The world’s population officially hits seven billion on October 31, a foreboding milepost for battles against a host of major societal scourges, including hunger, disease, poverty, and climate change.
With current conditions, the number is expected to reach eight billion by around 2023 and nine billion by 2050. By then, it’s estimated that some 1.2-billion people will live in poverty, with growth-fueled environmental decay compounding the misery of many.
In many ways, the modern U.S. research university, with expertise in such fields as economics, politics, sociology, and health care, has just the tools needed to help keep billions of people in livable conditions and population growth rates at manageable levels.
“It’s vital,” Peter J. Donaldson, president of the Population Council, a nonprofit research organization, said of the university role in population control. He credits university research for helping to convince governments worldwide over the past half century of the economic and health benefits of helping women control their own fertility.
Compared to today’s challenges, however, that achievement may prove to have been relatively easy. That’s because the wide and complicated network of academic fields that play a role in population control means that universities actually need to build the types of interdisciplinary collaborations that many of them celebrate but often don’t fully achieve.
“This requires a holistic approach,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a professor of sustainable development and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “During the last 10 years, I’ve held that there was far too little program work that really took on the complexity of this issue.”
Columbia, with more than 700 scientists and staff at the Earth Institute, is among at least 28 U.S. universities with research centers tackling issues of population, sustainable development, and global poverty. Many of them date back to the 1970s.
At the University of Colorado’s Institute of Behavioral Science, researchers have studied how the growing number of female-headed households in South Africa is affecting family responses to AIDS. At the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, they’ve been investigating how televisions placed in remote villages in Vietnam affect family attitudes and behaviors. And researchers from the University of Minnesota’s Population Center, studying child workers in Egypt, have concluded that improving working conditions is more effective than passing laws banning such labor if the goal is to get more girls into school.
But many universities are just beginning to confront the deeply ingrained institutional challenges that can hinder such work. The Earth Institute is now a model for research that can help control population growth, but it only this year began granting academic promotions with a nontraditional system that gives field work comparable weight to publications in scientific journals.
It was a surprising change, said Sabine M. Marx, a specialist in medical sociology who got promoted from associate research scientist to research scientist at the Earth Institute in large part because of her on-the-ground work with impoverished people in Haiti and her success in creating a layman’s guide to discussing climate change.
“Up until the end,” she said of her seven-month-long promotion-review process, which ended this summer, “I thought, is this really going to fly with the provost?”
Understanding the Problem
Humanity took hundreds of thousands of years, until the early 1800s, to reach one billion people. The number reached three billion in 1959 and doubled to six billion by 1998. The United Nations has estimated October 31 as the day it reaches seven billion.
The greatest rates of population growth these days are generally found in poorer countries, especially those of sub-Saharan Africa. And it’s widely understood that many families in those countries will voluntarily choose fewer children if given enough economic and medical security, as well as the necessary contraceptive options.
Like many university researchers whose work aids the overall goals of population control, Ms. Marx carries out projects with indirect effects. In her case, she was in Haiti before its devastating January 2010 earthquake, helping farmers understand the benefits of protecting water resources. After the quake, she helped convert scientific data on the probability of future quakes into terms that people could understand and act upon, such as simple probabilities that certain buildings would withstand a similar-sized quake.
Mr. Sachs and the Earth Institute make many such efforts to give poor people the confidence to face life with fewer children. A centerpiece is the institute’s work in guiding the Millennium Villages project, in which more than 400,000 people are working at 14 communities in 10 African countries to make changes in farming, health care, education, and economic systems that could serve as continentwide models.
To do that kind of work, however, universities are heavily dependent on grant money. And that support can be erratic, given that governments worldwide face budget constraints and political hurdles when handling any questions related to human reproduction. “We’re talking about sex here, and some people get a little antsy about that,” said Joel E. Cohen, a professor and head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University and Columbia.
