Oxfam America: Paris Forum: Millstone or Milestone? A slew of competing objectives and incentives mean that most aid is not spent on poor people, or in the poorest countries, and rarely responds straightforwardly to recipient demands (see box 1). The past half-century has witnessed the proliferation of official donors, out of all proportion to any increases in aid, creating an increasingly confused situation where the costs of coordination have steadily grown as the benefits to any single agency have diminished.

Oxfam America: Paris Forum: Millstone or Milestone? During the Cold War, this system mutated into a Babel of agencies, each with their own
projects and programmes, that are driven by a muddle of geopolitical, commercial and development objectives.
This legacy persists today. Aid is allocated inconsistently across sectors and countries, with much – perhaps most – of it spent in the donor countries on overpriced and inappropriate goods and services. Donor demands for demonstrable results and accountability have driven the creation of parallel systems for planning, implementing and reporting of projects and programmes. Byzantine donor procedures and conditions have distorted incentives and systems in aid dependent countries, and undermined local capacity, hindering with one hand where they have helped with the other.

Oxfam America: Paris Forum: Millstone or Milestone?First and foremost, they need to spend aid where it’s needed, on poverty reduction – rather than channel it to their own consultancy and infrastructure industries, and geopolitical allies. Cutting the red tape and intrusive conditions that accompany aid, using countries’ own systems and procedures, delivering what’s promised on time, and practising what is preached about transparency would together transform the impact of aid on poverty. The need for these changes is well understood. So far, it is political commitment rather than analysis that has been in short supply.

CNN.com - Most aid wasted, say agencies - Feb 28, 2005: "'First and foremost, they need to spend aid where it is needed -- on poverty reduction -- rather than channel it to their own consultancy and infrastructure industries and geopolitical allies,' the report said."

SciDev.Net: "A third change is the emergence of new arrangements that seek to create a market for 'international public goods' required principally by developing countries. For example, although new biomedical knowledge is needed to address diseases that mainly affect developing countries, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS, the financial circumstances of many such countries means that there is insufficient potential profit to be made for private companies to be willing to take the financial risks of developing vaccines on their own.
Yet the experience and scientific capabilities of private companies in developing drugs is essential for new and successful vaccines. As a result, new mechanisms have emerged, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. These seek to create public-private partnerships (PPPs) that can mobilise the very best of international scientific expertise (even if the science on which these new partnerships are based is highly segmented), while at the same time providing the economic and financial incentives essential to secure private investment."

SciDev.Net: "A second critical change has been the transformation of our understanding of the way that knowledge is created, acquired, assimilated, used and diffused, by both enterprises and institutions such as hospitals and universities. Thirty years ago, it was widely assumed that there was a linear process leading from basic to applied research, then to design, to development, and finally to production. Each such step often had its own institutional arrangements or departments within enterprises and institutions.
This linear approach has now largely been abandoned in favour of a much more systemic approach. Many large corporations have merged their research activities with production departments. Networks linking scientific and technical activities both within and between institutions have become commonplace, including new forms of interaction between universities and business enterprises, and both within and between countries. "

SciDev.Net: "The first and most significant change has been the spread of globalisation. This has brought both new opportunities and new threats for the application of science and technology to the prospects of developing countries.
Fundamental changes are also taking place in the nature of the knowledge used in innovation. This in turn is leading to increasing specialisation by organisations engaged in different aspects of the innovation process.
There is, for example, a new international division of labour in which science-based production companies now frequently carry out research and development in one country, do design work in another, establish production facilities in a third, and manage global sales from a fourth."

Press Review for March 04, 2005: In Paris, Rich Countries Decide To Better Coordinate Development Ai China's urban population will reach 1.1 billion people by 2050 if the nation can remain on course to become a "high income country" in accordance with international norms, state press said Friday. "The only way to eventually solve China's problems in agriculture and rural areas is to reduce the farming population by getting them to move into the cities," Xinhua news agency said, citing a newly released report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Such a development would mean that some 10 to 12 million farmers must move into urban areas annually in a migratory process that is expected to cost up to 16 trillion yuan ($1.9 trillion), or twice China's GDP in 2000, it said. According to statistics from the World Bank, the average rate of urbanization in high-, medium- and low-income countries were 75 percent, 62 percent and 30 percent respectively

