population carrying capacity
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VIDEO: Why it’s time to think about human extinction with Dr David Suzuki
The environmentalist, activist, professor of genetics and science broadcaster hits us with some home truths about what our future will look like if we continue to live the way we have been.
How the 1% are preparing for the apocalypse.
The threat of global annihilation may feel as present as it did during the Cold War, but today's high-security shelters could not be more different from their 20th-century counterparts.
Say "doomsday bunker" and most people would imagine a concrete room filled with cots and canned goods.
The threat of global annihilation may feel as present as it did during the Cold War, but today's high-security shelters could not be more different from their 20th-century counterparts.
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Rado True Designers' Series
A number of companies around the world are meeting a growing demand for structures that protect from any risk, whether it's a global pandemic, an asteroid, or World War III -- while also delivering luxurious amenities.
"Your father or grandfather's bunker was not very comfortable," says Robert Vicino, a real estate entrepreneur and CEO of Vivos, a company he founded that builds and manages high-end shelters around the world.
"They were gray. They were metal, like a ship or something military. And the truth is mankind cannot survive long-term in such a Spartan, bleak environment."
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The Oppidum, Czech Republic
The Oppidum, Czech Republic
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1/22 – The Oppidum, Czech Republic
The demand for designer bunkers has grown rapidly in recent years. Credit: the oppidum
Doomsday demand
Many of the world's elite, including hedge fund managers, sports stars and tech executives (Bill Gates is rumored to have bunkers at all his properties) have chosen to design their own secret shelters to house their families and staff.
Gary Lynch, general manager of Texas-based Rising S Company, says 2016 sales for their custom high-end underground bunkers grew 700% compared to 2015, while overall sales have grown 300% since the November US presidential election alone.
Related:
Apocalypse now: Our incessant desire to picture the end of the world
The company's plate steel bunkers, which are designed to last for generations, can hold a minimum of one year's worth of food per resident and withstand earthquakes.
But while some want to bunker down alone, others prefer to ride out the apocalypse in a community setting that offers an experience a bit closer to the real world.
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A secret bunker in South-East London, built to protect key government employees during a nuclear winter, has been transformed into a $4 million luxury residence. Credit: JDM estate agents
Developers of community shelters like these often acquire decommissioned military bunkers and missile silos built by the United States or Soviet governments -- sites that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build today.
The fortified structures are designed to withstand a nuclear strike and come equipped with power systems, water purification systems, blast valves, and Nuclear-Biological-Chemical (NBC) air filtration.
Most include food supplies for a year or more, and many have hydroponic gardens to supplement the rations. The developers also work to create well-rounded communities with a range of skills necessary for long-term survival, from doctors to teachers.
Vicino says Vivos received a flurry of interest in its shelters around the 2016 election from both liberals and conservatives, and completely sold out of spaces in its community shelters in the past few weeks.
Designer ark
One of those shelters, Vivos xPoint, is near the Black Hills of South Dakota, and consists of 575 military bunkers that served as an Army Munitions Depot until 1967.
Presently being converted into a facility that will accommodate about 5,000 people, the interiors of each bunker are outfitted by the owners at a cost of between $25,000 to $200,000 each. The price depends on whether they want a minimalist space or a home with high-end finishes.
The compound itself will be equipped with all the comforts of a small town, including a community theater, classrooms, hydroponic gardens, a medical clinic, a spa and a gym.
Vivos Europa One in Germany
Vivos Europa One in Germany Credit: © Copyright Terravivos.com
For clients looking for something further afield and more luxurious, the company also offers Vivos Europa One, billed as a "modern day Noah's Ark" in a former Cold War-era munitions storage facility in Germany.
The structure, which was carved out of solid bedrock, offers 34 private residences, each starting at 2,500 square feet, with the option to add a second story for a total of 5,000 square feet.
Stunning mural appears in secret forest
The units will be delivered empty and each owner will have the space renovated to suit their own tastes and needs, choosing from options that include screening rooms, private pools and gyms.
Vicino compares the individual spaces to underground yachts, and even recommends that owners commission the same builders and designers that worked on their actual vessels.
"Most of these people have high-end yachts, so they already have the relationship and they know the taste, fit, and finish that they want," he explains.
The vast complex includes a tram system to transport residents throughout the shelter, where they can visit its restaurants, theater, coffee shops, pool and game areas.
"We have all the comforts of home, but also the comforts that you expect when you leave your home," Vicino adds.
Survival Condo in Kansas
Survival Condo in Kansas Credit: Courtesy of Survival Condo
Nuclear hardened homes
Developer Larry Hall's Survival Condo in Kansas utilizes two abandoned Atlas missile silos built by the US Army Corps of Engineers to house warheads during the early 1960s.
Super-rich building luxury doomsday bunkers
"Our clients are sold on the unique advantage of having a luxury second home that also happens to be a nuclear hardened bunker," says Hall, who is already starting work on a second Survival Condo in another silo on site.