In terms of private support, the Packard, Hewlett, Ford, and, more recently, the Gates foundations have been major supporters, said Carl V. Haub, a senior demographer at the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau. Some have cut support recently because of stock market losses but not because of any apparent decline in interest, Mr. Haub said. Donors have also shifted more toward support of specific issues such as child and maternal health, reflecting a change of emphasis away from population-specific efforts, as suggested by a 1994 United Nations conference. And correspondingly, he said, universities have seen some increased interest in graduate programs in international public health.
But even within any such economic constraints, Mr. Cohen said, universities could do more. He has called for better efforts in four areas: undergraduate education, professional training, research, and outreach. Undergraduates need a better sense of the issue across a variety of subjects, including concepts of exponential growth in mathematics, hormonal action in chemistry, and cultural differences in the social sciences, Mr. Cohen said.
Developing nations may be driving the largest increases in population, but U.S. students should realize that their country has its own issues, he said. The United States has about 1.7 million unplanned births each year, with 48 percent of conceptions unplanned, exceeding the worldwide average of 41 percent, Mr. Cohen said. And those births cause a much greater drain on global resources because of “our incredibly massive consumption per person,” he said.
If U.S. college students routinely learned such facts, that could have a major effect on U.S. government policy and thus on international efforts to control population, Mr. Cohen said.
Paul R. Ehrlich, a professor of population studies at Stanford University known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, has been emphatic on that point. “In general, university performance in education on population and related issues is worse than pathetic—if there is any at all,” Mr. Ehrlich told The Chronicle.
And while governmental and private aid agencies understand the fundamental elements of population control, they still need more help from university researchers, even in basics such as developing better contraceptives and encouraging their use, Mr. Sachs said. Just in the last few weeks, the Columbia professor said, advocates of population control have been fretting over a study suggesting that a hormone shot that’s become the most popular contraceptive for women in much of Africa might double the risk of HIV infection. “It is not considered a settled finding by any means,” he said with alarm.
Also, with current growth projections, urban planners in poor countries need advice on how they can possibly hope to build what is effectively the equivalent of a city of one million people every five days without causing even more economic distress and, therefore, even more population spikes, Mr. Cohen said. “The design of those cities is key, and nobody is doing the fundamental research,” he said.
A Failure to Communicate
High fertility in poor countries has been a concern for decades. The environmental stresses, however, are only now “reaching a breaking point,” Mr. Sachs said, pointing out the need for even more study of how and when planetary resource limits will be reached and, perhaps, evaded.
Advocacy groups largely see universities as working hard to provide those types of answers, said Mr. Haub, of the Population Reference Bureau. The major shortfall of university researchers, he said, may be their failure to adequately communicate their findings to people who need the information. “A lot of academic work stays within the academic field,” Mr. Haub said.
The case of Ms. Marx, and two other colleagues promoted recently by Columbia, shows hope for change. Another example raising hopes for an improved culture of cross-discipline sharing is the recent publication in the American Economic Review of an interdisciplinary study led by David N. Weil, a professor of economics at Brown University, that used measurements of light from outer space to make calculations of population and economic growth.
The losses, meanwhile, include Alexander Pfaff, now an associate professor of public policy, economics, and environment at Duke University. Mr. Pfaff came up for promotion just a few years ago at Columbia and was denied, in part because his work didn’t fit neatly within a particular academic discipline, said Alex M. de Sherbinin, a co-leader of the Population-Environment Research Network at Columbia. Mr. Pfaff “had done groundbreaking work in deforestation related to population change,” Mr. de Sherbinin said.
Combining expertise from various disciplines, as is common in issues related to population control, “often can help to increase insight and relevance,” Mr. Pfaff said in an interview. “Yet selling that within the university can be a challenge at times.”
Mr. Pfaff still does federally financed work for the Earth Institute, but he does it now as a subcontractor working 500 miles away at Duke, Ms. Marx said. “If Alex was still here, he would have been promoted, absolutely,” under the new interdisciplinary guidelines, she said.
“He’s still doing the same amount of work, but if we had him here locally based, his contributions could be so much greater in terms of cross-project fertilization and interdisciplinary exchange,” Ms. Marx said. “So I think that was a big loss.”
