food of the world" should other forces fail to lower birth rates or increase death rates.⁶³

We can think of this 'Malthusian' proposition as containing two separate hypotheses: firstly, that unabated population growth ultimately leads to famine; secondly, that famine acts as a 'check' to population in this eventuality.

As we discuss here, recent trends in famine mortality, and hunger more generally, largely contradict the first hypothesis. Here we investigate the second, by considering the contribution of famines to long-run population trends. What role has famine played in shaping birth and mortality rates throughout history?

We begin by considering two examples of famines which, from a demographic point of view, differ enormously: the Chinese famine of 1959-61 and that in Ireland in the late 1840s.

However, this was immediately followed by a spike in birth rates in the years immediately following the famine, offsetting to a large degree its demographic effect. This was followed by a steady decline in birth rates throughout the 1960s and 70s, concurrent with domestic birth control policies, but also in line with many other rapidly developing countries.

The trend in mortality rates is similar: the peak generated by the crisis was followed by a continued decline that forms part of the common experience of countries as they develop. The key thing to note is that these secular shifts in births and deaths far outweigh the short-lived impact of the famine in determining the long-run trajectory of population growth in China. Despite causing an excess mortality of 2-5% of the total population, and a similar number of 'lost births', we can see from the lower panel in the chart below the famine had next to no discernible impact on population in the long run.

This picture contrasts somewhat with the developments following the Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s, as shown in the chart below. After a period of rapid growth that brought the population to over 8 million, a famine struck that was, in relation to the country's population, far more severe than the 'Great Leap Forward'-famine. It is thought to have reduced the population by about one quarter in its immediate effects: one million perishing and a further million emigrating. But one striking feature of Irish demographics is how the population then continued to shrink following the famine. By 1911 there were in Ireland about half as many people as in 1841. The population only began to grow again in the late 20th century. Is this then an example of a country that learnt from its 'Malthusian lesson'?

This continued depopulation was partly due to low birth rates (which were considerably lower than in England and Scotland in the second half of the 19th century) and partly due to very high levels of outward migration, particularly to the US and Great Britain. Between 1851 and 1900, there were almost as many outward migrants as there were deaths in Ireland (4.18 million and 4.56 million, respectively).⁶⁷ According to Cormac Ó Gráda, " during the decades between the Great Famine and World War One the probability of a young Irishman or Irishwoman not emigrating was less than one in two. "

As Ó Gráda argues, the only way a famine can have any real lasting demographic impact is if it "teaches" the population to alter marriage and family planning practices to reduce fertility rates.⁶⁸

There is some evidence of changing behaviour in Ireland following the famine, including more people choosing to marry later or not all. However it is difficult to know if this is directly attributable to the famine, or if it instead reflects people's responses to other changes taking place at the time, such as increasing life expectancy or increasing incomes. Furthermore, whilst total birth rates were low in the post-famine period, the number of children being born to married couples remained high, and the rate of natural increase was highest in those parts of the country worst hit by the famine, complicating any simple explanation along these lines. Similarly, whilst the famine itself clearly provided the impetus for mass emigration, high levels of outward migration began some decades before the famine and continued long afterwards in the context of a much-ameliorated standard of living. Thus, it seems likely that it was the promise of improved economic opportunities, rather than fear of famine which drove emigration between 1851 and 1900.⁶⁹

Overall then, even in this seemingly paradigmatic 'Malthusian' example, whilst Ireland undoubtedly did suffer some lasting demographic impacts from the famine, subsequent economic and social developments unrelated to the famine explain the majority of the depopulation the country experienced in the decades following it.

Population of the Island of Ireland, 1500-2000⁶⁶

But what can we say about the impact of famines on long-term population trends more generally? To help answer this question, we look instead at the role of 'population crises' of all kinds - that is to say severe spikes in mortality in general, not just those due to famine. What impact have such crises played in shaping population trends, relative to other global developments?

Here are two charts showing the historic evolution of death rates in England and Wales, and in Norway. Data points mark the annual 'Crude Death Rate' (total deaths per 1,000 people) in each country, and a line plotting the 20-year moving average is shown in each case. You can see that the decline in average mortality rates in both countries was preceded by a reduction in the spread around the average i.e., the number and extent of 'crises' of high mortality.⁷⁰

However, when such spikes were common, they in fact played a relatively small part in keeping average mortality rates as high as they were. Economic Historian, Robert Fogel, in considering the data for England concludes that "crisis mortality ⁷¹ [including famine] accounted for less than 5 percent of total mortality in England prior to 1800 and the elimination of crisis mortality accounted for just 15 percent of the decline in total mortality between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."⁷²

You can picture this by imagining what would happen if you took the highest points in the charts above - representing the crises in mortality - and moved them downwards towards the average for that time. The line showing the 20-year moving average would indeed fall, but only by a small amount compared to the overall decline.

Historic crude death rates in England and Wales

Historic crude death rates in Norway

Falling death rates, and increasing life expectancy, are trends that took place first in early industrialising countries, but have been a common experience in all parts of the world as poverty has declined, and healthcare and nutrition has improved. But since the 1960s this has been outpaced by a fall in birth rates, such that overall the global population growth rate has been steadily falling, and is likely to approach zero towards the end of this century. The rapid growth in population witnessed since the early 20th century was due to the fall in death rates happening ahead of the fall in birth rates, generating a period of natural increase in between.

As with any living organism, humans cannot sustain a given population without sufficient energy resources. Given this, at first glance, it does seem intuitive to assume population growth and famines to be closely linked via food availability. The evidence discussed here (and also here) contradicts any simplified view of this relationship that fails to acknowledge the diverse causes of famines and population dynamics.

The analogy to other living organisms can obscure what is different about the human species. We organize ourselves into complex social and political structures capable of incredible joint accomplishments - such as the eradication of diseases. But we are also capable of inflicting, or consciously allowing, unimaginable suffering - including the majority of famine deaths to date. The capacity of the planet to feed us is not a fixed constant, imposed by nature, but rather it depends also on us: on our agricultural practices, the development and transmission of knowledge and technology, and also crucially upon our choice of diet - an inherently cultural act.

The population growth rate is now declining, not, thankfully, due to more frequent crises of mortality but because people, through their own volition, are choosing to have fewer children. This change is very much associated to rising incomes and other social developments in health and education, and has tended to happen more quickly in countries that have developed more recently. If we need any generalization here, it is plenty - in terms of improved access to adequate food, clean water, sanitation, healthcare, education and so on - rather than scarcity, that is slowing down our species' multiplication.

This isn't to say that increased populations and affluence haven't brought about environmental damage, nor that environmental degradation poses no risks to our future well-being. But the idea we are helpless to stop famines in the face of high population growth in some parts of the world, or that famines represents any kind of 'solution' to the environmental problems humans are causing, are two hypotheses that do little to help either humanity or the planet.

Data Quality & Definition

This entry is based on our 'Our World in Data-Dataset of Famines' which covers the period since the mid-19th century and which can be found at the end of this document. In the following we discuss how famines are defined and in particular our reasoning for how we constructed the dataset.

Today the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) provides a definition of 5 levels of food insecurity of increasing severity, with level 5 constituting famine. According to the IPC, in order for a food insecurity situation to be declared a famine it must meet three specific criteria:

1. At least one in five households faces an extreme lack of food

2. More than 30 per cent of the population is suffering from acute malnutrition (wasting)

3. At least two people out of every 10,000 are dying each day

Whilst providing a more objective, and hence de-politicized, benchmark for declaring a famine - vital for eliciting a timely humanitarian response - a key aspect of the IPC classification is to provide a graduated system that fits the reality of food crises better than a binary 'famine or no-famine' approach. Notice that it focuses on the intensity of the crisis. As discussed by Howe and Devereux (2004), this is distinct from the magnitude of the event, typically understood in terms of the total (excess) mortality that occurred.⁷⁵ In compiling our table of famine deaths over time, we have naturally used estimates of the latter. It is important to note that there is no institutionally-agreed classification of famines in terms of magnitude. Indeed, for some people, a crisis that resulted in no excess mortality might still be properly considered a famine under some circumstances - there are many terrible outcomes that a severe food crisis can produce other than mortality, such as losses of livelihoods or long-term health impacts. Nevertheless, in producing our table we decided to implement a lower threshold of mortality for a crisis to be included (see Famines with low mortality, below).

It is worth seeing that these two dimensions - intensity and magnitude - whilst clearly related are nevertheless independent of each other. A very high-intensity famine, resulting in high mortality rates, may only effect a very small group of people and thus represent a relatively low-magnitude event. Or a low-intensity crisis may extend across a wide area and over a long period, resulting in a high-magnitude famine. A threshold in terms of intensity (i.e. IPC level 5) does not, therefore, straightforwardly map onto any given magnitude threshold.

Our visualisations show data relating to the period up to and including 2016. No estimates of excess mortality for the major food emergencies currently affecting Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Ethiopia have to our knowledge been released. However, in each case, there was a crisis-level food insecurity in 2016 present also. It is therefore possible that as any such estimates emerge, some excess mortality will be seen as having occurred in 2016. This is particularly pertinent to the case of South Sudan, an area of which was officially declared as being in famine throughout early 2017 according to the IPC system. We will update our table accordingly as more clear information becomes available.

In constructing our table of famine mortality over time, we have relied on a variety of secondary sources (listed below), themselves generated from historical accounts that did not make use of such precise definitions, nor would they have been able to do so given the absence of demographic records. Even if we may imagine a relative degree of conformity through time to the notion that famine consists of 'a widespread lack of food leading directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced illnesses',⁷⁶ it is important to note that most of the mortality estimates listed in our table are typically very rough and are often the subject of a good deal of controversy (some examples are discussed in more detail below).

It should be borne in mind that there may be many motives for different observers, record keepers or historians to (intentionally or otherwise) over- or underestimate mortality levels according to their sympathies with the affected population or suspected perpetrators.⁷⁷

As noted by the World Peace Foundation, "generally speaking, better demographic calculations lead to lower estimations of excess deaths than those provided by journalists and other contemporary observers. We might therefore reasonably expect an upward bias in the figures for earlier famines on the record [i.e. from 1870s]."

The earlier back one goes though, the more one might suspect that the written historical record is incomplete. We start our table from the 1860s. Whilst records for this period are no doubt more complete than earlier times, it is likely that some smaller events that would count as famines by today's standards may not have been recognized or recorded as such and are therefore missing from our table.

The aim of the table below is to show estimates of 'excess mortality' - that is to say, the extra number of deaths that occurred during the famine as compared to the number there would have been had the famine not occurred. As noted above, it should be borne in mind that those dying of infectious diseases during famines are normally also included in this. As such, mortality estimates typically try to subtract the 'normal' death rate - that expected in the famine's absence - from the actual total death rate during the famine. Estimating the latter is far from straightforward given the paucity of reliable demographic statistics typical of even recent famines. This also requires making assumptions about what the 'normal' death rate is, leaving even more room for disagreement (see discussion of the Democratic Republic of Congo famine below for an example).

Given this focus on excess mortality, some severe food insecurity situations involving high levels of mortality can nonetheless result in next to no excess mortality where the 'normal' death rate for the area in question is already very high. Niger in 2005, which many observers at the time considered to be a famine, is an example of this.⁷⁸

It is worth noting as well that what is 'normal' changes through time. Modern definitions of famine include criteria for nutrition and mortality that would correspond to conditions typical or near-typical of non-crisis conditions in earlier periods for much of the world.⁷⁹

It should be noted that, based on the work of Alex de Waal at the World Peace Foundation, included in our famine list is a number of events that are described as 'episodes of mass intentional starvation'. Some of these events are not included in other lists of major famine events of the 20th century (notably some of them are missing from Stephen Devereux's much-cited 2000 paper, Famine in the twentieth century).⁸⁰ This suggests that some authors might consider these deaths to be attributable more to conflict and not reliably attributable to famine. Nonetheless, we decided to include these events in our table. Our reasoning here is that the excess mortality associated to many of the famines listed in Devereux (2000) would not have occurred in the absence of conflict, and many of them are not without similar controversy (see below for some more discussion). Thus any distinction between 'famine' and 'episodes of mass intentional starvation' seems to be a matter of degree, and as such there appeared no clear reason not to include the latter in our table.