Amazon.com: Books: Powerdown : Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World: "If the collapse of civilization as we know it is inevitable , perhaps, as Heinberg suggests, the best course for us is the preservation of books, the arts, etc., for use later in a post-collapse society. The sustainable energy program that Heinberg and many others suggest that we should pursue with utmost urgency seems unlikely to occur until the American people are faced with a severe oil shortage and massive price increases. Then the politicians will be forced to take real and responsible action. In the meantime we seem to be in a period of nearly endless resource wars with hundreds of billions of dollars each year diverted to this losing cause that indeed should be spent on alternate energy sources, better highways, and better health care, for all Americans. Considering the vast amounts we are spending in this overseas war effort, perhaps the terrorists have already won! "

Amazon.com: Books: Powerdown : Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World: "As Heinberg writes, Bush and his followers are incompetent, with their belligerent foreign policy, but Heinberg does give Bush credit for recognizing the looming oil depletion problem on our horizon. Heinberg writes in detail of all of this, saying that instead of using the war to solve this problem we should instead be cooperating with other countries and spending the vast sums of money we are wasting on the war on alternate energy sources. "

EnergyBulletin.net | Meditations on Collapse (a review of Jared Diamond's book): "What, then, are Diamond's 'reasons for hope'? He offers only two: first, that our problems are, in principle at least, solvable; and second, that environmental thinking has become more common in recent years. But for hope to be realized, he says, modern societies will have to make good choices in two areas. We will need 'courageous, successful long-term planning,' which, he says, is indeed being undertaken by some governments and political leaders, at least some of the time. What Diamond doesn't mention is that the single instance of long-term planning that might have made all the difference to the survival of our civilization-a sustained choice by the US to wean itself from fossil fuels, beginning in the 1970s at the time of the first oil shocks-was not followed through; as a result, economic crises and resource wars are now virtually assured."

EnergyBulletin.net | Meditations on Collapse (a review of Jared Diamond's book): "problem is not merely that politicians are being bought and sold by corporations (this has been going on for decades), but that the entire system has been hijacked by partisans who pride themselves on making decisions solely on the basis of ideology and in supreme disdain for 'reality.' At the same time, the US electoral system has been eviscerated and commandeered by a single party (using various forms of systematic fraud that have now become endemic), so that a peaceful rectification of the situation by a vote of the people has become virtually impossible. Moreover, the American media have been so cowed and co-opted by the dominant party that most of the citizenry is blissfully unaware of its plight and is thus extremely unlikely to vigorously oppose the current trends. Diamond shows some limited awareness of this truly horrifying state of affairs, and he realizes that wise political leadership would be essential to the avoidance of collapse. Yet he refuses to draw the obvious conclusion: the most powerful of the world's current leaders are every bit as irrational as the befuddled kings and chiefs who brought the Maya and Easter Islanders to their ruin."

EnergyBulletin.net | Meditations on Collapse (a review of Jared Diamond's book): "3. Averting collapse would require changes that must be championed and partly implemented by political leaders: unprecedented levels of national and international cooperation would be needed in order to allocate essential resources in order to avert deadly competition for them as they become scarce, and our economic and monetary systems would have to be reformed despite pressure from the entrenched interests of wealthy elites. "

EnergyBulletin.net | Meditations on Collapse (a review of Jared Diamond's book): " In his book The Limits of Business Development and Economic Growth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), business strategist Mats Larsson makes the point that most of technology and business development in the past has had as its goal the reduction of time and cost in manufacturing. But nothing can be done at less than no time or at less than no cost. He cites the example of the printing and distribution of books and other written media: with these, Gutenberg famously reduced time and cost. Now, the Internet enables the electronic reproduction and distribution of books, films, and music at almost no cost and in almost no time. Similarly, labor cost in China is probably now at close to the absolute theoretical minimum. Larsson's conclusion is that economic growth is perilously close to its ultimate bounds, even when resource constraints are not factored into the calculation."

EnergyBulletin.net | Meditations on Collapse (a review of Jared Diamond's book): "At least four independent studies now forecast that the global oil peak is likely to occur as soon as 2005 and probably before 2010, which means that there will not be enough time to invest in replacement energy sources before the decline begins; nor can we be assured that adequate replacement energy sources exist. In the estimation of a growing chorus of informed observers, the oil peak is likely to be a trigger for global economic crisis and the outbreak of a series of devastating resource wars."

