Courtesy of Eric Roston Eric Roston, a writer focused on climate and energy, stopped in Kurujanga, India, recently on a three-week tour exploring how developing countries perceive and communicate about these issues.

Eric Roston, a former Time magazine journalist and author of “The Carbon Age,” spent three weeks roaming India at the invitation of the United States State Department to explore and talk about north-south differences in talking about climate change. (He told me that his talks and interactions were not in any way shaped by government officials.) The journey wrapped up at a conference organized by the International Federation of Environmental Journalists.

We’d had some e-mail chats about what I’ve been calling “the climate divide.” This is the reality that the world’s established industrial powers are already insulating themselves from climate risks by using wealth and technology accumulated through economic advancement built on burning fossil fuels, even as the world’s poorest countries, with little history of adding to the atmosphere’s greenhouse blanket, are most exposed to the climate hazards of today, let alone what will come through unabated global heating.

Mr. Roston, who also writes a weekly online “Climate Post” and is affiliated with the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions of Duke University, sent the following thoughts on how this divide exists within developing countries as well, and how it shapes how people in such places perceive the climate problem:

The climate divide is visible within countries, too.

The state of Odisha, on India’s cyclone-prone Bay of Bengal coast, has a rich history, but poor status quo. Poverty is 47 percent. Illiteracy is 50 percent for women and 36 percent over all. Mineral deposits have brought the “resources curse.” On my second day in India, I traveled to the village of Kurujanga, and met 40 or so members of the community. They did not know much about global warming, per se, but they understand viscerally that their climate is changing. There’s not much winter any more in Odisha (officially known as Orissa until last month), a nonscientific observation echoed by people I met elsewhere in the state and in India. The monsoon has been misbehaving. Sea-level rise and consequent erosion, whatever its cause, have prompted evacuations in nearby villages and shut down part of the nearby Konark-Puri Marine Road.

I explained some of the climate science that might be playing a role in the changes they’re observing (Global warming famously leaves few or no easily discernible fingerprints). People in the group understood and observed disconcerting changes, but most immediate and crushing was the poverty — and their self-consciousness of it. The group I met with understood how poor they are and how rich the Western world is. Funds dispatched to alleviate their poverty “are siphoned off in the middle somewhere,” said a 50-year-old woman named Sukanti Mohapatra. Another participant, whose name I was unable to get, pointed out that were it not for the deprivation and uncertainty, they are essentially comfortable with their way of life. She rightly suspected that wanting and consuming, as rich nations do, don’t necessarily lead to happiness. They want help, and don’t need white guys showing up at their village anymore if help won’t soon follow.

Back in Bhubaneswar, Odisha’s capital, the next morning I visited Infosys, the global IT company with $4 billion in revenue and more than 100,000 employees worldwide. I described the whiplash from these back-to-back venues to a colleague: “Eric,” she said. “That is India.”

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Our story on the punishment of a woman in Sudan who dared wear pants brings to mind a theme that has percolated on Dot Earth for a while: the relationship among the conditions facing women (and girls) in developing countries, progress toward prospering, stable populations and, in the end, societal and environmental stability.

Various studies point to the importance of girls having access to education and women having awareness of and access to contraception, allowing some influence over the size of their families. But there are other issues, as well. In many developing countries, women are often more involved than men in managing small farm tracts and in many cases have to hide their earnings from husbands.

In a broader sense, then, there appears to be simmering tension over “who wears the pants.” How that gets worked out probably will help determine whether there is a relatively smooth journey toward more or less 9 billion people on a finite planet in the next few decades.