In our table we have excluded crises where reported excess mortality was lower than 1,000. Our reasons for doing so were twofold. Firstly, in the context of very large margins of error for many of the famines in our table (with upper and lower estimates of excess mortality sometimes several millions apart), we felt that including events in which very few people are recorded as dying might give a misleading impression of the accuracy of the rest of the estimates in the table. Secondly, for many people, excess mortality (due to starvation or hunger-induced diseases) would normally be seen as an integral part of what it means for a crisis to constitute a famine.⁸¹

It should be noted that there might be good reasons to make use of a definition of famine that allows for zero or very low excess mortality.⁸² Nevertheless we felt some lower threshold would be appropriate, though the exact cut-off was a somewhat arbitrary choice.

One of our main data sources is the International Disaster Database, which lists mortality estimates for a range of disasters. In particular, it provides data on a number of smaller-scale events often not given in the main lists of major famines we have used. We considered those events listed as 'Droughts' as being famines, though we excluded any such disasters with a mortality estimate lower than 1,000 as per our threshold.

In addition, we also chose to omit two recent drought events listed in the database for China of 1,400 and 2,000 excess deaths in 1988 and 1991 respectively, having failed to find any corroborating cross-references to famine having occurred in these years.

Relatedly, some events often described as famines are not included in the table below where the reported excess mortality is considered to be in some sense 'negligible'. As with shifting understandings of what the 'normal', non-crisis death rate consists of, no doubt this is a threshold that has changed considerably over time as demographic analysis of famines has become more precise and excess mortality a relatively rare event. Examples of potentially controversial omissions we have made along these lines include the Highland Potato Famine in Scotland (1846-56), the Bihar famine in India 1966-7 (discussed in more detail below) and Niger in 2005.

The International Disaster Database lists a drought in India in 1965 as killing 1.5 million people. The only food crisis around this time that we could find cross-references for was that in Bihar, more commonly cited as occurring in 1966-67. Official statistics, however, suggest very low excess mortality. Indeed, the famine was sometimes invoked as evidencing that independent India had turned a corner in its development, such that it could now cope with a serious drought without sustaining major loss of life.

Dyson and Maharatna (1992), however, regarded the official mortality data to be highly deficient. They concluded that ' while the available data show little sign of excess mortality in Bihar, we probably cannot exclude this possibility'.⁸⁴ Drèze (1990) similarly came to the conclusion that 'there is precious little evidence to support the self-congratulatory statements that have commonly been made about the Bihar famine, e.g. " no exceptional mortality was recorded" or "no one died of starvation".'⁸⁵

For our table we decided to exclude this famine given such uncertainty. Notably, we chose to excluded the EM-DAT figure for 1965: such a high mortality seems questionable given the absence of other corroborating references.

Similar issues surrounded the determination of an excess mortality figure for the Maharashtra crisis in 1972-3. For Drèze (1990) it is clear that, whilst " the crisis was of extreme severity, famine was uncontroversially averted ". This was largely due to an enormous public employment programme which at its peak employed as many as 5 million people in Maharashtra state alone.

Whilst Drèze considers the available demographic statistics to imply that "mortality rose only marginally, if at all,", and notes that that there were no confirmed instances of 'starvation deaths', Dyson and Maharatna (1992) insist that the mortality rates do imply a significant excess mortality of 130,000. They arrive at this conclusion based on adjusting the figures to account for systematic under-registration of deaths, the pre-crisis trend in mortality rates, inter-census population growth and the possibility of excess mortality also occurring in 1972.

In keeping with many other of our listed famine mortality estimates, we decided to provide that figure cited by Devereux (2000), itself quoting the 130,000 figure from Dyson's work.⁸⁶

It is worth seeing though that our choice to attribute a mortality figure to the Maharashtra drought, but not that of Bihar, stands in contrast to the conclusion of Drèze (1990) - based on consideration of nutrition surveys, asset disposals and land sales (signs of acute distress), and the extent of migration - that the Bihar famine struck considerably harder. Nevertheless, in the absence of a specific mortality estimate for the Bihar famine it has been excluded from our list of famines. In any case, the level of uncertainty surrounding both of these famines should be borne in mind.

By far the largest single event in our table is that of China at the turn of the 1960s associated with the economic and social campaign led by Mao Zedong known as the Great Leap Forward. During and immediately after the Chinese famine, however, it remained 'shrouded in mystery', with the Chinese authorities and some Western observers insisting that, despite successive poor harvests, famine had been averted. In the post-Mao era of the early 1980s, some official demographic data was newly released allowing for the first systematic investigations of the death toll.

Initial results from this suggested an excess mortality of around 30 million, and this figure gained some currency. Subsequent estimates have tended to be lower.

One of the key issues is how these official data compare with UN estimates that exist for infant mortality and life expectancy for the period 1950-5, which imply significant under-registration in official data. Exactly what assumptions are made about such under-registration have consequences for the ultimate mortality estimate produced. There is necessarily a degree of arbitrariness to such assumptions, with different hypotheses often standing in contradiction to alternative sources of evidence such as historical documentation and conflicting with the demographic patterns typically observed in famines.

Whilst there is much uncertainty about the exact number of deaths attributable to the Great Leap Forward famine, it seems certain that it represents the single biggest famine event in history in absolute terms. Relative to the size of the population however, the death rate was "modest" compared to that of Ireland in the 1840s or Finland in 1867-8, and was comparable to that of the 1876-9 famine in China.

For our table we use the midpoint between the lowest and highest estimates given in our main sources, 15 million being the lower bound given by Ó Gráda (2009) and 33 million being the upper bound given by Devereux (2000).

A good summary of these issues is given by Ó Gráda (2008).

The most commonly-cited excess mortality estimate for the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the 5.4 million given in a 2007 report by the International Rescue Committee (IRC - report available here). The estimates were based on 'retrospective mortality surveys' in which interviewers asked a sample of respondents to report the number of deaths that had occurred within their household over a given period. These were then used to make inferences about the number of deaths across the country and, in conjunction with an assumed baseline mortality rate capturing the number of people that would have died anyway in the absence of the conflict, were used to generate the overall excess mortality figure.

Some controversy was generated in 2009 with the publication of the 2009/10 Human Security Report which presented a number of criticisms of the IRC methodology and argued that it had significantly overestimated the death toll.⁸⁷ The key debate concerned the baseline mortality rate used, which the Human Security Report considered to be too low, thereby inflating in its view the number of deaths that could be associated to the conflict. In addition, the Report argued that the samples of respondents used in the earliest IRC surveys were unrepresentative and also too small to provide reliable estimates. In particular, it suggested that the areas visited were atypical in that many of them were selected because of there being existing or planned humanitarian operations already in the vicinity, so they were therefore likely to have higher mortality rates than the average location.

Contrariwise, the IRC authors point to the fact that access to some of the most insecure zones was impossible during the surveys, suggesting a sample bias in the opposite direction.

The overall argument of the Human Security Report is that the available data is not sufficient to form the basis for a credible excess mortality estimate, and any attempt to make one is very sensitive to the choice between a range of plausible alternatives and subject to a very wide margin of error. It does produce an estimate, but only for the period between 2001-7 for which the surveys conducted were more representative and numerous. The report's 'best estimate' for excess mortality over this period is 863,000, compared to the 2,830,600 of the IRC for the same period. However, it points out that this is very sensitive to assumptions about whether the counterfactual baseline mortality rate should be considered to have a trend. For short-lived events a point estimate for the baseline mortality rate is sufficient. To estimate the excess mortality of a long-lived event, the report argues, one should allow for the possibility that the baseline mortality rate would have changed over this period in the absence of the event being studied. In the case of DRC it might be reasonable to assume that a negative trend in mortality rates observed prior to the outbreak of war would have continued, in which case the Report's 'best estimate' for the 2001-7 period would increase to 1.5 million.

As such, the 863,000 figure that we include as a lower bound in our table should be treated with extreme caution in that it completely excludes the period prior to 2001 and also ignores the downward pre-trend in mortality rates (as does the IRC estimate).

On the other hand, all these estimates of excess mortality include 'violent deaths' i.e. those directly attributable to conflict and not to the ensuing famine conditions. The IPC report cited does not provide an exact number of violent deaths, but it does claim that "less than 10 percent of all deaths were due to violence, with most attributed to easily preventable and treatable conditions such as malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition". As such we do not attempt to subtract violent deaths from the total.

The number of people that died in the North Korean famine remains highly uncertain, largely due to the closed nature of the country which has precluded access to official data and other channels of inquiry, such as surveys. Estimates range from the North Korean Government's 'quasi-official' estimate of 220,000 to the 3.5 million arrived at by South Korean NGO, Good Friends Centre for Peace, Human Rights and Refugees by extrapolation from interviews conducted with refugees fleeing the country. Whilst one might naturally be suspicious of the Government's own estimate, the approximate figure has been leant some credence by a recent study by Spoorenberg and Schwekendiek (2012). Via a reconstruction of demographic trends between 1993 and 2008 census data, the authors deduce an estimated mortality between 240,000 and 420,000. A rough consensus seems to have emerged that the 3.5 million is not reliable: the sample of interviewees - people from areas so badly affected that they sought to emigrate - was almost certainly unrepresentative of the country as a whole.⁸⁸

Over time, estimates made via a variety of methods have tended suggest increasingly lower excess mortality. For instance, Goodkind and West (2001) put forward 600,000-1 million, with a subsequent study by Goodkind, West and Johnson (2011) suggesting a mortality towards the lower end of that range. Ho Il Moon in an article for VOX argues for a figure of 336,000, again based on reconstruction of intercensal demographics. We take as our lower bound the 240,000 from Spoorenberg and Schwekendiek (2012) and Goodkind, West and Johnson (2011)'s higher figure of 600,000 as our upper bound.⁸⁹

Pierre van der Eng collates local and international newspaper reports of a series of localized famines that may have affected specific parts of Indonesia intermittently during this period, against a backdrop of more generalized and persistent malnutrition in much of the country (his paper is partly available here). As news reports, these figures are clearly not necessarily all that reliable and naturally focus on total numbers of deaths rather than excess mortality. Nevertheless, taken together they probably do point towards some excess famine mortality. Moreover, this was a period of significant repression of press freedoms in which the Government appears to have sought to actively restrict reporting on food crises, such that the reports collated may only represent a subset of famine events that occurred.

In our table we include a zero lower bound and use van der Eng's total figure of 135,400 deaths as the upper bound, taking the midpoint of these two for inclusion in the graphs presented in this entry.

Most of the visualisations in this entry are based on the 'Our World in Data-Dataset of Famines' assembled by us.
Our dataset is based on four main sources:

Data: Information on the occurrence of natural and technological disasters.

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: 1900-present

Available at: Online at www.emdat.be

We have used information on events listed as 'Droughts' with mortality estimates above 1,000 (see 'Famines with low mortality' above). Previously, there was a distinction in the database between droughts and famines, but these have been subsequently merged.

This resource is published by the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). EM-DAT states that the database "contains essential core data on the occurrence and effects of over 18,000 mass disasters in the world from 1900 to present. The database is compiled from various sources, including UN agencies, non-governmental organisations, insurance companies, research institutes and press agencies."

Neumayer and Plümper (2007) give an overview of natural disasters covered by EM-DAT.⁹⁰

The EM-DAT data for the time post 1970 is also available through Gapminder here.