"This aspect allows our clients to invest in an appreciating asset as opposed to an expense."
The Survival Condo has several different layouts, from a 900-square-foot half-floor residence to a two-level, 3,600-square-foot penthouse that starts at $4.5 million.
Owners have access to their homes and the facilities at anytime, whether a disaster is imminent or they just want to get away from it all, and the complex features a pool, general store, theater, bar and library.
The condo association sets the rules for the community, and during an emergency, owners would be required to work four hours a day.
Long-term luxury
If you prefer to spend the end of days solo, or at least with hand-selected family and friends, you may prefer to consider The Oppidum in the Czech Republic, which is being billed as "the largest billionaire bunker in the world."
The top-secret facility, once a joint project between the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), was built over 10 years beginning in 1984.
An interior shot of the Oppidum in Czech Republic
An interior shot of the Oppidum in Czech Republic Credit: Courtesy of the Oppidum
The site now includes both an above-ground estate and a 77,000-square-foot underground component. While the final product will be built out to the owner's specifications, the initial renderings include an underground garden, swimming pool, spa, cinema and wine vault.
While many might see the luxury amenities at these facilities as unnecessary, the developers argue that these features are critical to survival.
"These shelters are long-term, a year or more," Vicino says. "It had better be comfortable."
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Yolanda Sun
Analysis: Why we must talk about population.
Reading David Roberts’ recent explanation of why he never writes on overpopulation, I felt compelled to reply.
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A Response to David Roberts’ Self-Censorship on Overpopulation
Reading David Roberts’ recent explanation of why he never writes on overpopulation, I felt compelled to reply. While Roberts made a set of superficially convincing arguments, ultimately he’s wrong not to focus directly on the population pressures we’re facing. Not confronting population head-on is like looking out the window of a plane and realizing you’re about to crash but refusing to tell the other passengers about the impending crash. Instead you spend your remaining moments convincing people that it’s “empowering” to wear their seat belts. That it’s a good for their health to put their laptops away and hold their head between their legs. Sure, you’ll convince some—and those you do convince might be better off—but you’ll convince far fewer as the sense of urgency is gone.
Reducing the global population is essential in addressing humanity’s impact on the planet—along with reducing overall consumption (affluence) and the use of unsustainable technologies (all variables in the I = PAT equation). And after the missteps of the Sierra Club and some governments, Roberts can be excused for why he feels it may be smarter to simply address the P in the equation indirectly by focusing on women empowerment and providing good access to family planning (and I would add providing comprehensive sexuality education to all children, as Mona Kaidbey and Robert Engelman and discuss in EarthEd: Rethinking Education on a Changing Planet). But that won’t be enough.
Stabilizing population is urgent. The goal should not simply be to nudge along a little less growth so population stabilizes at 9 billion rather than 9.5 or 10 billion. Instead, we need to make a long term plan to get population back to a manageable range. How far to scale population back, as noted 10 years ago by Roberts in another essay on why he doesn’t talk about population, “is up for debate, but probably a lot.” Some, including Paul Ehrlich, have suggested the ideal population range is around 1-3 billion, depending on how badly we have damaged the Earth’s systems and how much we want to consume moving forward. If Roberts is serious when he says he wants poor countries to be less poor “than their forebearers” then that means the Affluence variable in the I = PAT equation will increase. Yes, affluence elsewhere must shrink in accordance (and I wholeheartedly agree that wealth inequities need to be grappled with as does consumerism more broadly), but our population—particularly the 2-3 billion of us in the global consumer class—is completely overwhelming Earth’s systems.
One-Planet Living
In Is Sustainability Still Possible?, Jennie Moore and William Rees explored what a one-planet lifestyle would look like (in a world with 7 billion not 9.5 billion) and their analysis shows that if we lived within Earth’s limits, gone would be the days of driving personal vehicles, flying, eating meat, living in large homes, and essentially the entire consumer society that we know today. Frankly, that’s fine with me, considering the ecological, social and health costs of modern society—but most will not accept that. And considering that—and that policymakers and economists and even most environmentalists still believe further economic growth is possible and even beneficial—it’s increasingly hard to imagine any scenario other than a horrifying ecological collapse in our future.
That is another reason why we should prioritize population degrowth. Every million people not born is a million not to die when climate change brings about terrible flooding, droughts, disasters and famines it will in the increasingly near future. And please don’t take this to the absurd extreme that, ‘well, let’s just stop reproducing altogether and then there’ll be no suffering.’ I’m not saying people should have no children at all (here’s another Tucker Carlson video for you to enjoy, this one with the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement). But people should have far fewer—particularly in overdeveloped countries like the United States. I personally chose to have one child, even though both my wife and I would like to have a second. But I deemed it morally irresponsible, or in the words of bioethicist Travis Rieder probably not ‘honorable’ to have a second, particularly knowing what’s in store for our kids in the coming century, and knowing that by living in the United States, I am a ravenous consumer no matter how hard I try to be otherwise.