This is just a quick Labor Day weekend look back at a story I wrote in 2005 assessing Bhutan’s effort to adopt gross national happiness as its main income and perceptions of happiness. Since 2005, the concept has gained momentum in Thailand and within Bhutan, which is developing a set of indicators for tracking progress toward what would otherwise be an awfully amorphous goal. The themes in this piece have resonated on Dot Earth repeatedly. Below I’ve pasted a few fun excerpts from the story, which revolved around a conference in Nova Scotia on Bhutan’s social experiment:

Defining Happiness

The founding fathers, said John Ralston Saul, a Canadian political philosopher, defined happiness as a balance of individual and community interests. “The Enlightenment theory of happiness was an expression of public good or the public welfare, of the contentment of the people,” Mr. Saul said. And, he added, this could not be further from “the 20th-century idea that you should smile because you’re at Disneyland.”

Outdoing the Joneses

[B]eyond a certain threshold of wealth people appear to redefine happiness, studies suggest, focusing on their relative position in society instead of their material status. Nothing defines this shift better than a 1998 survey of 257 students, faculty and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health. In the study, the researchers, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, gave the subjects a choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where others earned $25,000 or $100,000 a year where others earned $200,000. [9/08: The preceding sentence has been adjusted after we received a clarification from Sara Solnick.] About 50 percent of the participants, the researchers found, chose the first option, preferring to be half as prosperous but richer than their neighbors.

The Trouble With Money

Participants focused on an array of approaches to the happiness puzzle, from practical to radical. John de Graaf, a Seattle filmmaker and campaigner trying to cut the amount of time people devote to work, wore a T-shirt that said, “Medieval peasants worked less than you do.” In an open discussion, Marc van Bogaert from Belgium described his path to happiness: “I want to live in a world without money.” Al Chaddock, a painter from Nova Scotia, immediately offered a suggestion: “Become an artist.”

Read the rest….

How do you measure progress and gauge your well-being? Take the Solnick-Hemenway quiz: Which would you choose? Earning $50,000 a year when others earn $25,000 or $100,000 a year others earn $200,000?

Fresh population projections put the number of humans over seven billion in 2011, just 12 years after humanity passed the six billion mark. What’s most notable in the new analysis is confirmation that while fertility rates are dropping in many places, some of the world’s most turbulent and poverty-stricken regions are seeing explosive population growth leading to enormous numbers of teenagers and children. (More evidence that puberty rules planet Earth at the moment?)

Such a youth bulge can be an asset if education and economic activity are there to build a work force. But without prospects, the result can be higher risks of conflict. Look at the population projection for Uganda, showing that country heading to a population of 96 million in 2050 from 31 million today. How does a country like Uganda build schools fast enough, train teachers fast enough and improve sanitation fast enough to harness the potential in its youth? Ideas welcome.

Below you can see a novel tool for assessing population and education scenarios in sub-Saharan Africa (and elsewhere).

Devastating landslides like those that swept through several communities in southern Taiwan over the weekend are inevitable. Nonetheless, the risks can be substantially reduced with planning and warning, experts say.

But for the moment, twin trends are exacerbating the threat: the urban rush in developing countries, in which millions of poor people are settling on fragile slopes and floodplains, and rising odds of rain falling in dangerous downpours in a warming world. One way to foster economic advancement with such risks in mind is a planning approach called “climate-proofing development.”

It’s not hard to identify where such risks are greatest. I interviewed Kerry Emanuel, one of the leading specialists focused on tropical cyclones and climate. He noted the particular vulnerability to extreme rains on rugged islands like Taiwan, RĂ©union in the Indian Ocean, Hispaniola in the Caribbean. The mountainous terrain amplifies the upward flow of cyclone winds and thus intensifying how much, and how fast, water vapor gets turned into rain. And of course the steeper the terrain, the more likely slopes could give way in such a downpour.

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction distributed a news release with case studies of communities that have worked to cut landslide losses. Some highlights: Read more…

Shanghai, with a huge but aging population, is encouraging thousands of couples to have a second child, according to news reports. At the same time, India is reflecting on its trajectory toward becoming the world’s most populous country. An interesting article in The Times of India explains how one Indian state, Kerala, used a “three E’s policy” — education, employment, equality — to drive down its fertility rate as far as China did but without China’s draconian steps, and without the forced sterilization used in India’s “family planning camps” at one time. But over all, the article laments the lack of attention to the issue there. As I wrote recently, that vast but crowded subcontinent has already surpassed Japan in population density — quite a feat.

