Where people live and move in Deltas
Abstract
All regions of the world through the twentieth century have undergone absolute transformations in peoples’ lives: they live longer, have fewer children, and are much more likely to live in towns and cities. While these are individual decisions, it is now commonly understood that the structural drivers of such profound changes lie in economic opportunities, culturally shared expectations, access to health technologies and levels of education (Lutz et al. 2017). Regions and countries experience so-called demographic transitions of lower mortality especially infant mortality, followed by lowered total fertility rates (TFR) after a time lag, with these two combining to produce rapid population growth followed by stabilisation, population ageing and sometimes decline. The current global aggregate population of more than seven billion may stabilise over the incoming decades, but the timing of this stabilisation is not discernible in advance as it is driven by underlying drivers. Scientific synthesis of the underlying drivers for future population shows that the outcomes that matter are on levels of fertility, mortal, migration and education, especially female education rates and quality. Analysis of the Shared Socio-economic Pathways descriptions of the future by Samir and Lutz (2017) and Abel et al. (2016) show that scenarios involving sustainability priorities, universal education and human rights result in projections of global populations around seven billion by the end of the twenty-first century. At the other extreme, future scenarios with significant and persistent poverty, population momentum, less access to education and fewer health gains, can produce global populations of greater than twelve billion by the end of the century. A related major Anthropocene trend is in health outcomes: essentially sustained improvements in longevity and positive health across many parts of the world, despite challenging environmental conditions. McMichael (2014), for example, highlights life expectancy of more than 75 years in much of the world including in cities in countries with rapid economic growth; gains coming from sanitation, hygiene and maternal education. Limiting factors for life expectancy are currently principally non-communicable diseases such as cancers and heart and lung diseases associated with sedentary lifestyles, exacerbated by exposure to pollutants (McMichael 2014). So why is population health, as manifest in greater life expectancy, increasing when ecosystem services are in decline and pollution expo sure is increasing? This apparent paradox is explained in a number of alternative ways. On the one hand, well-being is not being reliant on the environment but principally on provisioning ecosystem services; availability of food production globally has increased substantially in the past half-century. Alternatively, health may be increasingly decoupled from environmental challenges, with urban living meaning populations are less exposed to environmental risks. Finally, as most population health research suggests, there is a significant time lag between environ mental degradation and the impacts appearing in the overall health of populations (Whitmee et al. 2015). Hence McMichael (2014) and others suggest that there are looming crises and challenges to human health in the incoming decades, not least through accumulating toxic effluent in air, water and soil and through urban interfaces with climate change including exposure to heat and pollution interactions. So continued health and well-being gains from resource exploitation are not inevitable in the future, and adverse trends cannot be discounted. The third major Anthropocene trend has involved the movement of whole populations towards urban settlement. Projections of global urban populations suggest around five billion people living in urban settlements by 2030, with an associated tripling of the global urban land area since 2000 (Seto et al. 2012). This increases the proportion of global populations living in urban areas to be greater than the current 55%, with growth concentrated in the present mega-cities, many of which are in coastal and delta areas, especially in Asia. Much of this growth occurs through migration towards urban settlements. Migration brings benefits to those moving both in terms of avoiding risks in source areas and, more importantly, providing economic, social and educational opportunities in destination areas. Individual decisions involve complex interactions between families, perceptions of opportunity and risk, and social expectations. However, at the aggregate level, the movement of many millions of people creates challenges for both rural source areas losing human capital, and for the sustainability of urbanisation processes, as illustrated in deltas (Szabo et al. 2018). Deltas reflect these global trends and challenges. Deltas and coastal areas in general are in net population growth due to migration flows over the past half-century. They are large numbers since the advent of intensive agricultural production and have been the sites of the growth of major cities over the past century. This chapter therefore examines the demographic and mobility dimensions of development and the prospects for flourishing and sustainable futures in deltas. It does so by examining the dynamics of current and future populations in three deltas located in South Asia and West Africa—the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) which is comprised of the India Bengal and the Bangladesh sections, Mahanadi and Volta (Chapters 2–4). Given major changes in the physical and ecological dimensions of low-lying coastal areas including deltas projected for the future (Brown et al. 2018), the chapter examines potential interventions to protect populations in place and to assist the movement of people away from environmental risks and harm.
Cite this
APA
de Campos, R., Codjoe, S., Adger, W., Mortreux, C., Hazra, S., Siddiqui, T., Das, S., Atiglo, D., Bhuiyan, M., Rocky, M., & Abu, M. (2019). Where people live and move in Deltas. In Nicholls, RJ, Adger, WN, Hutton, CW, Hanson, S. (Eds.), Deltas in the Anthropocene (pp. 153–177). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23517-8_7
Harvard
de Campos, R. et al. (2019) ‘Where people live and move in Deltas’, in Nicholls, RJ, Adger, WN, Hutton, CW, Hanson, S. (eds) Deltas in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 153–177. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-23517-8_7.
BibTeX
@incollection{decampos2019where,
author = {de Campos, RS. and Codjoe, SNA and Adger, WN. and Mortreux, C. and Hazra, S. and Siddiqui, T. and Das, S. and Atiglo, DY. and Bhuiyan, MRA. and Rocky, MH. and Abu, M.},
editor = {Nicholls, RJ, Adger, WN, Hutton, CW, Hanson, S.},
title = {Where people live and move in Deltas},
booktitle = {Deltas in the Anthropocene},
year = {2019},
pages = {153--177},
publisher = {Palgrave Macmillan},
address = {Cham, Switzerland},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-23517-8_7}
}