Global estimates
*In 2005, it is estimated there are between 185-192 million1 migrants worldwide.
*In 2000, there were 175 million international migrants worldwide: one out of every 35 person is an international migrant.
*Migrants represent 2.9 per cent of the global population.
*Of these, almost half (48.6%) are women.
* The stock of international migrants rose from 82 million in 1970 to 175 million in 2000.
Global trends
*Migration flows have shifted in recent years with changing poles of attraction for labour migration.
*In some parts of the world, migrant stock has actually decreased.
*Although the number of Asian migrants has increased from 28.1 million in 1970 to 43.8 million in 2000, Asia’s share of global migrant stock decreased from 34.5 per cent to 25 per cent over the same period.
* Africa has also seen a decline in its share of international migrants: from 12 per cent in 1970 to 9 per cent in 2000.
*This is also true for Latin America and the Caribbean (down from 7.1% to 3.4%); Europe (down from 22.9% to 18.7%) and for Oceania (3.7% to 3.3%).
*Only Northern America and the former USSR have seen a sharp increase in their migrant stock between 1970 and 2000 (from 15.9% to 23.3% for Northern America and 3.8% to 16.8% for the Former USSR). In the latter case however, this increase has more to do with the redefinition of borders than with the actual movement of people.
The stock of international migrants remains concentrated in relatively few countries
*75 per cent of all international migrants are in 12 per cent of all countries.2
Migrant population by regions
*56.1 million in Europe (including European part of former USSR), accounting for 7.7 per cent of European population.
*49.9 million in Asia, accounting for 1.4 per cent of Asian population.
*40.8 million in North America, accounting for 12.9 per cent of the North American population.
*16.3 million in Africa, or 2 per cent of African population.
*5.9 million in Latin America, accounting for 1.1 per cent of Latin American population.
*5.8 million in Australia, accounting for 18.7 per cent of Australian population.
International migrants in selected countries
*Top three migrant receiving countries:
*United States with 35 million migrants accounts for 20 per cent of the world’s migrant stock.
*The Russian Federation with 13.3 million migrants accounts for 7.6 per cent of the world’s migrant stock.
*Germany with 7.3 million migrants accounts for 4.2 per cent of the world’s migrant stock.
*Top three migrant sending countries:
*China with a diaspora estimated at 35 million.
*India with a diaspora estimated at some 20 million.
*The Philippines with some 7 million overseas Filipinos.
*Countries or areas where migrants make up more than 60 per cent of the population: Andorra, Macao Special Administrative Region of China, Guam, the Holy See, Monaco, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
International migrants in developed and developing world
*In 2000, 63 per cent of the world’s migrants lived in developed countries and 37 per cent in the developing countries.
Migration is not a one-way street: most countries are both migrant receiving and sending countries3
*In the U.S., for every 4 persons coming in, 1 moved out.
*In Germany and Australia, for every 3 persons coming in, 2 moved out.
*In Japan and Switzerland, for every 3 persons coming in, 1 moved out.
Benefits of migration. One indicator: International Remittances, General Figures
*Total amount of global international remittances in 2003 was US$ 93 billion4 and reached more than US$ 100 billion in 2004. Twice as much money may be sent through informal channels.
*About 20 per cent of annual global international remittances flow into South Asia.
*Top remittances receiving countries in 2002:
1.Mexico received just over US$ 11 billion, or 1.73 per cent of its GDP.
2.India received US$ 8.411 billion, or 1.65 per cent of its GDP.
3.The Philippines5 received US$ 7.363 billion, or 9.45 per cent of its GDP.
4.Egypt received US$ 2.893 billion, or 3.22 per cent of its GDP.
5.Morocco received US$ 2.877 billion, or 8 per cent of its GDP.
*Top remittance-sending countries in 2001:
*US: US$ 28 billion
*Saudi Arabia: US$ 15 billion
*Germany, Belgium and Switzerland (US$ 8 billion each)
*France: US$ 3.9 billion
*Luxembourg: US$ 3.1 billion
*Israel: US$ 3 billion
*Italy: US$ 2.6 billion
*Japan: US$ 2.3 billion
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Friday, August 07, 2009
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Effect on environment by growing population
No driver of environmental deterioration is more obvious than population growth, and none has been more taboo to talk about – especially in recent decades. Even ecologists have often danced around the topic. Although more than 40 years have passed since we wrote The Population Bomb, the book is still attacked daily on blogs, misquoted and excoriated. On the positive side, however, it has received great honors from the lunatic fringe. It was listed by the Intercollegiate Review as one of the fifty worst books of the 20th century, along with John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. In Human Events’ list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” it came in 11th place ("honorable mention”); even so, it bested Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.