Saturday was World Population Day, so I scanned the Web for unconventional efforts to convey and debate the drivers of, and consequences of, population growth. One was a recent talk by Hans Rosling, a public health expert at the Karolinska Institute, explaining how family size shrinks when health care and access to family planning come to poor countries. He uses the remarkable “Gapminder” tool for visually exploring related trends.

Another was a debate between Adrian Stott, a trustee of the Optimum Population Trust, a British group pushing for greatly expanded efforts to promote family planning worldwide, and Brendan O’Neill, an editor of Spiked, a British online publication devoted to “raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism.”

Mr. O’Neill lays out a 21st-century variant of the Julian Simon thesis that when it comes to human minds and bodies, the more the merrier. Tens of billions? Bring ‘em on, he says. Have a look at the videos and weigh in.

[UPDATE, 9/10: Cliff Krauss writes on the fast spread of new methods for gas extraction from shale that stand to greatly boost global supplies. Once again, Jesse Ausubel is proved prescient.]

At a meeting on population and resources early this year at the University of California in Berkeley, one session focused on global energy trends. Richard Nehring, a consultant tracking fossil fuels, noted that Africa (below and above the Sahara) has vast deposits of natural gas (CH4), many of which are suitable for extracting butane and propane, valuable household fuels. This leads to a glaring question.

We know there are orphan drugs — potential treatments for diseases in poor places that don’t get pursued because there’s scant profit. But is natural gas in Africa essentially an “orphan fuel�?

I’m going to send the following questions to a variety of energy experts and economists for their answers. What’s your view?

Sub-Saharan Africa has huge untapped reserves of natural gas. It also has a huge potential market, given that charcoal in African cities — the fuel of choice for hundreds of millions of people there — is often more expensive than gas. But the production of charcoal is destroying forests, and its use for cooking can destroy lungs in households choking on smoke. For the time being, promoting ways to use charcoal more cleanly and efficiently is a goal of many development specialists in Africa. But when will the jump to gas take place?

Q. Why isn’t development of this African gas resource, for both local and global markets, a priority for rich countries that claim they are committed to helping Africa break the bonds of persistent poverty? (Dysfunctional governments are surely an issue in some places, but not all.)

Q. Should projects that develop natural gas and related propane supplies in regions with few fuel choices get credit under proposed climate-treaty provisions?

On the climate front, discussions of ways to limit global warming seem more focused on capturing stray emissions of methane (more on that anon) than on pressing for ways to promote it as an alternative to coal, at least as a bridge to even less-polluting energy sources. For several decades, a cluster of scientists — in particular Jesse H. Ausubel, Arnulf Grübler, and Nebojsa “Naki� Nakicenovic — have pressed the case that methane is a vital ingredient for navigating toward a prosperous planet with a stable climate. It releases half the carbon dioxide per unit of energy that coal does. And if burned in certain ways, the resulting stream of CO2 is pure and easily captured for storage, Dr. Ausubel says.

It is also becoming ever clearer that the world has vast untapped stores of natural gas, everywhere from the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico to a wide swath of the Arctic.

The volatility of prices is clearly a problem, with low prices now likely to slow exploration and development of new sources, experts say. Another sign of the world’s enduring “ shock and trance� approach to energy policy, perhaps.

[UPDATED, 6/3, below.] There are significant questions about the robustness of the numbers at the heart of the new report estimating more than 300,000 deaths are already being caused each year by global warming, with nearly twice that number possible by 2030. The report was commissioned by the Global Humanitarian Forum, created in 2007 by the former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, and reviews reams of data and earlier analysis by other researchers and groups. More on the questions is below.