EnergyBulletin.net | Meditations on Collapse (a review of Jared Diamond's book): "Indeed, Diamond predictably devotes the last section of his last chapter to 'reasons for hope,' leaving the reader with evidence for thinking that collapse will not occur in our own instance after all. This excuses him from asking a question that appears to be tugging at more minds, and with more urgency, every day: What if it's already too late? Yes, if collapse can be averted, we should of course be working toward that end. But suppose for a moment that we have passed the point of no return, and that some form of collapse is now inevitable. What should we be doing in that case?"

EnergyBulletin.net | Meditations on Collapse (a review of Jared Diamond's book): "Diamond's essential message-that our very persistence as a civilized society may depend upon well-led efforts to reduce the negative impact of our economic processes upon nature-is one that more people desperately need to hear. The author artfully skewers classic one-liner objections such as, 'The environment has to be balanced against the economy,' 'Technology will solve our problems,' and 'If we exhaust one resource, we can always switch to some other resource meeting the same need.' Collapse draws the reader into rich and fascinating discussions of specific modern instances in which collapse in some form already has occurred, is occurring, or is likely to occur-Rwanda, Haiti, and Montana-showing in each instance how political and economic events, emerging from underlying environmental crises and constraints, can lead to economic reversal, social disintegration, or even genocide."

EnergyBulletin.net | Meditations on Collapse (a review of Jared Diamond's book): "Diamond argues that our modern global industrial society is creating some of the very same sorts of environmental problems that caused ancient societies to fail, plus four new ones: 'human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages and full human utilization of the earth's photosynthetic capacity.' Echoing the conclusions of the Limits to Growth study of 1972, Diamond notes that many of these problems are likely to 'become globally critical within the next few decades.'"

EnergyBulletin.net | Meditations on Collapse (a review of Jared Diamond's book): "'Despite these varying proximate causes of abandonments, all were ultimately due to the same fundamental challenge: people living in fragile and difficult environments, adopting solutions that were brilliantly successful and understandable in the short run, but that failed or else created fatal problems in the long run, when people became confronted with external environmental changes or human-caused environmental changes that cities without written histories and without archaeologists could not have anticipated.'"

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human RaceIf the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering façade, and that have so far eluded us?

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race: "'Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years,' says Armelagos, 'but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive.'"

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race: "For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It�s a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it�s nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive."

Jared Diamond on The Paula Gordon Show: "Biology and geography (not superior humans) determined who domesticated animals and plants, who developed what technology and who could survive the diseases that evolved alongside domesticated animals. "

People's Daily Online -- Full text of Human Rights Record of the US in 2004: "The United States is the No. 1 military power in the world, and its military spending has kept shooting up. Its fiscal 2005 defense budget hit a historical high of 422 billion US dollars, an increase of 21 billion dollars over fiscal 2004. As the biggest arms dealer in the world, the United States has made a fortune out of war. Its transactions of conventional weapons exceeded 14.5 billion dollars in 2003, up 900 million dollars year-on-year and accounting for 56.7 percent of the total sales worldwide."

People's Daily Online -- Full text of Human Rights Record of the US in 2004: "According to a report of the Wall Street Journal on June 15, 2004, a study on the fall of 2003 by Arthur Kennickell of the Board of Governor of the Federal Reserve System showed that the nation's wealthiest 1 percent owned 53 percent of all the stocks held by families or individuals, and 64 percent of the bonds. They control more than a third of the nation's wealth. ( US Led a Resurgence Last Year Among Millionaires World-Wide, The Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2004). In Washington D.C., the top 20 percent of the city's households have 31 times the average income of the 20 percent at the bottom. "

People's Daily Online -- Full text of Human Rights Record of the US in 2004: "In the elections, political parties and interest groups not only donated money for their favorite candidates, but also directly spent funds on maximizing their influence upon the elections. In Maryland, some corporate bosses donated as much as 130,000 US dollars. In return, the candidates after being elected would serve the interests of big political donators. The Baltimore Sun called this 'Buying Power' (see 'Buying Power', The Baltimore Sun, April 5, 2004). Due to the fact that local judges in 38 states need to be elected, quite a number of candidates began campaign advertising and looking for big donators. "