Such nonsense over four decades has allowed the role of population growth and related issues (especially patterns of rising consumption) as drivers of some of our most serious problems to be largely ignored. That makes a collapse of civilization now seem ever more likely. Climate disruption alone, tightly tied to overpopulation through such activities as fossil-fuel use and deforestation, could make achieving sustainability impossible.
A possibly even more serious problem is the increasing release of toxic chemicals in support of growing numbers of people, each striving to consume more. The releases are done with essentially no cost-benefit analysis; a potentially dangerous compound that might cure cancer is treated much the same as one that strengthens eyelash glue. While there are nut-case plans for “geoengineering” that might be tried if the climate starts to get away from us, there are no such possibilities if synergisms among toxics begin to kill us or our life-support systems. Especially threatening are endocrine-disrupting contaminants with non-linear dose-response curves – synthetic compounds sometimes more dangerous in tiny rather than large doses.
Then, of course, there’s the decay of the epidemiological environment, intimately tied to the increasing absolute numbers of people and of hungry (and thus immune-compromised) individuals – the latter now at a record more than one billion. More susceptible people pushing into the habitats of animals carrying novel (to us) infectious diseases, larger human populations to maintain those diseases, and ever more rapid transportation systems make nasty pandemics increasingly likely.
The Population Bomb, ironically, was much too optimistic about the future. In 1968, when it was published, carbon dioxide was thought to be the only human-produced greenhouse gas, and some climatologists believed that cooling by other pollutants would overwhelm its effect. As a result, we could only write that exploding human populations were tampering with the energy balance of Earth and that the results globally and locally could be dire. Now we know that increasing flows into the atmosphere of a series of anthropogenic greenhouse gas, a consequence of the near doubling of the human population and the more than tripling of global consumption, have the potential to cause catastrophic climate disruption unless rapidly abated.
In 1968, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina had not yet discovered the potential of chlorofluorocarbons to destroy the ozone layer and make life on Earth’s surface impossible. Norman Myers was years from calling world attention to the destruction of tropical rainforests; when The Bomb was written, the possibility that those forests might be destroyed was essentially unknown. Also unknown were the threats of endocrine-disrupting contaminants. The Bomb also should have paid attention to the potential for resource wars. The 1967 Israeli-Arab war, partly over water, and the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars over fossil fuels may be precursors of many more resource wars with similarly intimate overpopulation connections.
There were of course also flaws in The Population Bomb’s analysis of known threats. The first lines of the Prologue (p. 11) proved to be among the most troublesome in the book: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." We are often asked about the famines The Bomb predicted, as if the last four decades were a period of abundant food for all. Although hunger became less newsworthy as humanity did try to ameliorate the worst famines, they nonetheless were essentially continuous in parts of Africa. Perhaps 300 million people overall have died of hunger and hunger-related diseases since 1968. But the famines were smaller than our reading of the agricultural literature at the time had led us to anticipate. That was largely because of the medium-term success of the "green revolution," the export of high-yielding grain technology to poor nations. The analysis of the food situation in The Population Bomb was thus wrong in that it underestimated the impact of the green revolution. At the same time, it did correctly recognize that serious ecological risks would accompany the spread of that revolution.
Partly due to the message of The Population Bomb, there has been a highly desirable decline in birthrates in much of the world, but the depressing prospect is that some 2.5 billion people will be added to the population before growth stops and (we hope) a slow decline begins. Those additional people will have a disproportionately negative impact on our life-support systems. Our ancestors naturally farmed the richest soils and used the most accessible resources first. Now significant amounts of those soils have been eroded away or paved over, and farmers are increasingly forced to turn to marginal land to grow food. Instead of extracting rich ores on or near the surface, deeper and much poorer deposits must be mined and refined today, at ever greater environmental cost. Water and petroleum must come from lower quality sources, deeper wells, or the latter often from far beneath the ocean, and must be transported over longer distances. The environmental and resource impacts of future population growth will dwarf those of the past.
In the face of these problems, humanity seems paralyzed on many fronts, but especially in confronting issues of population and consumption. There is a growing movement to initiate a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB) to globally examine and publicly discuss the failures of cultural evolution to direct society towards sustainability. The population bomb is returning to public prominence, but it remains to be seen whether anything effective and humane will be done about it.