Historical Efforts
Roberts also selectively focuses on history to better make his point—providing examples of the Sierra Club brouhaha but not the work of all the population organizations that helped shift population trends in a positive direction. And while there have certainly been tragic missteps—such as India’s efforts at forced sterilization—there have been unqualified successes. In his book Countdown, Alan Weissman describes the amazing case study of Iran, which through a focused campaign, reduced population growth dramatically. Yes, the primary tactics were to provide free family planning and education, which I don’t think anyone will disagree are very smart tactics, but the government was clear in its goal and the urgency—and also supplemented its efforts with social marketing to create a smaller “normal” family size, including advertisements on TV, banners, and billboards that “One is good. Two is enough.” Similar successes can be seen in the efforts of the Population Media Center that uses soap operas to shift norms around population size.
While I don’t know if the numbers were or could ever be estimated, efforts like Iran’s and PMC’s, like Stephanie Mills committing so publicly to never have children at the height of her reproductive years, and Paul Ehrlich capturing the public’s attention with his warnings about the population bomb, all of this helped focus our collective attention on population issues in the 1960’s and 70’s and helped slow population growth.
Ultimately, Ehrlich, with as much criticism as he receives, was not wrong about the population bomb. His warnings and the efforts they helped trigger—along with the Green Revolution—allowed us to extend the fuse. But in all those years, the fissile material has also been building, and when the bomb finally explodes, the shockwaves will be felt around the world. In fact, even Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution warned, “Unless progress with agricultural yields remains very strong,” which Borlaug noted cannot continue indefinitely unless we cut down our forests, which he implored us not to do, “the next century will experience sheer human misery that, on a numerical scale, will exceed the worst of everything that has come before.”
Immigration
As for immigrants—sure it probably wasn’t the best idea for Professor Phil Cafaro to go on Tucker Carlson’s show to support anti-immigrant sentiments, but Cafaro’s point is valid, even if uncomfortable and confusing for progressives. Until America has a one-planet footprint, all new immigrants are going to increase global impacts because they’ll consume more in the US than in their home countries. (This even suggests all adoption ideally should be domestic, which is a-whole-nother can of worms!)
That’s not to say we should ban immigration or foreign adoption, but it means we should have a clear plan around immigration (along with one on reducing American consumption) and we should offset immigration by reductions in births of Americans (easier done if we have a population goal in mind for the United States). This offset is essentially what’s happening in European countries that have smaller than replacement rate birthrates—but the problem there is that this cultivates anti-immigrant sentiments as white European populations suddenly darken. With America at least, we have always been an immigrant nation so theoretically we could adapt, though obviously the current administration and its supporters are fomenting the same fears and biases that Americans have shown since its early days, as waves of immigrants from Ireland, Southern Europe, China, and Mexico started arriving.
Setting Goals
Is it so scary or morally fraught to start advocating for a smaller global population—or at the very least start talking openly about population challenges? Is it impossible to imagine nurturing a one-child family size norm in the US and Europe (where each child’s impact is many times greater than a child’s in a developing country)? One is good. Two is enough. Three is too many.
As Roberts notes, momentum is already bringing us toward smaller family sizes—but that same momentum is also bringing us toward higher consumption rates. Some smart social marketing and celebrity modeling could bring us toward population reductions quicker. Breaking the myth that sole children are spoiled and lonely—as Bill McKibben did in his great book Maybe One—would be a good place to start. As would showing the economic and environmental benefits of having one child. And so would making it cool to have one child. Perhaps that’s the marketing slogan we use: “It’s Hip to Have One.”
And let developing countries shape their own population targets so as to avoid the obvious criticisms of imperialism (maybe it’s even time for a Framework Convention on Population Growth to go along with the Framework Convention on Climate Change—so all countries can feel ownership in this effort). But clearly, population stabilization is as important in developing countries—not because of the immediate effects on human impact (I), but because as Earth systems finally break down after the decades of abuse we’ve delivered, people are going to retreat from their flooding towns, their drought stricken lands, their war-torn regions, and they’re going to have to go somewhere. And then the right-wing extremists will say “we told you so,” waving their copies of Camp of Saints in their hands as they do, and be perfectly poised to take over more government institutions—and that may be the population crisis’ scariest outcome of all.
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Investor Jeremy Grantham is worried about the world.
“It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.“
BARRON'S MFQ
Jeremy Grantham is Worried About the World
The veteran investor now runs a $900 million foundation focused on protecting the environment. What he supports, where he invests.
By SARAH MAX
Oct. 6, 2017 11:42 p.m. ET
Tony Luong for Barron's
Investors know Jeremy Grantham as the chief investment strategist of GMO, the $77 billion Boston-based asset management firm he co-founded in 1977. The venerable value investor is praised for his prescient market calls, including predicting the 2000 and 2008 downturns. He also told investors to “reinvest when terrified” in a piece published in 2009 on the very day the market hit its postfinancial crisis low.