Here’s a video news release, with nary a caveat:

Undisputed, however, is the theme we explored in depth here in 2007 in the Climate Divide series: The countries most vulnerable to risks from climate extremes today, and to any added stresses coming from human-driven climate change, are also least able to deal with them, and least responsible for emissions of greenhouse gases. That divide is reflected in the big ongoing disputes between rich and poor countries in talks aimed at generating a new climate agreement in December in Copenhagen. The next round of interim discussions begins on Monday in Bonn.

In my news article, the forum’s report on the human toll from climate change was vigorously criticized by Roger A. Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado (here’s his full-length critique of the climate-mortality report). Dr. Pielke has a habit of getting under the skin of environmental campaigners. But he has co-authored significant studies of disasters and climate.

Concerns about what amounts to a climate-centric approach to curbing the glaring health problems in poor regions were also raised by Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain School of Public Health in Brussels: Read more…

[UPDATE, 5/18: If anyone doubts that Generation E is global, please read Sabrina Tavernise's fascinating story about students from privileged homes and schools in Lahore, Pakistan, organizing via Facebook to gather garbage.]

In case you missed it, Leslie Kaufman has written a piece on Annie Leonard, a campaigner, lecturer and videographer who has become something of an environmental pied piper trying to tug Americans away from a culture of disposability.

It’s a tough challenge given that in a big, rich country, waste has for generations not been something people have had to think about. As I wrote last year, even when companies like Wal-Mart start to focus on the environment, in the end they’re still selling consumption easily as much as they’re pushing more efficient light bulbs. Is that a winning mix for the planet and people in the long run?

Scavenging for food scraps in a Haitian dump. (Credit: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)

At the same time, as Adam Nossiter pointed out grippingly in a story out of Senegal on May 3, the world’s poorest places are living in, and dying in, mountains of garbage. A lack of functional government and enough income to build systems for handling waste of all kinds, combined with the world’s accelerating urbanization, is creating astounding situations, like children being swallowed up in a soup of trash and storm water. In the meantime, for most of the world, garbage remains a resource for those at the bottom of the societal chain, a situation depicted vividly in Haiti by Marc Lacey and Tyler Hicks last year.

Adam Ferguson for The New York Times One of various clean-burning stoves developed to reduce harmful pollution from hundreds of millions of cooking fires in poor countries.

My article last week looked at how replacing primitive stoves with cleaner alternatives in the developing world could have big benefits for climate as well as local health and welfare. Because traditional cookstoves burn their fuel (wood and dung) incompletely. they produce a large amount of black carbon – a k a. soot. Soot cuts short the lives of more than 1.5 million people (mainly women and children) each year. Fuel gathering requires hours of sometimes hazardous work, also mainly by women and children.

And soot is emerging as a major climate warmer. New studies suggest soot is second only to CO2 and has particularly damaging climate effects in the Arctic and on Himalayan glaciers. When the particles settle out in these regions, the black carbon makes snow and ice darker, which in turn warms the ice. That, of course, contributes to melting.

But what kinds of new cookstoves might fit the bill – cheap, low in emissions, fuel-friendly and acceptable to local residents? The Surya project, which I mentioned in my article. is currently testing six models, evaluating their climate benefits and local acceptance.

One design from India is pictured above. Other groups that focus on design with health, development and the environment in mind are pursuing this challenging task as well. I’ve heard from a number of them in the last few days. One solution that has recently gained some international recognition is the “Kyoto Box,� a solar-powered cooker. You can check it out on YouTube here.

Last week The Financial Times selected the Kyoto Box as the winner in its FT Climate Challenge, over 300 other entries. It costs about $6 and is mostly made from cardboard. Read more…

paksbab.org A women’s community center was built of straw bales in Jabori, Pakistan in 2006.

paksbab.org The completed community center.