Data: Famines with mortality above 1,000 deaths.

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: 1900-2000

Available at: The research paper Devereux (2000) - Famine in the 20th century is published as a IDS Working Paper here.⁹¹

Data: Famines with mortality above 100,000 deaths and episodes of mass intentional starvation with killed more than 10,000

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: 1870-present

Available at: the World Peace Foundation website here.

Ó Gráda (2009) Famine: A Short History

Data: Overview of the history of famines and of famine scholarship, with a selection of famine mortality estimates in Table 1.1.

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: Table 1.1 includes selected famines since 1693

The book's website is available here.

Additional sources used in assembling the table below are as follows:

Kumar and Raychaudhuri [Eds.] (1983) - The Cambridge economic history of India, Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, 1983

Ó Gráda (2007) - Making Famine History. Journal of Economic Literature. Vol. 45, No. 1 (Mar., 2007), pp. 5-38. Available online here.

Ó Gráda (2008) - "The ripple that drowns? Twentieth-century famines in china and India as economic history." The Economic History Review 61:5-37.

Ó Gráda (2010) - Famines past, Famine's future. UCD CENTRE FOR ECONOMIC RESEARCH WORKING PAPER SERIES, WP10/20

Coghlan, Benjamin, Pascal Ngoy, Flavien Mulumba. Colleen Hardy, Valerie Nkamgang Beno, Tony Stewart, Jennifer Lewis and Richard Brennan, 2007. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An ongoing crisis. New York, International Rescue Committee.

Davis (2001) - Late Victorian Holocausts; Verso Books, ISBN 978-1-85984-739-8

Maharatna (1992) The Demography of Indian Famines: A Historical Perspective; doctoral thesis, LSE. Available online here.

van der Eng (2012) - All Lies? Famines in Sukarno's Indonesia, 1950s-1960s; Crawford School of Public Policy. Available online here.

Human Security Report Project. Human Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Iliffe (1987) - The African Poor: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. III (1907), The Indian Empire, Economic (Chapter X: Famine, pp. 475-502, Published under the authority of His Majesty's Secretary of State for India in Council, Oxford at the Clarendon Press. Pp. xxx, 1 map, 552. Through Wikipedia here.

Shoko Okazaki (1986) - The Great Persian Famine of 1870-71. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 49, No. 1, In Honour of Ann K. S. Lambton (1986), pp. 183-192

Crowell and Oozevaseuk (2006) - The St. Lawrence Island Famine and Epidemic, 1878-80: A Yupik Narrative in Cultural and Historical Context. Online here.

'Wikipedia List' refers to the List of Famines here.

The Our World in Data Dataset of Famines

Year

Country

Excess Mortality midpoint

Excess Mortality lower

Excess Mortality upper

Source

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This entry focuses on the history of famine and famine mortality over time. Our data include information only up to 2016. This does not include any data on the current food emergencies affecting Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Ethiopia. More information on these crises can be found at FEWS.net.

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This is another good interactive map that allows you to see in some countries growth is slowing and declining.

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a country for details.

Choose Year to Display Below:

Overall, however, the rate of population growth has been slowing for several decades. This slowdown is expected to continue until the rate of population growth reaches zero (an equal number of births and deaths) around 2080-2100, at a population of approximately 10.4 billion people. After this time, the population growth rate is expected to turn negative, resulting in global population decline.

Countries with more than 1 billion people

China is currently the most populous country in the world, with a population estimated at more than 1.42 billion as of September 2022. Only one other country in the world boasts a population of more than 1 billion people: India, whose population is estimated to be 1.41 billion people-and rising.

While India's population is projected to continue to grow until at least the year 2050, China's population is currently contracting slightly. This contraction, coupled with India's continued growth, is expected to result in India replacing China as the most populous country in the world by the year 2030.

Countries with more than 100 million people

Another 12 countries each have populations that exceeded 100 million people as of September 2022:

Country

Population

Country

Population

While Russia and Japan will see their populations decline significantly by 2050, the rest of these nations are expected to continue growing until at least 2050. Additionally, two additional countries, DR Congo and Vietnam, have more than 99 million people and should soon reach the 100 million mark.

Countries with fewer than 100 million people

As shown in the live-updating population table below, the overwhelming majority of the world's countries have fewer than 100 million people-substantially fewer, in some cases. The smallest country in the world in terms of both population and total area is Vatican City, where barely 500 people reside.

Population range

# of countries

1 billion or more

2

100 million to 999.9 million

12

10 million to 99.9 million

80

1 million to 9.9 million

66

less than 1 million

74

Rates of population growth around the world

The world's population continues to increase, with approximately 140 million babies born every year. According to the United Nations' 2022 World Population Prospects report, the global population is projected to reach 8.5 billion people by the year 2030, 9.7 billion people by 2050, and 10.4 billion people by 2080, where it will remain until 2100.

While the world's total population is expected to continue to rise until roughly 2100, the rate at which the population is rising has been slowly decreasing for decades. In 2020, the global population growth rate fell below one percent for the first time since 1950. This decrease continues a trend begun in the 1970s, in which the population growth rate shows a consistent decrease when measured in five-year increments.

The rate of population growth varies greatly from one country or region to another. More than half of the world's expected population growth between now and 2050 is expected to come from just eight countries: DR Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania. Particularly of interest is India, which is on track to overtake China's position as the most populous country by the year 2030. Additionally, multiple nations within Africa are expected to double their populations in the coming decades as fertility rates and birth rates rise thanks in part to advancements in medical care and decreased infant mortality and malnutrition.

Life expectancy and its impact on world population

Global life expectancy has also improved in recent years, rising to 72.8 years in 2019-almost 9 years longer than in 1990. Global life expectancy is projected to continue to increase, reaching 77.2 years by the year 2050. Significant factors impacting the data on life expectancy include expectations regarding mankind's ability to reduce the impact of AIDS/HIV and other infectious and non-communicable diseases.

As a result of the increase in global life expectancy, the majority of the world's countries are undergoing considerable growth in the number of residents over the age of 65. The percentage of over-65 residents in the world's population is projected to rise from 10% in 2022 to 16% in 2050. This total will be roughly twice the number of children under age 5 and equal to the number of children under age 12. This imbalance can put considerable strain on a country's economy and infrastructure, as it can lead to a shortage of working-age individuals entering the workforce to take the place of those who are retiring.

Life expectancy has a significant impact on the ability of the population to maintain what is called a replacement rate, in which the country's death rate is balanced or exceeded by its birth rate. In countries whose birth rates are either deliberately low or unintentionally so, the death rate may be higher, resulting in overall population decline. Although population decline can be desirable in certain circumstances, it can also create economic challenges and is more often viewed as undesired.

Challenges inherent in population estimates

Although population projections such as the US Census Bureau's World Population Clock utilize the most accurate and up-to-date data available, they are nonetheless still estimates. Unforeseen events such as the COVID-19 pandemic or Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine can have a powerful, but impossible-to-anticipate impact on population trends.

Even in the absence of such disruptions, the process of tracking the exact number of births and deaths in every country and territory in the world in real time-and maintaining a precise tally of the number of people alive on the Earth at any given moment-is logistically infeasible. Instead, modern population scientists use sophisticated mathematical models to create detailed estimates and projections, which the world's countries can use to plan for future generations.

2024 World Population 8,005,176,000

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How will the world's population change over the next eighty years? According to the United Nations' World Population Prospects 2022 report, the global population in 2050 is expected to reach around 9.7 billion people, nearly 2 billion more than the current population today. Current projections anticipate that this growth will continue until it reaches 10.4 million people sometime in the 2080s, at which time the population will hold steady until roughly 2100, then begin to decline.

In terms of population growth in individual countries, India is projected to surpass China as the most populated country in the world sometime during 2023, at which time China's annual growth rate will be between -0.1% and -0.3%, while India's growth rate will be between 0.69% and 0.92%. Given current trends in growth rates, UN projections predict that China's population will slide to 1.2 billion people by 2060, while India's will expand to almost 1.7 billion.

The United States is currently the third most populated country in the world, but is expected to drop to fourth most populated sometime in the early 2040s. Instead, the African country of Nigeria, whose 2022 growth rate is 2.39% (compared to 0.47% in the US) will become the third most populated country in the world. While UN predictions vary from those of the US Census Bureau, Nigeria takes the lead in both projections. Nigeria's population is expected to reach 377-410 million by 2050, while the US will have approximately 375-390 million people.

Vatican City / Holy See is expected to continue as the country with the smallest population in the world for the next several decades. In 2022, the famous Catholic city-state had a population of 510 people as well as a negative population growth rate. However, if global warming and the concurrent sea level rise continue unabated, certain Pacific Island nations such as Kiribati, the Maldives, and Vanuatu may be flooded under the rising oceans, which would force their populations to migrate and reduce their populations to zero.

Population growth from now to the year 2100

The Earth's population is expected to continue growing for the next 60-80 years. Improvements in health care technology, shared by developed countries with still developing and least-developed countries, have increased life expectancy and reduced infant mortality rates-which, in turn, have helped drive a boom in population growth. In fact, ten countries are expected to gain more in population by 2050 than the rest of the world combined.

Top 10 Countries Whose Populations Will Grow the Most by 2050:

Country

Population 2022

Population 2050

Growth

India

1,417,170,000

1,670,490,000

253,320,000

Nigeria

218,540,000

377,460,000

158,920,000

The rise, peak, and decline of population growth

Although the world's population is currently increasing, trends indicate that the rate of growth in many countries, especially developed countries and those with high populations, is slowing down. By the end of this century, even the world's fastest-growing countries are expected to have reached peak population size and begun to display declining (or negative) growth rates.

Many factors contribute to population decline and related metrics such as fertility rates. These include increased access to birth control and family planning, an increase in overall quality of life and the human development index, and various other cultural, political, social, and economic factors These include some factors that may not initially seem related to birth rate, such as the population's general level of education and the government's per-capita health expenditure.

Whether population growth is good or bad depends heavily upon several factors, most notably the rate of growth, the country in which it is taking place, and that country's level of development. Countries that have mature economies and well-developed infrastructure are more likely to be able to absorb an increase in population. Conversely, developing countries are more likely to lack adequate jobs, health care, or other infrastructure to support a larger population.

Similarly, a gentle increase in population is typically considered healthy, but a high rate of growth can be undesirable. High growth can often overwhelm a country's infrastructure, strain systems ranging from the job market to the food supply, and constrain available resources. When this happens, technological advances may offer opportunities to overcome production shortages and/or environmental damage.

As of late 2022, the world's population was approximately 8 billion people. However, breaking down the global population by race is difficult-primarily because of the evolving meaning of the word "race."

Why the classic concept of race is fundamentally flawed

The modern understanding is that race is an outdated social construct based on certain biological features that society has deemed to be significant. For example, most racial groupings are determined by physical differences such as skin tone or hair color. However, these variations are largely dictated by geography rather than genetics. Put simply, race is an illusion.

To clarify, it is true that isolated populations tend to display certain defining characteristics, such as the dark skin color of Africans or the blonde hair of many Northern Europeans. But these traits are all interchangeable and compatible and do not in any way introduce genetic boundaries between one supposed race and another.

This fact is clearly evidenced in the modern global population. Thanks in large part to advances in transportation and international mobility over the past century, more and more people of various "races" have spread around the world, intermarried, and started families-and their children display a breathtaking array of mixed-race appearances, obfuscating any supposed boundaries between one race and another.

These emerging demographics have made it increasingly obvious to the world's geneticists, anthropologists, and sociologists that clear-cut races do not exist. The mapping of the entire human genome in recent years has solidified and confirmed this view.

Race, ethnicity, and the challenge of tracking global diversity

It is important not to confuse race with ethnicity, which stems from one's society and culture and which does in fact exist. The main difference between race and ethnicity is that race is based on genetic traits and physical appearance, while ethnicity is based upon customs, language, and practices that are learned and passed down from generation to generation.