People's Daily Online -- Full text of Human Rights Record of the US in 2004: "In the elections, political parties and interest groups not only donated money for their favorite candidates, but also directly spent funds on maximizing their influence upon the elections. In Maryland, some corporate bosses donated as much as 130,000 US dollars. In return, the candidates after being elected would serve the interests of big political donators. The Baltimore Sun called this 'Buying Power' (see 'Buying Power', The Baltimore Sun, April 5, 2004). Due to the fact that local judges in 38 states need to be elected, quite a number of candidates began campaign advertising and looking for big donators. "

Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias: "A new study has found that when it comes to U.S. media coverage of global warming , superficial balance�telling 'both' sides of the story�can actually be a form of informational bias. Despite the consistent assertions of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that human activities have had a 'discernible' influence on the global climate and that global warming is a serious problem that must be addressed immediately, 'he said/she said' reporting has allowed a small group of global warming skeptics to have their views greatly amplified. "

developpement durable:Depuis que le capitalisme est apparu et s’est traduit par un développement technique et matériel d’une rapidité sans précédent dans l’histoire de l’humanité, les formes du compromis entre capital, travail et Etat ont été très diverses : l’Etat peut se révéler prédateur et casser les mécanismes permettant l’accumulation, comme on le voit dans bien des pays en développement ; il peut aussi, avec la complicité du capital, mettre la capacité d’innovation du capitalisme au service d’une politique de puissance dévastatrice, comme l’histoire du siècle dernier nous l’a montré tragiquement ; il peut enfin déboucher sur un équilibre plus satisfaisant, quand l’action de l’Etat démocratique, associée au mouvement social librement organisé, contraint le capital à accorder des salaires plus élevés et des garanties sociales. Etabli au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans les pays riches, ce compromis dit « fordiste » a permis d’éviter que la dynamique inégalitaire du capitalisme ne détruise la société. Cet équilibre est aujourd’hui menacé par la mondialisation et la montée du néolibéralisme qui l’accompagne. Il reste néanmoins, même sous une forme dégradée, au cœur de notre modèle social et politique.

People's Daily Online -- China's divorce rate 21.2% up in 2004: "China saw 1.613 million couples divorced in 2004 while 8.341 million couples registered to marry that year, according to statistics of the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
Compared with the statistics of 2003, 282,000 more couples divorced with an increase rate of 21.2 percent while 227,000 more couples got married in 2004. "

In the 21st century there can be no effective power without legitimacy; in turn, globalization is ensuring that there can be no legitimacy without recognizing the inherently equal value of human beings across the globe. Together, the United States and the European Union account for about 55 percent of world GDP and two thirds of global military capability. Together, they are also a formidable source of ideas, art, culture, and science. But they can no longer be omnipotent. Their populations together represent less than 14 percent of the world population today and will account for no more than about 10 percent by 2020. This in itself should be sufficient to disqualify any argument that Europeans and Americans can simply rule the world. Legitimacy requires that it is the United Nations, not NATO, which must provide the framework for world security.2 The same sense of legitimacy requires that international economic institutions such as the IMF, World
Bank, and WTO be part of an architecture of global governance that takes into account the resources of the wealthy while providing sufficient
weight and decision-making power as well to the large populations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.The developing countries and their people
must perceive international economic institutions as also their own. The leadership of the United States and Europe is needed to build
global governance, and no one is questioning that they will have a determining weight for years to come in any institutional structure that can and will function at the global level.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Age of ancient humans reassessed: "Two skulls originally found in 1967 have been shown to be about 195,000 years old, making them the oldest modern human remains known to science. "

t r u t h o u t - Jared Diamond | The Ends of the World as We Know Them: "Do we have cause for hope? Many of my friends are pessimistic when they contemplate the world's growing population and human demands colliding with shrinking resources. But I draw hope from the knowledge that humanity's biggest problems today are ones entirely of our own making. Asteroids hurtling at us beyond our control don't figure high on our list of imminent dangers. To save ourselves, we don't need new technology: we just need the political will to face up to our problems of population and the environment. "