In environmental circles, Grantham, who just turned 79, is equally esteemed. In 1997 he and his wife, Hannelore, converted their foundation to focus exclusively on the environment. The $900 million Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment gives money to organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and World Wildlife Fund, and supports climate-related research and communication at four academic institutions. It has contributed to the training of more than a hundred Ph.Ds in climate-related work, and funded two Pulitzer-winning projects and one recipient of an Emmy. Last year Grantham, who is British, was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his philanthropic contributions to the environment.
As an investor, Grantham’s priority is earning the best return. Still, he says, it’s impossible to separate what he knows about the environment and how he thinks about risk and opportunity. “If you believe, as I do, that climate change is so severe that it’s an actual question about survival as a well functioning global society, then you know that I take it extremely seriously,” he says.
If we don’t solve climate change, he warns, “all the other things we are trying to protect and encourage are a waste of money and energy.”
Barron’s: What sparked your interest in climate change?
Grantham: Twenty-eight years ago, I had a series of fairly epic summer vacations with my wife and three kids. The first trip was in the Amazon, the Galapagos, and the Andes, and involved taking dugout canoes up rivers in pouring rain with my four-year-old daughter hiding under my poncho. The next one was in Rwanda, during a pause in the civil war, and on to Tanzania. The final one was to Borneo. We sailed up to the middle of nowhere and stayed in longhouses that had one visitor a year.
This exposed us to the masses of clear-cut forests and the interminable piles of logs lying along the side of the rivers. We all became increasingly obsessed by the significance of climate change and the damage to the environment.
What is one of your biggest concerns?
Acceleration. Carbon dioxide is going up at an increasing rate, with the three biggest increases occurring in the last three years; the climate is warming at an increasing rate; and the water is warming at an increasing rate; and therefore, the level at which oceans are rising is increasing at an accelerating rate. It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.
“It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.“ —Jeremy Grantham Tony Luong for Barron's
Tell us about your foundation.
Total annual giving runs about $25 million to $30 million. About 30% is in the U.K., where, all things being equal, research costs half as much as it does in the U.S.
We fund four climate-change institutes—at Imperial College, the London School of Economics, and Sheffield University, as well as a related investment at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
We give 20% to about a dozen small organizations engaged in communications. We allocate about 40% of our giving to some of the usual suspects, The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Wildlife Fund, and a fourth group called RARE, which is U.S.-based but spends everything abroad protecting the environment.
The remaining part is an army of 15 or 20 more specialized enterprises, one of which is based on population. Population is a massive problem, particularly in Africa. All the safety margins, the resilience of these countries, has been chewed up by having so many people. Resources are a threat in the long run. Overpopulation is a threat. Climate change interacts with all of them in a rather pernicious way.
What is the foundation’s approach to grant-making?
We try to look at critical areas for the future. We require that grantees are urgent in their style and have fire in their bellies. We are especially focused on areas that are important but haven’t yet been recognized—and where the need for speed is critical. We also look for important areas that are politically incorrect and have a hard time attracting money because they are so controversial—like population growth.
How does the foundation invest its assets?
We have $900 million spread across a family foundation, a public trust, and, to a substantially lesser degree, my personal assets. The three pieces are run as one with the help of Cambridge Associates [an investment consultant]. We have a stunningly large amount, about 45% of assets, in early-stage venture capital funds chosen by Cambridge.
We’ve got 35% in what I modestly call world-class, very conservative hedge funds, including GMO. The remaining 20% is invested by the foundation’s executive director, Ramsay Ravenel, and myself. About 12% is in emerging markets, 5% in cash, and 3% is in our GMO Resources IV [ticker: GOVIX] in 2013, and GMO Climate Change III [GCCHX].
How has your insight into climate change influenced your investment decisions at GMO?
I’m not doing any direct investing at GMO. For the last 10 years, I have spent my time thinking about the big picture—productivity, economic booms and busts, climate change, and resource limitations. But, as an investor, you can never know too much. I can’t separate how my investing instincts were affected by knowing a lot more about resource limitations and the effects of climate change. It was part of the background music, like everything else I know.
The two funds you mentioned, GMO Resources and GMO Climate Change, are for institutional investors. Tell us about them.
We launched Resources in 2013, and Climate Change this year. Lucas White is the portfolio manager of both funds. One of the advantages for the Resources fund is that, because resource prices are volatile, most investors hate them. Value managers who might normally buy them shy away; they outperform over time because they’re cheap. Meanwhile, these stocks tend to have a low correlation with most other investments.
How do you reconcile your views on climate change with investments in the Resources fund?
It’s complicated because the biggest resources are fossil fuels. New technology is an arrow aimed at the heart of fossil fuels; after a decent one or two years, the slow burn of green energy will substitute them away. They will have to manage a long, slow decline. [About 30% of the portfolio is in oil and gas, versus nearly 70% for most market-cap-weighted resource benchmarks.] We would expect over the next 10 years to be handsomely underweighted. That does not mean that there may not be a time when the fund will choose to invest.
And the Climate Change fund?