While the difference between race and ethnicity may be widely understood and accepted in many countries, not every country views the topics through the same lens. Different countries divide race and ethnicity into different possible elements (such as the number of possible ethnicities), and each country has its own system for measuring, classifying, and tracking diversity, whether it be via variations in race, ethnicity, or both.

For instance, the United States still uses the term "race", but treats it as a social identity rather than a biological or anthropological classification. Citizens voluntarily self-identify as White, Black or African American, American Indian, Asian, or Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. Meanwhile, other countries may offer a different range of possible races, or may instead measure ethnicity or country of origin, such as English, German, East Indian, etc.

These incongruent approaches make it difficult to compare data between countries, and confound even the most ambitious attempts to create a universal set of constituent categories capable of containing the entirety of human diversity.

Throughout most of history, the world's population has been much smaller than it is now. Before the invention of agriculture, for example, the human population was estimated to be around 15 million people at most. For comparison, the world population in 2017 (~7 billion) was roughly equal to a full 6% of the estimated 110 billion people who have ever lived.

The introduction of agriculture and the gradual movement of humanity into settled communities enabled the global population to increase gradually to around 300 million by AD 0. While this is a substantial increase, it remains a tiny fraction of the current population. For example, the Roman Empire, which historians regard as one of the strongest empires the world has ever known, probably contained around 50 million people at its height-nearly 20 million less than the population of the UK today.

The world population would not reach its first major milestone-one billion people-until the early 19th century. Then, as the industrial revolution took hold and living standards improved, the rate of population growth increased considerably. Over the next hundred years, the population of the world doubled, reaching two billion in the late 1920s.

During the 20th century, however, population growth skyrocketed. Over the past 100 years, the planet's population has more than tripled in size. This massive increase in human population is largely due to improvements in diet, sanitation, and medicine, especially compulsory vaccination against many diseases, which have both improved life expectancy and decreased infant mortality rates all over the world.

A Timeline of World Population Growth Milestones (People):

Year 0001: 200 million

Year 1000: 275 million

Year 1500: 450 million

Year 1650: 500 million

Year 1750: 700 million

Year 1804: 1.0 billion

Year 1850: 1.2 billion

Year 1900: 1.6 billion

Year 1927: 2.0 billion

Year 1950: 2.55 billion

Year 1955: 2.8 billion

Year 1960: 3.0 billion

Year 1970: 3.7 billion

Year 1985: 4.85 billion

Year 1999: 6.0 billion

Year 2011: 7.0 billion

Year 2023: 8.0 billion (projected)

Population growth in the future

While past population trends are fairly well known (only the specific dates of certain milestones are occasionally disputed), future trends are less clear. Most population experts agree that population increases will continue, albeit at an ever-decreasing rate, until the Earth's population reaches its ceiling, pauses, and begins to contract. However, the particulars of that process, such as the rate of increase, when and at what number the population will plateau, and the rate of decrease that will follow, are still the subject of much debate.

Most population experts tag steadily improving global standards of living as the cause of decreasing rates of population increase. As wealth and quality of life increase, the average family size will shrink and population growth will steadily slow and eventually stop.

However, other experts maintain that poverty, inequality and continued urbanization will have the opposite effect and cause a growth increase, particularly in countries in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, where population growth is already much higher than the global average.

Still others predict a population decrease stemming from much bleaker causes. These experts speculate that the current world population is unsustainable in the long term and that humanity will reach a point at which we simply cannot produce enough food or utilize our natural resources efficiently enough to feed such a large population or sustain the global economy at its current scale.

2022 projections by the United Nations estimate that the global population could swell to 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion by 2050, and 10.4 billion by 2080. At that point, the population is expected to plateau before beginning to decline around the year 2100. Current population growth is driven in large part by advances in medicine, which are increasing life expectancy; and improved health care in developing and least-developed countries, which is decreasing infant mortality.

The rate of population growth is not equal in every country. According to the United Nations' 2022 World Population Prospects report, many of the world's 46 least-developed countries are expected to double in population from 2022 to 2050, placing them among the world's fastest-growing countries. Conversely, 61 of the world's countries are expected to decrease in population by at least 1% between 2022 and 2050. The largest contractions are expected to occur in Eastern Europe, while the largest growth will come from the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

Although the population of the world currently grows daily, the overall rate of that growth has been slowing for decades. The rate of population growth peaked in 1970 at 2.06% growth per year, but had dropped to 1.78% by 1980. Rates remained relatively flat throughout the '80s, with a minimal rise to 1.80% by 1990. From there, however, the rate of population growth began to drop precipitously, falling to 1.37% in 2000, 1.27% in 2010, and 0.87% in 2020-the first time since 1950 that the growth rate had fallen below 1%. The United Nations predicts the global population growth rate will continue to decrease over the next several decades, until it dips into negative population growth around the year 2100.

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a country for details. Choose Year to Display Below: Overall, however, the rate of population growth has been slowing for several decades. This slowdown is expected to continue until the rate of population growth reaches zero (an equal number of births and deaths) around 2080-2100, at a population of approximately 10.4 billion people.

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This is an artistic way to "visualize the claustrophobic consequences of overpopulation as tiny projection-mapped humans begin to fill up the screen, endlessly bumping into each other as they each fight for their own space—a simple but powerful metaphor for some of the negative side effects of an overpopulated planet."

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"Every 400 milliseconds a new human being is born," writes artist Stefano D'alessio, succintly summarizing the problem facing the 10.9 billion people projected to be living on Earth by 2050, consuming its resources 3x faster than the planet can handle. His collaborative installation with Martina Menegon, >70000000000, visualizes the claustrophobic consequences of overpopulation as tiny projection-mapped humans begin to fill up the screen, endlessly bumping into each other as they each fight for their own space-a simple but powerful metaphor for some of the negative side effects of an overpopulated planet.

The duo also offers a simple solution. Open the doors stationed below the installation and the crowd floods out of the frame, presumably to Mars or Keplers-438b -442b. Seeing the rate at which humans are filling up the planet with your own eyes, and hearing an accompanying "pop" every time they do so is as good of an argument for space colonization as we've ever seen in three minutes.

Visit Stefano D'alessio and Martina Menegon's websites for more interactive installations.
Command a Butterfly Swarm in a New Motion-Tracking Installation Projection-Mapped Magic Carpets Continue Their Moroccan Takeover Dancer Bends Light in Stunning Projection-Mapped Performance Watch Light Race Through a Loop-the-Loop of Light Bulbs
Related:

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Artists Visualize (Then Solve) the Population Crisis

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"Every 400 milliseconds a new human being is born," writes artist Stefano D'alessio, succintly summarizing the problem facing the 10.9 billion people projected to be living on Earth by 2050, consuming its resources 3x faster than the planet can handle.

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My artistic representation of silent spring! My picture describes how Rachel Carson sparked the environmental movement by concerning the government/policy makers with the importance of establishing science into environmental issues and brought awareness to ecological disasters caused by pollution.

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Located in Woods Hole, Mass. and depicts her as a biologist and conservationist.

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Science as the Muse for Art: Melissa Gwyn paints 'Molecules That Matter'

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Science as the Muse for Art: Melissa Gwyn paints 'Molecules That Matter'

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With input from two Nobel laureates, the curators of an innovative art exhibition in New York state are spotlighting the 10 molecules of the 20th century that have most profoundly altered our world.

"Molecules That Matter" features giant models of these elite compounds--ranging from aspirin and penicillin to DDT and Prozac--juxtaposed with contemporary works by nationally recognized artists.

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With input from two Nobel laureates, the curators of an innovative art exhibition in New York state are spotlighting the 10 molecules of the 20th century that have most profoundly altered our world.

"Molecules That Matter" features giant models of these elite compounds--ranging from aspirin and penicillin to DDT and Prozac--juxtaposed with contemporary works by nationally recognized artists. UCSC assistant professor of art Melissa Gwyn has contributed four paintings to this unusual exhibition at Skidmore College's Tang Museum.

For the past two decades, Gwyn has been creating art inspired by science. Her paintings combine the thick paint of abstract expressionism with the delicate and intricate detail of Dutch 17th-century still life.

Gwyn's oil-encrusted works can take months and even years to dry. She begins each one by pouring puddles of paint onto wood panels and molding the paint with her fingers, scalpels, and tweezers. Eventually, in a labor-intensive process that calls for multiple layers of paint, organic shapes resembling flowers, fruit, and leaves begin to appear and multiply. Artforum magazine noted that her paintings "look like enlarged slides of microscopic organisms whose apparent simplicity is belied, under closer scrutiny, by their teeming busyness."

The co-curators of the "Molecules That Matter" exhibit--the Tang museum's director and a Skidmore chemistry professor--took note of Gwyn's early work dealing with chemistry and selected her 1992 drawing of the hormone progesterone for the show. In addition to including that piece in the exhibition, they invited her to create new works to represent three other featured molecules: DDT, Prozac, and the recently discovered carbon structure, Buckminsterfullerine.

"In my paintings, I draw inspiration from scientific imaging and science illustration sources," says Gwyn. "The paintings also reflect my research into each molecule's impact--both positive and negative--while incorporating my ongoing interest in the environment and its degradation."

Gwyn's creative approach generated paintings that blend depictions of MRI scans and digital modeling of human anatomy with traditional still-life forms. "The DDT painting, for example, combines repetitive patterns of red blood cells, parasites in those cells, and images of the Colorado potato beetle, because the pesticide DDT became the focus of a campaign to eradicate the beetle," says Gwyn.

Her Prozac painting focuses on a lesser known environmental impact of the pill's popularity.

"In researching Prozac, I came upon a study that found there is so much Prozac in the culture that it's ending up in wastewater, with the result that it may be affecting fish and frog populations and altering their reproductive cycles. So I created a surrealistic, fantastic pond-like site where frogs--an indicator species--are swimming among algae and seaweed that resemble human neurons and nephrons (the kidney filtration system)--as their realities and ours are intertwined."

Most of the pieces in the "Molecules That Matter" exhibition were culled from existing art; in fact, Gwyn is the only artist from whom the curators sought new work.

She devoted seven months to the three new paintings, completing them this past August. Gwyn attended the exhibit opening a month later and spent time meeting with Skidmore College students in organic chemistry, art theory, and painting classes. She also participated in public panels along with the curators, scientists, a historian, and another artist to discuss the art/science collaboration.

Gwyn's fascination with art and science was originally inspired by elementary school science books and the children's science fairs that she encountered in the public school systems of New York, where she worked part time in the early 1990s after graduating from Yale with an M.F.A. in painting.

"I was quite taken with the way that children's creativity interpreted the symbols of atoms in molecular models," notes Gwyn. "Kids created brilliant models of graphite with gumdrops and toothpicks; another molecule was represented by aggregates of colored gym socks. Inspired by these sculptures, I began to build molecular models out of plastic fruit and then depicted the models in still-life paintings."
The "Molecules That Matter" exhibit runs through April 13 at the Tang Museum, before traveling to several other college campuses across the country.
Gwyn's participation in "Molecules That Matter" has already sparked new interest in her art; her work has been noted in several reviews of the exhibit, including one featured in the December issue of the magazine Chemistry World.

"The great benefit of artists working with scientists is finding shared vocabulary and experiences," observes Gwyn. "When people in different disciplines reveal their ideas, processes, and failures, it brings more dimensionality to a subject."

"The Tang exhibit is a perfect example of this," she adds. "The functionality of having these seemingly invisible molecules exhibited at a scale even larger than the viewers themselves is a fascinating reversal of focus. It brings to light the huge impact that these molecules have on our lives."

Contact the author at srapp@ucsc.edu.