t r u t h o u t - Jared Diamond | The Ends of the World as We Know Them: "Could this happen in the United States? It's a thought that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by gated communities, guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. By doing these things, they lose the motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security and public schools. If conditions deteriorate too much for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out. Rioters eventually burned the palaces of Maya kings and tore down the statues of Easter Island chiefs; they have also already threatened wealthy districts in Los Angeles twice in recent decades. " ...In contrast, the elite in 17th-century Japan, as in modern Scandinavia and the Netherlands, could not ignore or insulate themselves from broad societal problems.... In this New Year, we Americans have our own painful reappraisals to face. Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can't continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the rest of the world. ... Historically, oceans protected us from external threats; we stepped back from our isolationism only temporarily during the crises of two world wars. Now, technology and global interconnectedness have robbed us of our protection. In recent years, we have responded to foreign threats largely by seeking short-term military solutions at the last minute.

null: "What lessons can we draw from history? The most straightforward: take environmental problems seriously. They destroyed societies in the past, and they are even more likely to do so now. If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected just a few neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means that any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. Just think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped the United States today.
Other lessons involve failures of group decision-making. There are many reasons why past societies made bad decisions, and thereby failed to solve or even to perceive the problems that would eventually destroy them. One reason involves conflicts of interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance, the pig farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and Iceland) can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of society. Another is the pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival, as when fishermen overfish the stocks on which their livelihoods ultimately depend.
History also teaches us two deeper lessons about what separates successful societies from those heading toward failure. A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions. That's why Maya k"

t r u t h o u t - Jared Diamond | The Ends of the World as We Know Them: "What lessons can we draw from history? The most straightforward: take environmental problems seriously. They destroyed societies in the past, and they are even more likely to do so now. If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected just a few neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means that any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. Just think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped the United States today. "

t r u t h o u t - Jared Diamond | The Ends of the World as We Know Them: "When it comes to historical collapses, five groups of interacting factors have been especially important: the damage that people have inflicted on their environment; climate change; enemies; changes in friendly trading partners; and the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts. That's not to say that all five causes play a role in every case. Instead, think of this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined, but whose relative importance varies from case to case. "

Edge 114: "Rational behavior involving clashes of interest also arises when the consumer has no long-term stake in preserving the resource. For example, much commercial harvesting of tropical rainforests today is carried out by international logging companies, which lease land in one country, cut down all the rainforest in that country, and then move on to the next country. The international loggers have correctly perceived that, once they have paid for the lease, their interests are best served by clear-cutting the rainforest on their leased land. In that way, loggers have destroyed most of the forest of the Malay Peninsula, then of Borneo, then of the Solomon Islands and Sumatra, now of the Philippines, and coming up soon of New Guinea, the Amazon, and the Congo Basin. In that case, the bad consequences are borne by the next generation, but that next generation cannot vote or complain."

Edge 114: "One particular form of such clashes of interest has received the name 'tragedy of commons.' That refers to a situation in which many consumers are harvesting a communally owned resource (such as fish in the ocean, or grass in common pastures), and in which there is no effective regulation of how much of the resource each consumer can draw off. Under those circumstances, each consumer can correctly reason 'If I don't catch that fish or graze that grass, some other fisherman or herder will anyway, so it makes no sense for me to be careful about overfishing or overharvesting.' The correct rational behavior is to harvest before the next consumer can, even though the end result is depletion or extinction of the resource, and hence harm for society as a whole."

Edge 114: "The third step in my road map of failure is perhaps the commonest and most surprising one: a society's failure even to try to solve a problem that it has perceived.
Such failures frequently arise because of what economists term 'rational behavior' arising from clashes of interest between people. Some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior that is harmful for other people. Economists term such behavior 'rational,' even while acknowledging that morally it may be naughty. The perpetrators are often motivated and likely to get away with their rational bad behavior, because the winners from the bad status quo are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated because they receive big, certain, immediate profits, while the losers are diffuse (the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals) and are unmotivated because they receive only small, uncertain, distant profits from undoing the rational bad behavior of the minority."