The goal is to make money by understanding the bewildering amount of change going on. We’re not pretending that every holding is ESG. Our job is to understand this rapidly changing world and make an attractive fund for clients who would like to be investing on the right side of climate change. For example, copper mining can be a dirty business, but it’s hugely critical for electric cars. [ Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) is one of the fund’s top holdings.]
Where else does it invest?
Clean energy is almost a third of the portfolio, including companies focused on solar and wind power, and storage. [The fund owns Vestas Wind Systems (VWS), First Solar (FSLR), and Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM), which mines lithium used for storage.]
Energy efficiency is 24% of the portfolio. One aspect of this is transportation, which includes companies that are making items to increase the efficiency of motors and cars themselves. It also includes energy efficiency in buildings, as well as diversified efficiency enterprises. [Two holdings, Schneider Electric (SU.France) and Eaton (ETN), have multiple businesses tied to energy efficiency.]
There is also a fair amount in timber, fish farming, and suppliers of farming materials and equipment, such as Deere [DE], right?
We have, by other people’s standards, a stunningly large allocation of more than 17% to agriculture.
Can technology help feed more people?
Technology in agriculture is much harder, because it comes up against the laws of physics. There is just so much energy you can get out of the sun if you are a plant. We have spent a few thousand years boosting that efficiency level. We are approaching a theoretical limit.
On top of that, you have to throw in the increasing effects of storms, droughts, and temperature. Higher temperatures carry more water vapor, 4% to 5% more up in the air than there used to be. You don’t get more storms, but when you get them, they’re heavier. If you chart the incidence of heavy storms, say one inch in an hour, you will find that they are doubly grown over the last 40 years. That is so obviously the case when you read the news.
What about new food sources or agricultural methods?
There is steady progress on agriculture and feeding the public. We may have to change what we eat. To take a very tough example for Westerners, insects are incredibly nutritious and much, much more efficient sources of energy than chicken. They’re eaten a lot in Africa and the East.
Fish are being overfished, but there are great opportunities in seaweed, which is entirely edible. Seaweed can grow 10 to 20 inches a day, four times faster than the fastest-growing land plant. In that context, the sea is amazingly underoptimized. We’ve squeezed the common grains as much as they can be squeezed, but there are plenty of secondary grains important in Africa and Asia that have much more productivity potential.
Humans have all the skills and technology required to have a perfectly recyclable world that doesn’t face imminent danger from climate change, and doesn’t have massive poverty. But we have chosen to go on a rather more chaotic and help-yourself route.
Capitalism does a brilliant job on millions of decisions balancing supply and demand and so on, but on a handful of issues, it seems, it is clearly ill-equipped to deal with the problem. How do you handle global overfishing? How do you handle long-term erosion of soil and the overdevelopment of underground water, each of which is owned by an individual farmer, or an individual? These require more global cooperation and more concrete internal cooperation, and thinking and planning.
Can capitalism help with some of that? Using ESG criteria to choose securities is becoming more common.
Interest in ESG isn’t necessarily because of the rush of blood to being good. It could be just good business. If you’re a producer of consumer goods, and people become worried about the plastics in your product, or botulism in your food, you lose business.
There’s quite a lot of work that suggests that people who are early movers on good behavior are demonstrating that they are simply thinking more about the future, how it will look, how it will play out over 10 or 15 years. A study by Harvard Business School concluded that in the past, the companies that were good on ESG did exactly that, and they were outperformers.
But the heavy lifting [in combating climate change] will still be technological. By the early stage of the next decade, solar and wind will be three cents per kilowatt hour and by the middle of next decade—which is just seven years away—it will be cheaper than the marginal cost of nuclear and coal. The cost of running [a coal plant] and mining will be more than building a solar plant or wind farm from ground zero.
When that point is reached you’re talking economics. People who would have stood their ground until the end of time will be eagerly signing up for solar farms, storage facilities, etc.
Thank you, Jeremy.
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‘We don’t exist’: Life inside Mongolia’s swelling slums.
A scarcity of affordable housing has pushed thousands of low-income residents to the fringes of Ulan Bator, where they struggle for food and water.
ULAN BATOR, Mongolia — The land beneath Dolgor Dashnyam’s home is wet and gritty and smells of decay. Here, atop one of Ulan Bator’s largest landfills, Ms. Dashnyam lives under a roof made of soggy mattresses. She spends her days rummaging through piles of gin bottles and discarded animal bones, picking up pieces of scrap metal to sell in order to buy water and bread.
Ms. Dashnyam, 55, was once an ambitious college graduate who dreamed of owning a farm and getting rich. But a scarcity of affordable housing has pushed her and thousands of low-income residents to the fringes of Ulan Bator, the city of 1.4 million that is Mongolia’s capital, where they struggle for basic necessities like food and clean water.
“Nobody cares about us,” said Ms. Dashnyam, who makes about $3 a day and says she has been unable to obtain government-subsidized housing. She was laid off from a job in farming. “We don’t exist.”