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Science as the Muse for Art: Melissa Gwyn paints 'Molecules That Matter'

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With input from two Nobel laureates, the curators of an innovative art exhibition in New York state are spotlighting the 10 molecules of the 20th century that have most profoundly altered our world. "Molecules That Matter" features giant models of these elite compounds--ranging from aspirin and penicillin to DDT and Prozac--juxtaposed with contemporary works by nationally recognized artists.

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Leonardo DiCaprio uses his platform to discuss the awareness of climate change as a serious issue !!!

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Leonardo DiCaprio & Obama Talk Climate Change

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Oscars 2016 Leonardo DiCaprio Wins best Actor - Speech 2016 VOSTFR [HD] QUALITY

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AMPAS Oscars© All right reserved This is awesome. It's been a long time I was waiting for this. As an Actor I'm so happy for him and I hope this is the first of a long serie :-D .

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A quick link to learn more about pollution! I think it's very important for people to learn more about the causation consequences of toxic pollution.

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The environment can get contaminated in a number of different ways.

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Controversy over the ESA : "congress is considering a series of bills that, if passed into law, would institute changes to the Endangered Species Act that could shift control of conservation measures to state and local governments, accelerate decisions about whether species need protecting, and limit courts’ power to overturn decisions to lift or loosen species protections

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Congress is considering a series of bills that, if passed into law, would institute changes to the Endangered Species Act that could shift control of conservation measures to state and local governments, accelerate decisions about whether species need protecting, and limit courts' power to overturn decisions to lift or loosen species protections, the Associated Press( AP) reports.

Many Democrats and wildlife advocates argue that the proposed changes will put the world's biodiversity at risk. "The wildlife extinction package is an extreme and all-encompassing assault on the Endangered Species Act," Bob Dreher, senior vice president of conservation programs at the nonprofit conservation organization Defenders of Wildlife, says in a statement posted by YubaNet.com. "These bills discard science, increasing the likelihood of harm to species and habitat, create hurdles to protecting species, and undermine citizen's ability to enforce the law in court, while delegating authority for species management to states-or even corporations and individuals-that are ill-equipped to assume it."

Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, tells the AP that preventing wildlife advocates from filing lawsuits that aim to restore protections is a slippery slope that could make the government unaccountable for its decisions to change a species conservation status.

The proposed amendments follow on the heels of a federal judge's decision earlier this week (September 24) to reinstate protections for grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park, prohibiting planned hunts that would have allowed the culling of up to 23 grizzlies in Idaho and Wyoming this fall. This court decision would have been blocked if the new laws were in place.

"This ruling in Montana to me is the prime example of why Congress should modernize the Endangered Species Act," Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), chair of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee who drafted some of the new legislation, tells the AP. "The grizzly bear has been fully recovered for 10 years. Even the Obama administration said so."

Republicans are also hoping to ease protections for gray wolves in the contiguous US. Like grizzly bears, gray wolves faced extinction in the early 1900s but have since rebounded thanks in large part to the passage of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1973. Now, both species are a point of contention between wildlife advocates and farmers, who say that the predators are attacking livestock.

Meanwhile, a 60-day public comment period ended this week for proposed ESA changes, put forth by President Donald Trump's administration in July, that would do away with automatic protections for threatened species and limit the use of habitat preservation as a conservation strategy. Researchers from around the country drafted two letters condemning the amendments, reports. One letter, to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, came from three organizations representing some 9,000 working biologists; the second letter was signed by 273 leading university scientists.

"This is completely disastrous for efforts to save species from extinction," Duke University conservation ecologist Stuart Pimm tells Reuters.

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Congress Considers Endangered Species Act Amendments

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Congress is considering a series of bills that, if passed into law, would institute changes to the Endangered Species Act that could shift control of conservation measures to state and local governments, accelerate decisions about whether species need protecting, and limit courts' power to overturn decisions to lift or loosen species protections, the Associated Press ( AP) reports.

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A recent protest against the hunting of wild horses. This issues posed a cultural and ethical problem , protest advocated for the " to ensure a sustainable future while preserving the land and natural resources that sustain Navajo tradition and culture."

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CLOSE

A controversial hunt was aimed at reducing the numbers of feral horses near Teec Nos Pos, Arizona

FARMINGTON - A wild horse hunt aimed at thinning a herd in an Arizona trophy hunt area was abruptly cancelled today as opposition to the hunt grew and a protest was planned.

The tribal government's natural resource regulators last week issued a proclamation declaring the 2018 feral horse management hunt. It was designed to remove 60 horses from the Carrizo Mountains near Teec Nos Pos in northeast Arizona.

The Navajo Nation Division of Natural Resources this afternoon rescinded the proclamation, according to a notice on the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife's website.

President Russell Begaye said in an emailed statement that the hunt will be postponed and the proclamation was rescinded to allow for public input and education.

Protest was planned

Tens of thousands of feral horses roam Navajo Nation lands - and the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife is seeking ways to reduce that population.

Following the release of the hunt proclamation horse advocates, including members of the Facebook group Indigenous Horse Nation Protector Alliance, organized a rally for Friday morning in Window Rock, Arizona, to protest the hunt.

Gloria Tom, the director of Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the public outcry led to the cancellation.

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A herd of horses cross Indian Service Road 3050 on Monday, Feb., 26, 2018 in Shiprock. (Photo: Jon Austria/The Daily Times)

Hunt should go before tribal leadership

In an email statement, Navajo Nation Speaker LoRenzo Bates said his office was not aware that the executive branch had made a decision to issue permits for hunting feral horses.

"As Navajo people, we are taught to respect all life forms and that includes horses," Bates said. "Considering the cultural and historical factors and concerns over water shortages and overgrazing - this is certainly an issue that should have been brought before Navajo leadership and medicine people to discuss and consider."

If the hunt had not been rescinded, hunters accompanied by wildlife conservation officers would have been able to kill non-branded horses that were at least two years old. Hunters would not have been permitted to kill mares that have foals with them.

Begaye said the Carrizo Mountains near Teec Nos Pos in northeast Arizona has been critically impacted by the feral horses. He said the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife's proclamation specifically targeted the Carrizo Mountains.

The proclamation called for removing up to 60 horses over a six-day span from the Carrizo Mountains.

Tom said the Corrizo Mountains is one of the trophy hunt areas of the reservation. She said the department was concerned about the impacts of the horses on the habitat, especially about the impact on mule deer.

She said the severe drought in the region will increase competition for food and water.

"We're looking at a very severe outlook for lack of precipitation through July this year," she said.

Tom said the drought was one reason the department hoped to remove horses to reduce the stress on the landscape and wildlife.

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Wild horses are pictured on Monday, Feb., 26, 2018 in Shiprock. (Photo: Jon Austria/The Daily Times)

A problem that can't be ignored

With the hunt being called off, Tom said the department is looking at other ways to reduce the population. She said a roundup is one possibility, but rounding up the horses could be hard in the mountainous terrain.

"The problem of feral horses on the Navajo Nation is one that cannot be ignored," Begaye said. "According to a 2016 study conducted by the Navajo Fish and Wildlife Department, there are more than 38,000 feral horses on the Navajo Nation. These numbers are tremendous when considering the amount of overgrazing that exists and the impact it has on the livestock and wildlife in the various ecosystems on the Nation. It's estimated that one horse consumes approximately 32 pounds of forage and 10 gallons of water per day to sustain its life."

The estimated number on Navajo Nation exceeds the estimated populations of feral horses on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management in surrounding states. The BLM estimates there are about 59,500 feral horses roaming on federal lands in 10 western states. The majority of those horses - nearly 35,000 - are in Nevada. New Mexico has approximately 168 feral horses on lands managed by the BLM and Arizona has about 364, according to the BLM. Utah has an estimated 5,215 feral horses on BLM-managed land and Colorado has an estimated 1,693.

Begaye said the tribe's division of natural resources documented "extensive damage to the land, wildlife habitat, vegetation and other natural resources by the overpopulation of feral horses on the landscape."

He encouraged Navajo chapters to pass resolutions to address feral horse management in their regions. Begaye said the division of natural resources will implement a multi-pronged horse management strategy.

"Implementation of this plan is required to ensure a sustainable future while preserving the land and natural resources that sustain Navajo tradition and culture."
Russell Begaye, president of the Navajo Nation
"Implementation of this plan is required to ensure a sustainable future while preserving the land and natural resources that sustain Navajo tradition and culture," Begaye said.

Tom said the horse management strategy includes methods like regional livestock auctions on the reservation and increased education.

"I compare our horse problem to what we're dealing with with our dogs and cats," she said.

She said responsible horse ownership will help cut down on the population.

Tom said the communities in Navajo Nation have shown interest in finding ways to reduce the populations, especially in light of drought conditions.

"We're seeing a lot of very difficult situations with horses trying to get to water," she said.

When reached by phone Monday, chapter president Duane "Chili" Yazzie said the Shiprock supports humane methods for reducing the population.

Feral horses roam the northern part of the chapter in an area called Palmer Mesa and travel to the river to drink, Yazzie said. He said this places the horses in competition with livestock for resources. He said the chapter favors luring horses into corrals with hay and water and then closing the gate behind the horses. The horses could be trained by Shiprock residents and adopted out. Yazzie said the sick and injured horses would be humanely euthanized.

Yazzie does not know how the chapter would react to the plan for the horse hunt, but he said it was controversial.

"There is considerable objection to this method of dealing with the horse population," Yazzie said.

The Navajo Nation has been searching for a way to reduce the population of feral equines for years. In 2013, Navajo Nation ended a practice of rounding up feral horses and selling them to be shipped to Mexico for slaughter.

"It's their culture. They have to decide for themselves what they want to do."
Patricia Irick
Patricia Irick, who trains wild horses at the Largo Canyon rescue Mustang Camp, said the hunt is a more humane method of population than shipping them to Mexico.

"Being hauled to Mexico is much more stressful," Irick said.

She said while horse advocates are concerned about hunts, ultimately Navajo Nation will have to decide for itself how to manage the herds.

"It's their culture," she said. "They have to decide for themselves what they want to do."
Hannah Grover covers government for The Daily Times. She can be reached at 505-564-4652 or via email at hgrover@daily-times.com.
Read or Share this story: https://www.daily-times.com/story/news/local/navajo-nation/2018/02/26/wild-horse-hunt-canceled-navajo-nation/374931002/

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Navajo Nation cancels plans for wild horse hunt

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CLOSE A controversial hunt was aimed at reducing the numbers of feral horses near Teec Nos Pos, Arizona FARMINGTON - A wild horse hunt aimed at thinning a herd in an Arizona trophy hunt area was abruptly cancelled today as opposition to the hunt grew and a protest was planned.

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A website that provides information about the salary and requirements for certain careers in natural resource and conservation positions.

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What Are Career Options for Conservation Majors?

Conservation majors are typically interested in work that preserves, protects and restores the environment, and the management and conservation of natural resources. Conservation is a broad field with many different branches, and conservation majors typically focus their studies on their specific area of interest. Some potential career options in this field include conservation scientist, wildlife biologist and environmental engineer. Conservation scientists will work with farmers and livestock and evaluate soil health to better the environment. Wildlife biologists primarily work with animals studying the impacts they have on their environments, and environmental engineers address environmental problems and work to find solutions for issues like pollution, waste and unsafe drinking water.

The following chart is an overview of just three of the many career paths you might choose as a conservation major.

Conservation Scientist

Wildlife Biologist

Environmental engineer

Education Field of Study
Environmental science,
Forestry,
Agricultural science

Zoology and wildlife biology,
Ecology

Environmental engineering,
Civil engineering

Source: *U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

What Can I Learn in a Bachelor's Degree Program in Conservation?