Edge 114: "My UCLA undergraduates, and Joseph Tainter as well, have identified a very surprising question; namely, failures of group decision-making on the part of whole societies, or governments, or smaller groups, or businesses, or university academic departments. The question of failure of group decision-making is similar to questions of failures of individual decision-making. Individuals make bad decisions; they enter bad marriages, they make bad investments, their businesses fail. But in failures of group decision-making there are some additional factors, notably conflicts of interest among the members of the group that don't arise with failures of individual decision-making. This is obviously a complex question; there's no single answer to it. There are no agreed-on answers."

Edge 114: "What I'm going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group decision making. I'll divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat fuzzily delineated categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem. Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem. Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so. While all this talking about reasons for failure and collapses of society may seem pessimistic, the flip side is optimistic: namely, successful decision-making. Perhaps if we understand the reasons why groups make bad decisions, we can use that knowledge as a check list to help groups make good decisions."

Foreign Affairs - The Choice - Donald Kennedy: "environmental problems 1 through 12, a five-point framework of major factors contributing to collapse, the five kinds of failure in group decision-making"

we must work towards a set of practical proposals we must work towards a set of practical proposals that will make the democratic governance of globalization possible and provide us with security and justice both in the political sphere and the economic sphere of the international system. “Embedded Liberalism”4 must be replaced by “Embedded Globalization.” There will only be progress toward such global governance if it is grounded in democratic values and practice, respectful of cultural diversity, avoidant of the dangers of gigantism and bureaucratism by leaving what can be decided locally to local levels of public policy, and able to gain the allegiance of majorities across the globe.

Worldwatch Institute: Global Security: Trends and Facts: Population and Security: In most cases, “demographic risk factors” do not occur in isolation. Rather, they interact with each other and with nondemographic variables, including historic ethnic tensions, unresponsive governance, and weak institutions, to produce stresses that challenge government leadership and the capacity of countries to function effectively.

Worldwatch Institute: Global Security: Trends and Facts: Population and Security: "Many regions of the world are experiencing rapid declines in both the quality and the availability of critical natural resources. More than 30 countries�most of them in Africa and the Middle East�have now fallen below even the most conservative benchmarks for scarcity of either cropland or renewable fresh water. While some countries have reached this situation due to a combination of harsh climate or terrain and a rapidly growing population, others are experiencing these scarcities almost exclusively as a result of population growth.
Faced with this reality, analysts have expressed growing concern about the inevitability of �resource wars� in the coming decades, particularly over fresh water. For the near future, however, the greatest risk will likely be population-influenced resource disputes not between countries but within them. One source of rising tension is the allocation of fresh water among diverse local users�particularly among farmers and the more politically influential and growing set of urban and industrial users. "

Worldwatch Institute: Global Security: Trends and Facts: Population and Security: Since 1950, the world’s urban population has more than quadrupled, from 733 million to just over 3 billion, and it is now growing faster than world population as a whole. While urbanization is largely a positive demographic trend, the remarkable rates of growth that many developing-country cities have sustained in recent decades have helped to deplete city budgets, flood job markets, and challenge the adequacy of existing services and infrastructure. Crowded cities can harbor intense economic and political competition among diverse groups and become a locus for ethnic and religious conflict.

Worldwatch Institute: Global Security: Trends and Facts: Population and Security: “The very features that have made cities in the industrial world prosperous—a youthful population, ethnic and religious diversity, a middle class, and proximity to political power—are potential sources of volatility for many surging and economically depressed cities in the developing world.”

Worldwatch Institute: Global Security: Trends and Facts: Population and Security: "Many of these young people face dismal prospects. Over the past decade, youth unemployment rates have risen to more than double the overall global unemployment rate. In the absence of a secure livelihood, discontented youth may resort to violence or turn to insurgent organizations as a source of social mobility and self-esteem. Recent studies show that countries with large youth bulges were roughly two-and-a-half times more likely to experience an outbreak of civil conflict during the 1990s than countries below this benchmark. "

Worldwatch Institute: Global Security: Trends and Facts: Population and Security Over the past few decades, countries from every major political and religious background and in virtually every region have experienced momentous change in the size and structure of their populations. Yet the global demographic transition—the transformation of populations from short lives and large families to longer lives and small families—remains woefully incomplete. Roughly one third of all countries, including many in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia, are still in the early stages of the transition, with fertility rates above four children per woman.