Hundreds of thousands of people have flocked to Ulan Bator in recent years, drawn by the promise of high-paying jobs and a path to the middle class. Many are fleeing harsh conditions in the countryside brought on by climate change, with droughts and bitter winters devastating fields and livestock.
But city life has grown increasingly bleak. While luxury high-rises are plentiful along sleek downtown streets, affordable housing is scarce. Homelessness is rising, advocates for the poor say, as an economic slowdown hurts jobs and wages. Pollution is worsening, and access to public resources like electricity and sewers is strained.
Ulan Bator, nestled in a valley about 4,400 feet above sea level, was never designed to house more than a few hundred thousand residents. Now it is on course to expand indefinitely, raising fears that the government may not be able to keep up with the influx of migrants.
City officials, citing concerns about a lack of space at schools and an overburdened welfare system, said this year that Ulan Bator would not accept any more rural migrants. The government has cautioned against constructing homes in some areas because of the dangers of overcrowding.
Still, many Mongolians are defiant. On craggy hillsides and rocky plains, they are setting up makeshift shacks and gers, or yurts, the traditional homes of Mongolian nomads.
On a secluded hill in northern Ulan Bator, Enkh-amgalan Tserendorj, 50, washed clothes outside the family yurt, where she and her husband have lived since last year. Ms. Tserendorj said she did not want to live so far from downtown but had no choice. Under Mongolian law, citizens are entitled to claim small plots of land of about 7,500 square feet — about 700 square meters — leaving many people struggling to find attractive spaces.
“It’s unfair,” she said. “Every good piece of land is occupied.”
Ms. Tserendorj’s 26-year-old son has tuberculosis, and she said the family’s isolation had made it difficult to find proper medical care. She said she was also concerned by a lack of reliable electricity and the threat of natural disasters like landslides.
Ulan Bator’s government has vowed to invest billions in affordable housing by 2030 and to begin transforming several yurt districts into residential complexes. The government hopes to have 70 percent of its citizens living in apartments by 2030, compared with about 40 percent right now. The city’s population is estimated to increase to 1.6 million by 2020, and 2.1 million by 2030, from 1.4 million in 2015.
But advocates say the government’s housing plan falls short. And some worry that the city does not do enough to protect residents who are forced by the government to leave their homes to make way for new construction.
“Families are living in fear that they will be left homeless,” said Nicholas Bequelin, the East Asia director for Amnesty International in Hong Kong. “The authorities are falling short in their responsibilities to protect residents’ rights.”
Climate change has intensified the pressure to resolve the housing crisis. Mongolia has been particularly hard hit, with a series of devastating droughts. Temperatures are also on the rise; this summer was the hottest in more than a half-century.
Gandavaa Mandakh, a former herder, moved to Ulan Bator three years ago from a town in southern Mongolia after losing dozens of cows, camels, goats and sheep during harsh winters.
Mr. Mandakh, 38, now works as a taxi driver; his wife works as a cook at a Korean restaurant. They have three children and earn about $500 per month.
“Of course, we have many problems here,” he said, noting the city’s bad traffic and overcrowded schools. “But it’s still better than staying in the countryside.”
In a yurt a few miles away, Dolgorsuren Sosorbaram, 59, a retired private business owner and a lifelong resident of Ulan Bator, said she had grown tired of rampant air pollution, which can reach hazardous levels in the winter. She said that life in the city was becoming too difficult and that the government should do more to encourage city residents to take up jobs in the countryside.
“There’s no more space here,” Ms. Sosorbaram said as she yanked stalks of flowering yellow wormwood from the ground outside her home. “It’s time for us to return to our roots in the countryside.”
While Ulan Bator once offered the promise of riches, a sharp economic slowdown has brought fresh anxiety. Mongolia’s economy, which depends heavily on mining, was once a darling of global investors, growing by 17.3 percent in 2011 as commodity prices surged. It has sputtered in recent years, expanding 1 percent last year and 5.3 percent in the first half of this year.
Some of Ulan Bator’s poorest residents say the slowdown has hurt their earnings and made homeownership a distant dream.
At the Ulaan Chuluut landfill in the northern part of the city, scavengers like Ms. Dashnyam have given up hopes of an ordinary life. They wake each morning to the sound of rumbling garbage trucks, chasing after each one with a metal rod in hand to sort through garbage and pick out the most lucrative items, like cans and pieces of metal.
n May, Ms. Dashnyam thought her problems might be solved. Officials who said they represented the General Intelligence Agency of Mongolia showed up at the landfill, saying they would pay several thousand dollars a head if Ms. Dashnyam and the other landfill dwellers could locate a stack of documents that had been mistakenly discarded.
After several days of searching, Ms. Dashnyam and her friends found the documents. But when the government workers took the files, they paid only a small portion of what they had promised, the scavengers said.
Ms. Dashnyam, who has lived at the landfill for several months, said she worried she would be stuck there in the winter in subzero temperatures.
“We have no other option,” she said. “I just hope I can survive.”