Bachelor's degree programs in conservation can usually be completed in four years. Most programs will allow you to pursue a course of study that emphasizes your interests and career goals, which could include policy, biology, watershed conservation, natural resources or environmental sociology. Most programs also provide you with training in fundamental areas of science, including biology, chemistry, natural resources and forestry. You could also find courses like these in the curriculum:

Biodiversity

Conservation biology

Environmental politics and policy

Economics and public affairs in conservation

Research methodologies in environmental sciences

Remote sensing of the environment

Geographic information systems

Wildlife population management

Ornithology

Herpetology

Mammalogy

Entomology

Additionally, these degree programs may require you to complete final examinations before you graduate. You may also need to complete an internship in conservation or forestry.

What Jobs Can I Get?

With a bachelor's degree in conservation, you could work in a number of industries, including federal agencies, state agencies, research firms or environmental organizations. Examples of these employers include the following:

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation

U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs

United Nations

State Department of Lands

Society for Range Management

U.S. Department of Agriculture

U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service

You could secure positions such as environmental consultant, ecology consultant, field botanist, aquatic ecologist or landscape ecologist. You could also work in fields like soil management, insect and disease management, land use planning, environmental economics or water management. Other areas of employment might include wilderness and park management, protected area management, firefighting or environmental policy.

Can I Continue My Education?

A bachelor's degree in conservation could prepare you for various graduate-level degree programs. You could enroll in law programs that allow you to specialize in environmental law, conservation or public policy. You could also pursue a master's degree in professional sciences like biology, chemistry or ecology. Another possibility would be to apply to a Master of Natural Resources (MNR) degree program; this area of study offers doctoral-level education as well.

If you wish to pursue a different career in the field of science, you may consider microbiology or hydrology. Microbiology requires a bachelor's degree for an entry-level position though you will need a doctorate to conduct research or to teach at the collegiate level. Microbiologists work with microorganisms and study how they interact with and affect their environments. Most microbiologists work in research and are continually striving to expand their knowledge of viruses, bacteria, fungi, algae and parasites.

Hydrologists study water and how it moves through the earth. As a hydrologist, you will focus on all aspects of water including how precipitation affects surface and groundwater, how the surrounding environment is impacted and how environmental differences may change the overall condition of water. You will need at least a bachelor's degree for this career though many hydrologists hold a master's degree.

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what kind of jobs can conservation majors get?

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What Kind of Jobs Can Conservation Majors Get?

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Conservation majors are typically interested in work that preserves, protects and restores the environment, and the management and conservation of natural resources. Conservation is a broad field with many different branches, and conservation majors typically focus their studies on their specific area of interest.

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Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologists say the increased euthanizations of grizzly bears reflect that the carrying capacity of suitable grizzly habitat in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem is maxed out; as grizzly bears move out of the places deemed to be suitable habitat, more and more bears are getting into conflicts with people and livestock..

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POWELL - Newly released statistics show 2018 was the deadliest year on record for the region's grizzly bears.

Wildlife managers in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho euthanized a total of 42 grizzlies last year - including 32 in Wyoming. That was a record number of "lethal removals" in the state - up 45 percent from the previous record of 22.

U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen reinstated endangered species protections for grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem last year. Finding that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife acted improperly in delisting the species, Christensen halted planned bear hunts in Wyoming and Idaho.

Regardless of the bears' legal status, Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologists say the increased euthanizations reflect that the carrying capacity of suitable grizzly habitat in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem is maxed out; as grizzly bears move out of the places deemed to be suitable habitat, more and more bears are getting into conflicts with people and livestock.

At last week's Wyoming Game and Fish Commission meeting in Cody, the department's top two large carnivore experts detailed 2018 conflicts that resulted in the loss of a man's life and four human injuries, plus dead livestock and pets. The newly elected president of the commission, David Rael of Cowley, stopped the report to ask for clarification.

Rael's question was pointed: "For the record, we were shut down on a 24-bear quota [hunt] by Judge Christiansen and we euthanized 32?"

Brian DeBolt, Wyoming Game and Fish Department large carnivore conflict coordinator, confirmed the number. DeBolt pointed out a portion of the bears that were lethally removed could have been available for harvest had Wyoming's grizzly hunt been allowed to run as scheduled. It's impossible to say whether hunters would have taken the same bears trapped by the large carnivore team.

To be accurate, many of the removals weren't authorized by Game and Fish biologists, but by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has managed grizzlies since they returned to federal protections in late September.

Rael has been on a grizzly trapping mission with the large carnivore team, follows its progress closely and presumably knew the answer to his own question - which appeared to be a jab at the federal judge.

During the recent legislative session, Wyoming lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a pair of bills expressing their displeasure with the grizzlies' re-listing. One bill theoretically allows the Game and Fish Commission to hold hunts in spite of the judge's decision and says grizzlies scheduled for euthanization can be relocated to California or other states willing to accept them.

It highlights a changing attitude toward the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem's top predator.

Following Judge Christensen's ruling, "quite honestly, there's a different level of tolerance with the general public," said Dan Thompson, large carnivore program coordinator for the Game and Fish.

While environmental groups, tribes and thousands of people across the nation were in an uproar over the possibility of grizzly hunts near Yellowstone National Park borders, Park County residents are increasingly growing weary of conflicts as the footprint of areas inhabited by grizzlies continues to grow. The total number of conflicts by all predators are driven by grizzly bears, DeBolt said.

There were 244 grizzly conflicts last year, largely predation of cattle; that's more than the total of black bear, mountain lion, gray wolf and coyote conflicts combined.

Despite the high number of grizzly bear trappings, relocations and removals, the majority of work done by Game and Fish biologists and game wardens is prevention and education, DeBolt said.

"If we get a report of a conflict, our last resort is to have to trap that bear and to relocate or remove it," he said.

Dusty Lasseter has been with the Game and Fish for a decade and works exclusively with large carnivores. He's seen thousands of dead livestock and trapped more than 100 grizzlies. Along with the rest of the large carnivore team, it's fair to say they have more experience with grizzlies than any group of biologists in the continental U.S.

Lasseter said he's seeing grizzlies quickly moving into areas south and east of suitable habitat. He's been on teams that recently removed grizzlies from light residential, recreational and agricultural areas - including in Clark, the Willwood south of Powell and as far east as Byron.

Lasseter told the commission he has also seen wolves moving east. The team removed 27 wolves in 2018, a number that is about half of those removed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services division. Reports and testimony, including from Rael, put wolves in the Bighorn Mountains - where dispersed camping is king of the mountain.

In an effort to decrease the number of wolves, the Game and Fish extended its 2018 hunting season by a month and raised the quota. Only wolves taken in the trophy zone - the northwestern corner of the state that officials consider to be suitable habitat - are counted. Those killed elsewhere in Wyoming (known as the predator zone) can be taken without regulation and don't count against the quota.

Wolf hunting in the state resumed in 2017 for the first time since 2014, with a quota of 44 animals. Since hunting resumed, the number of wolves killed by wildlife managers to resolve conflicts has been roughly halved. In 2016, 113 wolves were lethally removed; last year more than 50 Wyoming wolves were removed by wildlife managers.

The large carnivore team doesn't have easy jobs. And being on the team makes them extremely unpopular in certain circles. On a recent Powell Tribune article that quoted Thompson, a commenter from New York suggested he was an undereducated "yahoo."

"We have national and international scrutiny on everything we do," said Thompson, who holds a Ph.D. from South Dakota State University in Brookings.

While the State of Wyoming, the federal government and others appeal the federal judges' ruling, the large carnivore team will be "working to come up with a more accurate population assessment for grizzly bears," Thompson said. Current counting methods are known to be conservative. The Game and Fish will also continue to compensate area livestock and agricultural producers for losses to predators. The agency paid nearly $1 million in claims in 2018 - including more than $763,000 for wolf and grizzly damage claims alone.

"We've seen an increase in livestock depredation because they're moving in to more human dominated landscapes," Thompson said of grizzlies and wolves in a recent interview. "There are now more potential for those conflicts."

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Mark Davis  Powell Tribune  Via Wyoming News Exchange

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POWELL - Newly released statistics show 2018 was the deadliest year on record for the region's grizzly bears. Wildlife managers in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho euthanized a total of 42 grizzlies last year - including 32 in Wyoming. That was a record number of "lethal removals" in the state - up 45 percent from the previous record of 22.

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Jaguars have been listed as endangered by the U.S. Wildlife Service since 1972. One of the last three Jaguars known to be living in the U.S> was killed by poachers in June of 2018. It's illegal to hunt and kill, this case represents how a nonprofit working to conserve this native animal has declined.

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Based on the rosette patterns of this pelt, experts believe it's Yo'oko, a jaguar thought to be one of only two in the U.S.

Credit: The Center for Biological Diversity

One of just three jaguars known to be living in the U.S. was recently killed by poachers. Experts identified the jaguar's pelt in a recent photo and say it is Yo'oko, a male jaguar ( Panthera onca) that was known to roam the Huachuca Mountains in southern Arizona, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

The rosette patterns on a jaguar's pelt are unique to each individual, a trait that allowed officials with the Arizona Game and Fish Department to identify Yo'oko's pelt in a photo sent to them from the Tucson-based Northern Jaguar Project. The endangered carnivore had been photographed near the Mexican border in Arizona several times in 2016 and 2017, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting endangered species.

It's unclear when Yo'oko died or who killed him, but the Arizona Daily Star reported today (June 28) that he may have been killed by a mountain lion hunter. A local rancher, Carlos Robles Elias, told the Arizona Daily Star that he heard from a friend that the jaguar was trapped and killed six months ago somewhere in Sonora, Mexico, near the U.S. border. [ Photos: Elusive Jaguars Take Center Stage]

It's illegal to hunt or kill jaguars, which are an endangered species, and a jaguar may not have been what Yo'oko's killer was after. Elias told the Arizona Daily Star that he suspects a hunter was hired to trap a mountain lion, which are legal to kill in Arizona, but caught Yo'oko instead. Ranchers in the area go after mountain lions and other predators that eat calves and threaten the ranchers' livelihood, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

Yo'oko, a male jaguar, was first spotted in the Huachuca Mountains of southern Arizona in late 2016.

Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildife Service

The Northern Jaguar Project, a nonprofit working to conserve jaguars, has declined to share the source of the pelt photo. The group doesn't want to risk losing the trust of ranchers and farmers in the area, whose support the group depends on for conserving endangered native species like jaguars, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

Seven jaguars have been photographed in the U.S. in the past 20 years, although in the last three years, experts have spotted only three of the wild cats, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. However, jaguars once lived throughout the Southwest, from Louisiana to Southern California. Hunting and habitat loss over the past 150 years has decimated the population and jaguars have been listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service since 1972.

Original article on Live Science.

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Someone Just Killed One of the Last Remaining Jaguars in the US

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One of just three jaguars known to be living in the U.S. was recently killed by poachers. Experts identified the jaguar's pelt in a recent photo and say it is Yo'oko, a male jaguar ( Panthera onca) that was known to roam the Huachuca Mountains in southern Arizona, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

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This is an interesting article that discusses how increased stakeholder involvement does not necessarily lead to conservation success. Rather increased trust between stakeholders can.

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Does stakeholder involvement really benefit biodiversity conservation?

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The establishment of protected areas, such as Natura 2000, is a common approach to curbing biodiversity loss. But many of these areas are owned or man...

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Water Conservation Mural Dedication: "Flagstaff teens are hosting a community event, where they will unveil a youth-designed mural that illuminates threats to water in the Southwest and shares stories of environmental injustice, community resistance, and hope. Their powerful work of public art advocates for the protection of our region and envisions a future of water justice on the Colorado Plateau"

I like this organization because these projects exemplify how important community opinion is when addressing stakeholder positions on conservation based decisions.

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Mural Mice Universal - Arizona based mural artist collective specializing in community development projects

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Welcome to the home of the Mural Mice. We are happy to share our art and our experience in building community murals and theater. Ask us how you can get involved in the next big Mural Mice adventure. We use murals as a tool to bring people together.