The powerful earthquake in central Italy is a reminder that we’re floating on dynamic plates of earth. Vulnerable communities, from Oregon to Istanbul, face the task of limiting losses from inevitable disasters even as they deal with today’s challenges.

Darcey Donovan has joined the swelling ranks of engineers and scientists with a passion for helping build resilience in such places. Her inspiration was the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. Her goal was to create a way to build quake-resistant houses in poor rural regions using local materials. Her material of choice, in the end, was straw.

Ms. Donovan, who received her engineering degree at the University of Nevada, Reno, went back to the school to test her design on the huge shaking table there, one of several such test beds for earthquake engineers. Video of that test is below. (The university provides a lot of great background here.) The design held up well. Several such buildings have been built, with more on the way. They are also extraordinarily energy efficient and fire resistant (the straw is very densely packed, limiting its combustibility).

I wrote here last year about Santiago Pujol of Purdue, who used a similar shaking table to test the resilience of a simple design for safer schools. I recently noticed a fascinating project in which some high school students in California were able to use another giant shaking table to test model structures they designed and built. (There’s nothing like doing science and engineering to learn how those disciplines work, mistakes and all.)

Ms. Donovan has created and leads a nonprofit group, Pakistan Straw Bale and Appropriate Building, that is focused on spreading information about the construction method and helping communities do the building. She says the method and materials (clay, straw, gravel) produce buildings at half the cost of conventional earthquake-resistant buildings in Pakistan.

I’ve posted Ms. Donovan’s answers to a few questions about her work below. Who do you know who is working to smooth the journey toward a stable, prospering human population with a focus on today’s poorest regions? Read more…

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times The world has more than 1 billion teenagers who, without education and job prospects, may contribute to instability and, in places like Sudan, end up being child soldiers, according to demographers and security specialists.

Masafumi Yamamoto for The New York Times Japanese convenience stores, which served mainly young customers decades ago, now cater to elderly customers. Sueko Inoue shopped in a Lawson store in Awaji.

[UPDATE 3/13: There's a fascinating roundup of views of the new United Nations population projections in our new "Room for Debate" blog.]

The United Nations Population Division has updated its population forecasts through 2050, and concludes that, despite a longstanding global decline in fertility rates, the world is still on a path to exceed 9 billion people by mid-century, with the vast majority of the increase coming in the world’s poorest countries.

In those countries, large proportions of the population are children or teenagers, who could contribute either to a large workforce and economic gains or — in the absence of education and jobs — to instability and conflict.

The other fast-growing group around the globe is the oldest segment of the populations, according to the United Nations — and that trend also can pose challenges, particularly in the absence of a large working-age population. ( This article from 2004 explored how Japan is coping with an aging population: automated help for the elderly, including human washing machines.)

Three factors have nudged population projections upward over the past decade, Hania Zlotnik, the director of the population division, said in an interview: lengthening lifespans; the success of HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention efforts, particularly in Africa; and “a slower than expected decline in fertility” (meaning the number of children a woman bears). Read more…

Girls carrying water in Kenya. The quality of girls’ lives will shape population curves. (Photo: Evelyn Hockstein for The New York Times)

There’s a very happy retired French teacher and tennis coach in California today. Her name is Jane Roberts. In 2002, after the Bush administration blocked $34 million Congress had approved for the United States contribution to the United Nations Population Fund, known commonly as Unfpa, she co-founded 34 Million Friends, a group trying to fill the gap $1 at a time. She wrote a book on women and human welfare, as well.

On Friday, President Obama pledged to restore that money while also signing an order reversing another move by the Bush administration that banned American government aid for family-planning organizations that, in part, promoted or conducted abortions.

I spoke with Ms. Roberts last fall about population, women and human welfare and got in touch again after the news out of the White House. Her statement reacting to Mr. Obama’s action is below. You can also hear Odetta singing a song crafted from a poem Ms. Roberts wrote about family planning, maternal welfare and human progress. Here’s a short video in which Ms. Roberts describes her campaign.

Read more…