Munkhchimeg Davaasharav contributed reporting.
Follow Javier Hernandez on Twitter: @HernandezJavier
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Alert: Nature, on the verge of bankruptcy.
Pressures on global land resources are now greater than ever, as a rapidly increasing population coupled with rising levels of consumption is placing ever-larger demands on the world’s land-based natural capital, warns a new United Nations report.
ROME, Sep 12 2017 (IPS) - Pressures on global land resources are now greater than ever, as a rapidly increasing population coupled with rising levels of consumption is placing ever-larger demands on the world’s land-based natural capital, warns a new United Nations report.
Consumption of the earth’s natural reserves has doubled in the last 30 years, with a third of the planet’s land now severely degraded, adds the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) new report, launched on 12 September in Ordos, China during the Convention’s 13th summit (6-16 September 2017).
“Each year, we lose 15 billion trees and 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil,” the UNCCD’s report The Global Land Outlook (GLO) says, adding that a significant proportion of managed and natural ecosystems are degrading and at further risk from climate change and biodiversity loss.
In basic terms, there is increasing competition between the demand for goods and services that benefit people, like food, water, and energy, and the need to protect other ecosystem services that regulate and support all life on Earth, according to new publication.
At the same time, terrestrial biodiversity underpins all of these services and underwrites the full enjoyment of a wide range of human rights, such as the rights to a healthy life, nutritious food, clean water, and cultural identity, adds the report. And a significant proportion of managed and natural ecosystems are degrading and at further risk from climate change and biodiversity loss.
The report provides some key facts: from 1998 to 2013, approximately 20 per cent of the Earth’s vegetated land surface showed persistent declining trends in productivity, apparent in 20 per cent of cropland, 16 per cent of forest land, 19 per cent of grassland, and 27 per cent of rangeland.
These trends are “especially alarming” in the face of the increased demand for land-intensive crops and livestock.”
More Land Degradation, More Climate Change
Land degradation contributes to climate change and increases the vulnerability of millions of people, especially the poor, women, and children, says UNCCD, adding that current management practises in the land-use sector are responsible for about 25 per cent of the world’s greenhouses gases, while land degradation is both a cause and a result of poverty.
“Over 1.3 billion people, mostly in the developing countries, are trapped on degrading agricultural land, exposed to climate stress, and therefore excluded from wider infrastructure and economic development.”
Land degradation also triggers competition for scarce resources, which can lead to migration and insecurity while exacerbating access and income inequalities, the report warns.
“Soil erosion, desertification, and water scarcity all contribute to societal stress and breakdown. In this regard, land degradation can be considered a ‘threat amplifier’, especially when it slowly reduces people’s ability to use the land for food production and water storage or undermines other vital ecosystem services. “
High Temperature, Water Scarcity
Meanwhile, higher temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and increased water scarcity due to climate change will alter the suitability of vast regions for food production and human habitation, according to the report.
“The mass extinction of flora and fauna, including the loss of crop wild relatives and keystone species that hold ecosystems together, further jeopardises resilience and adaptive capacity, particularly for the rural poor who depend most on the land for their basic needs and livelihoods.”
Our food system, UNCCD warns, has put the focus on short-term production and profit rather than long-term environmental sustainability.
Monocultures, Genetically Modified Crops
The modern agricultural system has resulted in huge increases in productivity, holding off the risk of famine in many parts of the world but, at the same time, is based on monocultures, genetically modified crops, and the intensive use of fertilisers and pesticides that undermine long-term sustainability, it adds.
And here are some of the consequences: food production accounts for 70 per cent of all freshwater withdrawals and 80 per cent of deforestation, while soil, the basis for global food security, is being contaminated, degraded, and eroded in many areas, resulting in long-term declines in productivity.
In parallel, small-scale farmers, the backbone of rural livelihoods and food production for millennia, are under immense strain from land degradation, insecure tenure, and a globalised food system that favours concentrated, large-scale, and highly mechanised agribusiness.
This widening gulf between production and consumption, and ensuing levels of food loss/waste, further accelerates the rate of land use change, land degradation and deforestation, warns the UN Convention.
Global Challenges
Speaking at the launch of the report, UNCCD Executive Secretary Monique Barbut said, “Land degradation and drought are global challenges and intimately linked to most, if not all aspects of human security and well-being – food security, employment and migration, in particular.”
“As the ready supply of healthy and productive land dries up and the population grows, competition is intensifying, for land within countries and globally. As the competition increases, there are winners and losers.
No Land, No Civilisation
According the Convention, land is an essential building block of civilisation yet its contribution to our quality of life is perceived and valued in starkly different and often incompatible ways.
A minority has grown rich from the unsustainable use and large-scale exploitation of land resources with related conflicts intensifying in many countries, UNCCD states.
“Our ability to manage trade-offs at a landscape scale will ultimately decide the future of land resources – soil, water, and biodiversity – and determine success or failure in delivering poverty reduction, food and water security, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.”