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The New York times does post that debunks the misconceptions surrounding climate change. I find this a creative and very effective way to inform people about attitudes and beliefs around our knowledge of the environmental issues.

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"Where did the Big Bang happen?" It's a question that Dennis Overbye, The New York Times's cosmic affairs correspondent, gets a lot.

Actually: The Big Bang didn't happen at a place; it happened at a time.

from your spot at the center of the universe. (That's not an April Fools' joke, either, as you'll find out.)

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"Where did the Big Bang happen?" It's a question that Dennis Overbye, The New York Times's cosmic affairs correspondent, gets a lot. Actually: The Big Bang didn't happen at a place; it happened at a time. from your spot at the center of the universe.

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Cartoons about climate change: https://www.usnews.com/news/cartoons/2019/02/01/cartoons-on-climate-change-and-global-warming

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This article addresses the systematic changes we need take action on in order for everyone to acknowledge the issue of climate change. This comes from proper education on climate sciences, changing our economy reliance on a polluting production industry and adressing political attitudes.

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The scientific community has made the urgent need to mitigate climate change clear and, with the ratification of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international community has formally accepted ambitious mitigation goals. However, a wide gap remains between the aspirational emissions reduction goals of the Paris Agreement and the real-world pledges and actions of nations that are party to it. Closing that emissions gap can only be achieved if a similarly wide gap between scientific and societal understanding of climate change is also closed.

Several fundamental aspects of climate change make clear both the need for education and the opportunity it offers. First, addressing climate change will require action at all levels of society, including individuals, organizations, businesses, local, state, and national governments, and international bodies. It cannot be addressed by a few individuals with privileged access to information, but rather requires transfer of knowledge, both intellectually and affectively, to decision-makers and their constituents at all levels. Second, education is needed because, in the case of climate change, learning from experience is learning too late. The delay between decisions that cause climate change and their full societal impact can range from decades to millennia. As a result, learning from education, rather than experience, is necessary to avoid those impacts.

Climate change and sustainability represent complex, dynamic systems that demand a systems thinking approach. Systems thinking takes a holistic, long-term perspective that focuses on relationships between interacting parts, and how those relationships generate behavior over time. System dynamics includes formal mapping and modeling of systems, to improve understanding of the behavior of complex systems as well as how they respond to human or other interventions. Systems approaches are increasingly seen as critical to climate change education, as the human and natural systems involved in climate change epitomize a complex, dynamic problem that crosses disciplines and societal sectors.

A systems thinking approach can also be used to examine the potential for education to serve as a vehicle for societal change. In particular, education can enable society to benefit from climate change science by transferring scientific knowledge across societal sectors. Education plays a central role in several processes that can accelerate social change and climate change mitigation. Effective climate change education increases the number of informed and engaged citizens, building social will or pressure to shape policy, and building a workforce for a low-carbon economy. Indeed, several climate change education efforts to date have delivered gains in climate and energy knowledge, affect, and/or motivation. However, society still faces challenges in coordinating initiatives across audiences, managing and leveraging resources, and making effective investments at a scale that is commensurate with the climate change challenge. Education is needed to promote informed decision-making at all levels of society.

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Addressing Climate Change Through Education - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science

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The scientific community has made the urgent need to mitigate climate change clear and, with the ratification of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international community has formally accepted ambitious mitigation goals.

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Great article that analyzes the usage of fossil fuels, it current and future impact on the environment and public health.

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The degree to which we use energy has far-reaching consequences. For example, the simple act of driving to work uses fuel that is ultimately tied to both international conflict and global climate change. The success of modern civilization is fundamentally linked to our ability to harness energy, primarily in the form of fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. As shown in Figure 1, in 2008 the world consumed about 500 quadrillion-a million billion-British Thermal Units (Btu) of energy, 85% of which came from burning fossil fuels (for reference, a gallon of gasoline provides about 125,000 Btu [2]). But what's all the buzz about fossil fuels anyway? Why aren't they a sustainable option?
Figure 1. Historical and projected World Energy Consumption by Fuel Type, in units of quadrillion Btu [1]. Liquids (blue line) consist of petroleum and petroleum derivatives.
Fossil fuels are carbon-based materials found in the Earth's subsurface, formed from decomposing plant and animal remains over the span of millions of years [3]. They are attractive as energy sources primarily because they can be transported with relative ease and the energy delivered is highly concentrated.

However, there are major drawbacks to using fossil fuels for primary energy. First, fossil fuels are limited in supply. If we run out of fossil fuels without a backup plan, our energy demands will be unmet. We're not sure how much fossil fuels we have left, but we can estimate the quantity of proven reserves-the amount of fossil fuels that would currently be profitable to extract [4]. There are approximately 1,471 billion barrels of proven oil reserves [1]. In 2011 the world consumed an average of 89 million barrels of oil per day [5]. At this rate the oil reserves will last us for only 45 years. We can do a similar calculation for natural gas and coal: at our current consumption rates, natural gas will last us around 62 years and coal will last us around 130 years [1,6]. We've often heard the argument that estimates of proven reserves for oil and natural gas tend to increase; this is because improvements in extraction technology and increasing demands change the definition of what is profitable to extract [4]. Nonetheless, the point remains that fossil fuel resources are finite and, based on the calculations above, will not allow human societies to flourish for timespans longer than 50-200 years.

A second drawback to relying on fossil fuels is that approximately 42% of the world's oil is produced by nations in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and nearly half of that comes from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq [7]. There are significant national security concerns related to depending upon and financially supporting these politically volatile nations, some of which have links to terrorist networks.

Fossil fuel use is also unsustainable for our health and the safety of the environment. For example, emissions from coal-fired power plants include particulate matter and mercury, and are responsible for respiratory illness and premature death especially in vulnerable populations like children and the elderly [8]. In the United States, coal-fired power plants are responsible for 40% of annual mercury emissions and 76% of acid gas emissions; it is estimated that 13,000 deaths per year are due to particulate pollution [9]. Due to the Clean Air Act, the United States has instated more measures to regulate pollutants than developing countries. Poor regulations pose a serious public health problem for countries like China, where over 70% of energy needs are met by burning coal [10]. Unfortunately, coal plant emissions are not just local, meaning that longer-lived pollutants like fine particulate matter, mercury, and cancer-causing chemicals get transported from countries with poorer air quality standards to other areas of the globe [9]. Further, coal has a considerable hidden cost associated with economic, health, and environmental impacts. It is estimated that the combined cost of mining, transportation, processing, and combustion to the United States alone can range from 300 billion to over 500 billion dollars annually [11]. In other words, we pay a high price for coal in the form of health care costs and higher taxes but coal appears cheap only because the price is not directly on our electricity bills. If we account for these hidden costs, coal-generated electricity is three times more expensive than what we pay directly and suddenly renewable sources of electricity are economically competitive with coal [11]. (For more details on how the true cost of coal is calculated, check out the interactive guide at http://chge.med.harvard.edu/resource/explore-true-costs-coal).

Human fossil fuel use is also contributing to global climate change: burning fossil fuels produces the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as a byproduct. There is increasing evidence that the carbon dioxide produced from burning ancient fuels is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than the land and oceans can take it up. In 2008 alone, the world emitted 30.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. With increases in population and improvements in living standards worldwide, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are projected to increase by more than 40% of 2008 levels over the next 30 years [1]. This puts the welfare of future human societies at risk because carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere is associated with sea level rise, the melting of glaciers and sea ice, and increases in the frequency of heat waves, droughts, and extreme weather events [12].

These facts paint a grim picture, so what are the alternatives to fossil fuels? While we cannot change the basic need for energy to power our lives, we can continue to develop technology to change where that energy comes from. Fossil fuels took millions of years to form, and it will take that much time for them to be replenished. Yet, our need for energy is immediate. From national and energy security perspectives, it will be important to increase domestic fossil fuel production in the short term, but this still does not address the issues relating to finite supplies, air quality, and human-caused climate change. Instead of continuing to rely upon them in the long term, domestic fossil fuels can be used in the short-term to bolster renewable energy technologies until these technologies are dependable enough to stand on their own.

Sustainable energy, harnessed from renewable resources like the sun, wind, water, and crops, is responsible for meeting only 10% of the world's energy demands (Fig. 1). What's fascinating is that in one year, usable but unharnessed sun and wind resources produce 50 times more energy than the world currently consumes [13]. But if there is so much energy around us, why is it so hard for us to shift to sustainable energy sources? As of now, renewable energy technologies are not optimally designed or economically profitable partially because few financial resources are being channeled into their development. That said, all technologies that humans enjoy today (including cars, telephones and electricity!) were once in a stage too young to be considered reliable or profitable for the mass market. However, continued investments gave researchers the resources and opportunities to develop these technologies and maximize performance and functionality. There will never be a magic solution that eliminates all the negative consequences of our energy demands, but we can make educated choices about using and developing energy sources that significantly reduce the social and environmental impacts of our energy use.
Archana Dayalu is an Atmospheric Chemistry graduate student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. References:
[1] United States Energy Information Administration. (2011). "International Energy Outlook" http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/

[2] United States Energy Information Administration. (2012). "Annual Energy Review 2011" http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/archive/038411.pdf

[3] United States Department of Energy. "How Fossil Fuels were Formed" (April 24, 2012) http://www.fossil.energy.gov/education/energylessons/coal/gen_howformed.html

[4] Conger, C. "How much Fossil Fuel is in the Earth?", Discovery News (September 24, 2012) http://news.discovery.com/earth/how-much-fossil-fuel-is-in-the-earth.html

[5] International Energy Agency. "Oil Market Report 2012" http://omrpublic.iea.org/

[6] United States Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook. "Natural Gas - Proved Reserves" (2011) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2179rank.html

[7] United States Energy Information Administration. "2011 World Oil Production" http://www.eia.gov/countries/index.cfm?view=production

[8] United States Environmental Protection Agency. "Particulate Matter & Health" (June 15, 2012) http://www.epa.gov/airquality/particlepollution/health.html

[9] American Lung Association. "Toxic Air: Time to Clean Up Coal-fired Power Plants" (March 8, 2011) http://www.lung.org/about-us/our-impact/top-stories/toxic-air-coal-fired-power-plants.html

[10] United States Energy Information Administration. "Country Analysis Brief: China" http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=CH

[11] Harvard School of Public Health. "Explore the True Costs of Coal: The Measureable, Economic, and Qualitative Cost of Coal" (July 1, 2012) http://chge.med.harvard.edu/resource/explore-true-costs-coal

[12] "IPCC, 2007: Summary for Policymakers", Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S, Qin, D, Manning, M, Chen, Z, Marquis, M, Averyt, KB, Tignor, M, and Miller, HL (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf

[13] Jacobson, M, and Delucchi, M. "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030", Scientific American (November 2009) http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf

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Why We Need Sustainable Energy - Science in the News

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The degree to which we use energy has far-reaching consequences. For example, the simple act of driving to work uses fuel that is ultimately tied to both international conflict and global climate change. The success of modern civilization is fundamentally linked to our ability to harness energy, primarily in the form of fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas.

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Some facts that help you out into perspective how impact deforestation on environments and global health.

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Deforestation: 11 facts you need to know

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Agricultural expansion, illegal logging, mining and urbanization continue to drive deforestation around the world. Globally, forests are under threat — large-scale efforts are needed to protect these ecosystems and the many benefits they provide.

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This article talks about getting the people informed and involved in sustainable efforts. This article discuss creating unity of people from different backgrounds and cultures through art by getting the community together to make murals on the importance of a sustainable future.

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"Today is about making our community more beautiful," exclaimed California State Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra (D-Pacoima), at a recent EDF-sponsored community art show and mural launch.

I know what you might be thinking. "Say what? EDF and art?"

This is one of the new routes we're taking in our commitment to "finding the ways that work."