Such nonsense over four decades has allowed the role of population growth and related issues (especially patterns of rising consumption) as drivers of some of our most serious problems to be largely ignored. That makes a collapse of civilization now seem ever more likely. Climate disruption alone, tightly tied to overpopulation through such activities as fossil-fuel use and deforestation, could make achieving sustainability impossible.
A possibly even more serious problem is the increasing release of toxic chemicals in support of growing numbers of people, each striving to consume more. The releases are done with essentially no cost-benefit analysis; a potentially dangerous compound that might cure cancer is treated much the same as one that strengthens eyelash glue. While there are nut-case plans for “geoengineering” that might be tried if the climate starts to get away from us, there are no such possibilities if synergisms among toxics begin to kill us or our life-support systems. Especially threatening are endocrine-disrupting contaminants with non-linear dose-response curves – synthetic compounds sometimes more dangerous in tiny rather than large doses.
Then, of course, there’s the decay of the epidemiological environment, intimately tied to the increasing absolute numbers of people and of hungry (and thus immune-compromised) individuals – the latter now at a record more than one billion. More susceptible people pushing into the habitats of animals carrying novel (to us) infectious diseases, larger human populations to maintain those diseases, and ever more rapid transportation systems make nasty pandemics increasingly likely.
The Population Bomb, ironically, was much too optimistic about the future. In 1968, when it was published, carbon dioxide was thought to be the only human-produced greenhouse gas, and some climatologists believed that cooling by other pollutants would overwhelm its effect. As a result, we could only write that exploding human populations were tampering with the energy balance of Earth and that the results globally and locally could be dire. Now we know that increasing flows into the atmosphere of a series of anthropogenic greenhouse gas, a consequence of the near doubling of the human population and the more than tripling of global consumption, have the potential to cause catastrophic climate disruption unless rapidly abated.
In 1968, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina had not yet discovered the potential of chlorofluorocarbons to destroy the ozone layer and make life on Earth’s surface impossible. Norman Myers was years from calling world attention to the destruction of tropical rainforests; when The Bomb was written, the possibility that those forests might be destroyed was essentially unknown. Also unknown were the threats of endocrine-disrupting contaminants. The Bomb also should have paid attention to the potential for resource wars. The 1967 Israeli-Arab war, partly over water, and the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars over fossil fuels may be precursors of many more resource wars with similarly intimate overpopulation connections.
There were of course also flaws in The Population Bomb’s analysis of known threats. The first lines of the Prologue (p. 11) proved to be among the most troublesome in the book: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." We are often asked about the famines The Bomb predicted, as if the last four decades were a period of abundant food for all. Although hunger became less newsworthy as humanity did try to ameliorate the worst famines, they nonetheless were essentially continuous in parts of Africa. Perhaps 300 million people overall have died of hunger and hunger-related diseases since 1968. But the famines were smaller than our reading of the agricultural literature at the time had led us to anticipate. That was largely because of the medium-term success of the "green revolution," the export of high-yielding grain technology to poor nations. The analysis of the food situation in The Population Bomb was thus wrong in that it underestimated the impact of the green revolution. At the same time, it did correctly recognize that serious ecological risks would accompany the spread of that revolution.
Partly due to the message of The Population Bomb, there has been a highly desirable decline in birthrates in much of the world, but the depressing prospect is that some 2.5 billion people will be added to the population before growth stops and (we hope) a slow decline begins. Those additional people will have a disproportionately negative impact on our life-support systems. Our ancestors naturally farmed the richest soils and used the most accessible resources first. Now significant amounts of those soils have been eroded away or paved over, and farmers are increasingly forced to turn to marginal land to grow food. Instead of extracting rich ores on or near the surface, deeper and much poorer deposits must be mined and refined today, at ever greater environmental cost. Water and petroleum must come from lower quality sources, deeper wells, or the latter often from far beneath the ocean, and must be transported over longer distances. The environmental and resource impacts of future population growth will dwarf those of the past.
In the face of these problems, humanity seems paralyzed on many fronts, but especially in confronting issues of population and consumption. There is a growing movement to initiate a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB) to globally examine and publicly discuss the failures of cultural evolution to direct society towards sustainability. The population bomb is returning to public prominence, but it remains to be seen whether anything effective and humane will be done about it.
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