A Bit of History
Except for some regions in Europe, human use of land before the mid-1700s was insignificant when compared with contemporary changes in the Earth’s ecosystems, UNCCD notes, adding that the notion of a limitless, human-dominated world was embraced and reinforced by scientific advances.
“Populations abruptly gained access to what seemed to be an unlimited stock of natural capital, where land was seen as a free gift of nature.”
The scenario analysis carried out for this Outlook examines a range of possible futures and projects increasing tension between the need to increase food and energy production, and continuing declines in biodiversity and ecosystem services.
From a regional perspective, these scenarios predict that sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa will face the greatest challenges due to a mix of factors, including high population growth, low per capita GDP, limited options for agricultural expansion, increased water stress, and high biodiversity losses.
The Solution
These are the real facts. The big question is if this self-destructive trend can be reversed? The answer is yes, or at least that losses could be minimised.
On this, Monique Barbut said that the GLO report suggests, “It is in all our interests to step back and rethink how we are managing the pressures and the competition.”
“The Outlook presents a vision for transforming the way in which we use and manage land because we are all decision-makers and our choices can make a difference – even small steps matter,” she further added.
For his part, UN Development Programme Administrator Achim Steiner stated, “Over 250 million people are directly affected by desertification, and about one billion people in over one hundred countries are at risk.”
They include many of the world’s poorest and most marginalised people, he said, adding that achieving land degradation neutrality can provide a healthy and productive life for all on Earth, including water and food security.
The Global Land Outlook shows that “each of us can in fact make a difference.”
Can Mother Nature recover? The answer is a clear yes. Perhaps it would suffice that politicians pay more attention to real human real needs than promoting weapons deals — and that the big business helps replenish the world’s natural capital.
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Gabriel Jimenez
Third of Earth's soil is acutely degraded due to agriculture.
Fertile soil is being lost at rate of 24 billion tons a year through intensive farming as demand for food increases, says UN-backed study.
Third of Earth's soil is acutely degraded due to agriculture
Fertile soil is being lost at rate of 24bn tonnes a year through intensive farming as demand for food increases, says UN-backed study
Soil erosion in Maasai heartlands in Tanzania.
Soil erosion in Maasai heartlands, Tanzania, is due to climate change and land management decisions. Photograph: Carey Marks/Plymouth University
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Jonathan Watts
Tuesday 12 September 2017 13.18 EDT First published on Tuesday 12 September 2017 13.15 EDT
A third of the planet’s land is severely degraded and fertile soil is being lost at the rate of 24bn tonnes a year, according to a new United Nations-backed study that calls for a shift away from destructively intensive agriculture.
The alarming decline, which is forecast to continue as demand for food and productive land increases, will add to the risks of conflicts such as those seen in Sudan and Chad unless remedial actions are implemented, warns the institution behind the report.
“As the ready supply of healthy and productive land dries up and the population grows, competition is intensifying for land within countries and globally,” said Monique Barbut, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) at the launch of the Global Land Outlook.
“To minimise the losses, the outlook suggests it is in all our interests to step back and rethink how we are managing the pressures and the competition.”
Why meat eaters should think much more about soil
John Sauven
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The Global Land Outlook is billed as the most comprehensive study of its type, mapping the interlinked impacts of urbanisation, climate change, erosion and forest loss. But the biggest factor is the expansion of industrial farming.
Heavy tilling, multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled, notes a paper in the outlook by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European commission. Over time, however, this diminishes fertility and can lead to abandonment of land and ultimately desertification.
The JRC noted that decreasing productivity can be observed on 20% of the world’s cropland, 16% of forest land, 19% of grassland, and 27% of rangeland.
“Industrial agriculture is good at feeding populations but it is not sustainable. It’s like an extractive industry, said Louise Baker, external relations head of the UN body. She said the fact that a third of land is now degraded should prompt more urgent action to address the problem.
“It’s quite a scary number when you consider rates of population growth, but this is not the end of the line. If governments make smart choices the situation can improve,” Baker said, noting the positive progress made by countries like Ethiopia, which has rehabilitated 7m hectares (17m acres).
Farmers in Sudan battle climate change and hunger as desert creeps closer
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The impacts vary enormously from region to region. Worst affected is sub-Saharan Africa, but poor land management in Europe also accounts for an estimated 970m tonnes of soil loss from erosion each year with impacts not just on food production but biodiversity, carbon loss and disaster resilience. High levels of food consumption in wealthy countries such as the UK are also a major driver of soil degradation overseas.
The paper was launched at a meeting of the UNCCD in Ordos, China, where signatory nations are submitting voluntary targets to try to reduce degradation and rehabilitate more land. On Monday, Brazil and India were the latest countries to outline their plan to reach “land degradation neutrality”.
However, the study notes that pressures will continue to grow. In a series of forecasts on land use for 2050, the authors note that sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, the Middle East and north Africa will face the greatest challenges unless the world sees lower levels of meat consumption, better land regulation and improved farming efficiency.
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