What is the biggest killer of children in the developing world? Everyone has different statistics. The World Health Organisation says that 1.8 million children under five years of age die from pneumonia each year, more than 98% of them in developing countries. About 800,000 die of malaria, 2 million from diarrhoea. Other killers are HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, measles, and tetanus. And of course, abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 35 million children are aborted every year in developing countries.

However, what concerns Save the Children, "the world’s largest leading independent children’s rights organisation, with members in 29 countries and operational programmes in more than 100", is climate change. "Climate change could kill 250,000 children next year, and the figure could rise to more than 400,000 by 2030," says its new report, Feeling the Heat.

"Climate change is the biggest… click here to read whole article and make comments

Is Japan headed for financial meltdown because of decades of below replacement-level birth rates? Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that doom is nigh in a recent column in the London Sunday Telegraph. He quotes a number of economists, but Carl Weinberg of High Frequency Economics is the most outspoken:

"The debt situation is irrecoverable. I don't see any orderly way out of this. They will not be able to fund their deficit. There will be a fiscal shutdown, a pension haircut, and bank failures that will rock the world. It is criminally negligent that rating agencies are not blowing the whistle on this."

The crisis of Japanese finance is due to more factors than the birthrate, but Evans-Pritchard says that “a baby strike by young women” has been a major problem. Now… click here to read whole article and make comments

I have heard it parroted for as long as I can’t remember that Nigeria’s hyperpopulation is one of the reasons the country is failing. And from the first time I heard this flawed reasoning I have always countered it, even when my views had not even been mellowed with data, statistics and considerable knowledge of political economy. The problem with the notion of high population is not so much that it is erroneous as that it might give Nigeria’s misrulers something to blame for their slimy utter badness. I would not be surprised if Obasanjo had indeed blamed huge population for any number of Nigerian maladies, he must have had his ear close to the ground.

Now it might be argued that as the 14th largest country in continent, speaking about square miles, one might be tempted… click here to read whole article and make comments

The population control lobby is far from dead. There still are highly influential academics who fervently believe that increasing aid for population control (aka reproductive rights, women’s health, safe and legal abortion) is absolutely necessary. Without it, the world will turn into an over-heated, war-torn slum heaped with festering mountains of garbage. This is the message that comes through loud and clear in a special issue of an influential British journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, called The Impact of Population Growth on Tomorrow’s World. The special forum was edited by an Australian, Roger V. Short, and an American, Malcolm Potts. (The editorials are free, but a subscription is required to access the articles.)

Roger Short has been pushing population control remorselessly for decades. In this issue of the journal, his contributors quarry an inexhaustible mine of demographic clichés. In his… click here to read whole article and make comments

Democracy is a romantic notion; youth are romantic; QED, youth must be democratic. Not so, say some demographers. Richard Cincotta, a consultant in US intelligence and defence, will be explaining his theory about the "youth bulge" in developing countries on PRB Discuss Online tomorrow evening. Could be something to check out.

Cincotta’s argument runs like this. As a youth bulge works its way through the demographic pyramid, it can slow the transition to democracy. Think of Venezuela or Iran, both countries with a large population aged 15 to 30 and both countries which are moving away from democracy.

Where will the impulse for liberal democracy come from – a lower birth rate and ageing populations? The good news, as Cincotta and his colleagues see it, is that as populations continue to age in South America, North Africa, Asia,… click here to read whole article and make comments

It’s not very often that you find an eminent public figure who combines shrewd political observation with philosophical depth. But the other evening Britain’s chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, who entered the House of Lords last week as Lord Sacks of Aldgate, proved that he is such a person. In a speech at Theos, a theological thinktank in London, he examined the deep cultural reasons behind the decline in the British birthrate. The last paragraph is the best.

Now I am going to do something here which is deliberately provocative, but why should the angry atheists get all the best tunes? So let me give you two very provocative examples; let me begin with the neo-Darwinians. After all, it’s their year – the 200th anniversary of Darwin and 150th of The Origin of Species. I haven’t seen this argument ever… click here to read whole article and make comments

The message is finally getting through: the population bomb has fizzled out and fertility is falling nearly everywhere in the world.

Sometime in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the "replacement level of fertility", the magic number that causes a country’s population to slow down and eventually to stabilise… The move to replacement-level fertility is one of the most dramatic social changes in history.

This is the cheerful message delivered in the October 29 issue of The Economist. If the world’s leading news magazine has finally swung around, the day is not far behind when population controllers will be looking for jobs:

… click here to read whole article and make comments

The received wisdom among demographers and other social sciences is that as countries develop economically and socially their fertility rates decline. However, a recent article in Nature¹ has shown that at higher levels of development, as measured by the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI), the fall in fertility goes into reverse. Could this be the answer to the problem of ageing populations?

Before answering this question, it is important to try and understand why this reversal of fertility has happened and whether it is likely to be permanent. The reversal is likely to have been due to a mixture of a number of socio-economic changes, for example: increased employment flexibility and conditions, especially for women, welfare provision and reforms, governments’ family policies and direct attempts to increase fertility. The authors tested whether the increase in fertility at higher HDI levels was due to… click here to read whole article and make comments

Britain is bracing itself for the ageing of its population with the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that the proportion of people aged over 65 is set to rise dramatically. The release of the latest figures come at a time when Britain is already struggling to fund its benefits and health care systems moving commentators to warn that too little is being done to prepare for the ageing of the population.

Even before the release of the latest figures, government ministers had warned that the pressures created by an older population "posed as big a threat to the country as climate change".

The ONS report points out that:

• Over the past 25 years the percentage of Britain’s population aged 65 and over has… click here to read whole article and make comments

Last week, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced a 2 per cent leap (439,000 people) in the country’s population in the year to March, a huge dust storm blew in from the arid interior to blanket much of Eastern Australia. Are the two things connected?

Green groups would probably say, yes. Others, maybe. “Dust storms are a natural phenomenon, but they are influenced by human activities and are now just as serious as traffic and industrial air pollution,” says Laurence Barrie, chief researcher at the World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva, which is working with 40 countries to develop a dust storm warning system.

Most of the recent population increase -- almost 300,000 people -- was from immigration. But the birth rate is up, too, with 160,000 babies born during the year. On that basis Australia’s population could… click here to read whole article and make comments