We looked to accomplish two things with this project: to help spark imagination and civic pride by bringing local artists and youth together to create a vision for a more sustainable city, and to make a concerted effort to meet the community where they are on the environmental issues they care about. The results were both inspiring and enlightening.

Our first launch event, in Fresno, CA, featured local muralist Mauro Carrera and local nonprofit partner organizations Valley LEAP, Arte Americas, and Fresno Building Healthy Communities.

The vivid imagery of the Fresno mural was spectacular: an 8' x 16' mobile fresco honoring the agricultural heritage of California's Central Valley and its hardworking migrant workers, while integrating and embracing a new vision of more clean energy, fresh water, bike access, clean air, and green space.

The mural will be rotated throughout the year around several local community organizations and used for future youth conferences and monthly art walks in downtown Fresno.

The next day we moved the party to Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, partnering with Pacoima Beautiful and local artist Kristy Sandoval for a 15' x 30' mural painted outside the city's Community Center, which houses numerous non-profit youth organizations. This project featured a call to "keep Pacoima beautiful," and a bold vision to capture some of the vast solar potential in sunny San Fernando Valley (a recent EDF study found that capturing just 5% of the rooftop solar power in the area could create thousands of jobs and reduce carbon emissions by over 200,000 metric tons per year).

The mural will expand in the future along the Community Center's outdoor wall to include images calling to mind water conservation and urban greening, and will occupy an anchor spot on the regular Pacoima mural walking tour.

Why sustainability through art?

EDF's Keith Gaby nailed it last month with a blog post that set a refreshing tone for the environmental movement: "The reality is that environmentalists often have a difficult time reaching the people with whom we most need to build trust in order to accomplish our goals: Americans who don't feel a natural kinship with the traditional environmental movement. We need to accept that other people's priorities - economic or cultural - are valid and important."

Effective environmental policy needs to recognize and prioritize the local and regional needs of communities; part of doing this means communicating policies and values that meet folks where they live, literally. Public art (such as murals) is a special way to facilitate a conversation that anyone can access, a conversation that comes from the community, for the community.

In the weeks and months leading up to the mural launches, EDF staff and partners participated in local workshops with community members to discuss climate change, clean energy, and resiliency. Our partners led the conversation and the artists took in feedback about the collective vision, incorporating it into each mural's design. The end result was something enduring and beautiful, a bold vision for a sustainable future and a rousing call to action to help us get there.

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Public art gets community talking sustainability

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"Today is about making our community more beautiful," exclaimed California State Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra (D-Pacoima), at a recent EDF-sponsored community art show and mural launch. I know what you might be thinking. "Say what? EDF and art?" This is one of the new routes we're taking in our commitment to "finding the ways that work."

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Module 14: Biodiversity
I love this TED talk video! It's very informational and provides great information about biodiversity.

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Why is biodiversity so important? - Kim Preshoff

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This website is E.O. Wilson's Biodiversity Foundation. It discusses Art as a conservation action and as fuel to inspire people on reflection/critical thinking on the importance of biodiversity.

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Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI) Presents:
The 17th annual art-sci international juried exhibition,
Biodiversity/Extinction October 10, 2015 - February 28, 2016
Artists Reception: November 8, 2015

The New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street, Corona, Queens, NYC
in Flushing Meadows Park

Distinguished Co-Jurors:
Elizabeth Corr, Manager of Art Partnerships at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and
Dr. Paula J. Ehrlich, President & CEO of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation

Selected Artists & Scientists:
Hetty Baiz (USA), Elizabeth Bajbor (Poland), Bengtson+Wetherwax (USA), Bec Bigg-Wither (Australia), Don Cooper (USA), Donna Davis (Australia), Gina Duque (Canada), Michael Felber (USA), Jon Goldman (USA), Angela Gonzalez (USA) Jaden J.A. Hastings (USA), Joseph Ingoldsby (USA), Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger (Australia), Jennifer Kim Sohn (USA), Beth Krensky (USA), JM Landin (USA), Lee Lee (USA), Dash Masland (USA), Nadir+Peppermint (USA), Yoko Shimizu (Japan), Lauren Strohacker (USA),
Ashley Williams (USA), and Jon Wyatt (UK)
￼
Art That Fuels Reflection, Critical Thinking, and Hopefully Action on Today's Biodiversity/Extinction Crisis

New York, NY (October 28, 2015) Throughout history, visual artists have been inspired to capture the complex as well as the sublime qualities of nature and its life-forms. Scientists have done the same via observational recording, classification, counting, and analysis. Because of their baseline reports, we now know the truths of today's rapidly-increasing biodiversity/extinction crisis. Additionally, the science of ecology, tells us how this loss affects every human, as we are the interconnected "top predator" of all life on planet Earth.

The artists and scientists in this year's Art & Science Collaborations' SCIENCE INSPIRES ART: Biodiversity/Extinction exhibition at the New York Hall of Science, on view from October 10, 2015 - February 28, 2016, were selected by distinguished Co-Jurors: Elizabeth Corr, Manager of Art Partnerships at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Dr. Paula J. Ehrlich, President & CEO of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. Combing scientific knowledge with methods from their artistic toolbox, the show's participants allowed their feelings of deep concern to guide their ultimate mission - for their art to stimulate public
reflection, critical thinking, dialogue, and hopefully individual actions on the issues we face surrounding loss of biodiversity and species extinction.

Below is an overview of the aesthetic communication strategies employed by the 23 artists and scientists in this exhibition, represented by 2D prints of their original artworks executed in various media: installation, painting, mixed-media, collage, digital imagery, photography, video, illustration, 3D sculptural objects, and even "microbial selfies."
THE PULL OF HUMOR:
(1) Bengtson+Wetherwax turn a scientific field experiment into an amusing inter-species cultural exchange in their mixed-media video work called Teaching Aid.

(2) Jon Goldman's provocative Aphoristic Extinctions series is a pithy observation of how humans use language to cynically express fear and justify estrangement from wild animals.
ART AS CONSERVATION ACTION:
(3) Hetty Baiz's early and deep connection to the importance of nature's web-of-life, translates easily into her recent collage series of magnificent wildlife threatened by extinction.

(4) Bec Bigg-Wither's collage, I'd Kill To Be Like You - Air, is an ode to the freedom of our feathered aviators of the sky, while lamenting that science alone cannot protect them.

(5) Angela Gonzalez's mixed-media artwork, BIOS - Basic Input Output System, heralds the life-sustaining systems of trees and the necessity for a balance between people, planet, and profit.

(6) Gina Duque's mixed-media works on canvas celebrate the structure and power of seeds to sustain human civilizations with their common ability to survive long periods in dry, barren lands.

(7) Don Cooper's digital collage illustrations are a "call to action" on behalf of our planet,
acknowledging that both negative and positive collective actions can make a difference.

(8) Lauren Strohacker's Encounter project places free-standing cut-outs of mule deer in downtown Phoenix to stimulate dialog about cohabitation versus conflict in our current Anthropocene Era.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER:

(9) Joseph Ingoldsby's poignant 2D "memorial," The Last Migration, reflects on the loss of two keystone bird and fish extinctions by man's actions over just a 100-year time-span.

(10) Jennifer Kim Sohn's Toxic Habits questions "green" advertising claims by exposing the real ecological costs of today's textile production processes, including "natural cotton."

(11) Donna Davis' digital print, Life Support, acknowledges the life support services plants provide humans and envisions a future world where man's machines try to keep them alive.

(12) Ashley Williams' oil painting, Sleep And Its Consequences, from her Sentient series on lichens, emanated from learning how they help scientists determine local pollution levels.

FROM-THE-FIELD

(13) Michael Felber's concern about species extinction is viscerally sensed from his exquisite, up-close illustration, Grandfather, of the threatened Alaskan brown bear.

(14) Jaden J.A. Hastings' installation series, On the Subjugation of Nature, is uniquely Anthropocenic - trees are bound by a strip of fabric printed with their sequenced genome.

(15) Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger's study of the evolutionary dynamics of dandelion weeds provoked her artwork, Life I, questioning our present monoculture agriculture and society.

(16) JM Landin's Carapace Cornucopia delights in the patterns and colors that result from the adaptive camouflage of turtles - a trait that contributes to their sustainability.

(17) Lee Lee's Alewives is from her mixed-media DEBRIS series on ocean plastics, which initiated the formation of the international Debris Project that highlights the ecological impacts of single-use plastic.

(18) Jon Wyatt's photograph, Waterlogged Fields, Monkton, South Wales, is from his The Sixth Extinction series and a result of his field reconnaissance inspired by learning of leading paleogeologists investigating clues in Wales to a 200-million year old global mass extinction event.
FROM-THE-LAB:
(19) Elizabeth Bajbor's artwork, Life, emanates from her biological perspective that all life forms are "data storage systems" whose evolved genes can benefit future generations.

(20) Dash Masland's photograph, It's a Microbial Matter, prods us to see DNA's beauty, as well as the crucial role microbes play in conserving our planet's interconnected web of life.

(21) Nadir+Peppermint's Microbial Selfies series springs from their ingenious electronics and custom software that enables food fermenting bacteria to take "selfies" that reveal the unseen services microbes provide us.

(22) Yoko Shimizu's intriguing Underwater Efflorescence installation series is from her lab experiment growing flowers to blossom underwater in order to study species adaptation to environmental change.

RITUAL:

(23) Beth Krensky's imaginatively crafted Portable Altar and Wish objects are perfect for rituals designed to sanctify and inspire human protection of our rapidly diminishing natural world.

Because scientists are taught not to bring emotions into their research, it is thrilling to see that an increasing number of contemporary artists (and scientists!) are taking on the challenge of using their art to present complex scientific issues in humanistic ways that question our ingrained thinking. Only in this manner will we search for humanistic, cradle- to-grave solutions to today's most critical problems.

-Cynthia Pannucci, Founder-Director/Art & Science Collaborations and exhibition organizer

See the Online Exhibition's: Introduction, Co-Juror Statements and Bios, and Artist Pages with all 42 Images, Artist Statements & Website links: www.asci.org/artikel1417.html

ASCI'S Online Exhibition Archive: http://www.asci.org/artikel62.html
(begins in 1992 with The Pull of Kinetics at Snug Harbor Cultural Center, NYC)

Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI) is a nonprofit organization with an international membership that is dedicated to raising public awareness of the intersections of art and science as a more holistic way of viewing, learning about, and responding to our inner and outer worlds. Two text+image Historical Reports: www.asci.org/artikel58.html

ASCI's large archival website features it's projects and the work of its members: www.asci.org
Science co-juror Paula Ehrlich with exhibition artist Jon Goldman. Photograph by Marcia Rudy.

"Being a juror for this show provided me with wonderful insight into the many ways that artists are thinking about engaging people in the important issues of biodiversity and extinction. It was fabulous to attend the artist's reception and learn more from the artists about what inspired them to create these pieces and how they hope to make a difference in the world through their art."
-Paula J. Ehrlich, President & CEO of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation

Media Coverage "CITY SIGHTS: Finding the Science-Art in New York Area Art Exhibitions." By Julia Buntaine. SciArt in America. November 11, 2015.

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"Science Inspires Art: Biodiversity/Extinction" Exhibit Fuels Reflection, Critical Thinking, and Action

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Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI) Presents: The 17th annual art-sci international juried exhibition, Biodiversity/Extinction October 10, 2015 - February 28, 2016 Artists Reception: November 8, 2015 The New York Hall of Science 47-01 111th Street, Corona, Queens, NYC in Flushing Meadows Park Distinguished Co-Jurors: Elizabeth Corr, Manager of Art Partnerships at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Dr. Paula J.

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Great information on the Biodiversity that exists right here in the Sonoran Desert

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This portfolio instructs on Sonoran Desert Biodiversity with two modules: The Arthropod Investigation and the Habitat Investigation. Each module: