By Ephrat Livni , The New York Times.  Excerpt: There’s long been one mantra in mainstream economics: Growth is good. Gross domestic product — the monetary value of a country’s goods and services — is used to measure the economic health of a country or region, and a line that slants upward and to the right is typically what national leaders want to see. But recently, an alternative term has begun taking root in popular culture and policy: “degrowth.” Degrowth challenges the capitalist pursuit of growth at all costs and “focuses on what is necessary to fulfill everyone’s basic needs,” said Kohei Saito, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and author of “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.” ...Societies should be striving to create “a different kind of abundance,” he says, offering free education, medical care and transportation instead of continuously making more goods for consumption. ...Mr. Saito believes part of the reason degrowth has had increasing app...

By James Wagner ,  Emiliano Rodríguez Mega  and  Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A system of dams and canals may soon be unable to provide water to one of the world’s largest cities, a confluence of unchecked growth, crumbling infrastructure and a changing climate. The groundwater is quickly vanishing. A key reservoir got so low that it is no longer used to supply water. Last year was Mexico’s hottest and driest in at least 70 years. And one of the city’s main water systems faces a potential “Day Zero” this summer when levels dip so much that it, too, will no longer provide water. ...Mexico City, once a water-rich valley that was  drained  to make way for a vast city, has a metropolitan population of  23 million , among the  top 10  largest in the world and up from 15 million in 1990. It is one of several major cities facing severe water shortages, including  Cape Town ;  São Paulo , Brazil; and  Chennai , India...

By Damian Carrington , The Guardian.  Excerpt: ...the most effective action individuals can take ...Most experts (76%) backed voting for politicians who pledge strong climate measures, where fair elections take place . ...The second choice for most effective individual action, according to the experts, was reducing flying and fossil-fuel powered transport in favour of electric and public transport. ...Globally it is a small minority of people who drive aviation emissions, with only about  one in 10 flying at all . Frequent-flying “super emitters” who represent just 1% of the world’s population cause half of aviation’s carbon emissions, with US air passengers having by far the biggest carbon footprint among rich countries. ...Meat production has a  huge impact   on the environment . Most people in wealthy countries already eat more meat than is healthy for them and more than 60% of the scientists said they had cut their own meat consumption. Almost 30% of the ex...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/africas-carbon-sink-capacity-is-shrinking By Rachel Fritts , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The population of Africa, the second-largest continent in the world, currently sits at about 1.4 billion, but is set to exceed 2 billion by 2040. This means greater swaths of land than ever before are being used for agriculture, and livestock numbers are increasing. A new estimate of Africa’s greenhouse gas budget between 2010 and 2019 quantifies just how much these changes in land use have affected Africa’s role in the global carbon cycle. ...To make their estimates,  Ernst et al.  ...took a comprehensive look at all major potential carbon sources, including human sources such as agriculture and fossil fuel emissions and natural sources such as termites and wildfires. They also considered natural sinks: the  grasslands ,  savannas , and  forests  that still cover much of the continent. The team found that between 2010 and 2019, Africa tr...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/22/beijings-population-falls-for-first-time-since-2003-as-china-battles-low-birthrate By Helen Davidson , The Guardian.  Excerpt: In 2022 there were more deaths than births in the Chinese capital, home to more than 21 million people, resulting in a natural population growth of minus 0.05 per 1,000 people. It is the first time the population has gone backwards since 2003....“Given the high living and education cost and education levels in Beijing, it is very normal that the birthrate of permanent residents is low,” said Xiujian Peng, senior research fellow at the Centre of Policy Studies at Victoria University in Australia. China’s Communist party government is  striving to reverse the trend  and stave off the economic impacts of an ageing population. ...Last year official data showed China’s birthrate had fallen to 6.77 births per 1,000 people, the lowest on record. ...“It is too difficult to marry and have children to live ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/world/asia/china-birth-rate.html By  Nicole Hong  and  Zixu Wang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In China, a country that limits most couples to  three children , one province is making a bold pitch to try to get its citizens to procreate: have as many babies as you want, even if you are unmarried. The initiative, which came into effect this month, points to the renewed urgency of China’s efforts to spark a baby boom after its population  shrank  last year for the first time since a national famine in the 1960s. ... there are plans to expand national insurance coverage for fertility treatments, including I.V.F.  But the measures have been met with a wave of public skepticism, ridicule and debate, highlighting the challenges China faces as it seeks to stave off a shrinking work force that could imperil economic growth. Many young Chinese adults, who themselves were born during China’s draconian one-child poli...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/upshot/china-population-decline.html By Andrew Jacobs  and  Francesca Paris , The New York Times.  Excerpt: China’s population has  begun to decline , a demographic turning point for the country that has global implications. ...China joined an expanding set of nations with shrinking populations caused by years of falling fertility and often little or even negative net migration, a group that includes Italy, Greece and Russia, along with swaths of Eastern and Southern Europe and several Asian nations like South Korea and Japan. ...History suggests that once a country crosses the threshold of negative population growth, there is little that its government can do to reverse it. ...Two decades ago, Australia tried a “baby bonus” program that paid the equivalent of nearly 6,000 U.S. dollars a child at its peak. At the time the campaign started in 2004, the country’s fertility rate was around 1.8 children per woman. (For most develop...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/world/europe/italy-birthrate.html By  Jason Horowitz , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Italy’s population is aging and shrinking at the fastest rate in the West, forcing the country to adapt to a booming population of elderly that puts it at the forefront of a global demographic trend that experts call the “silver tsunami.” But it faces a demographic double whammy, with a drastically sinking birthrate that is among the lowest in Europe. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said Italy is “destined to disappear” unless it changes.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/china-world-population-decline.html By  Wang Feng , New York Times opinion piece.  Excerpt: China, the most populous country on the planet for centuries, this month  reported  its first population decline in six decades, .... By the end of the century China may have  only around half  of the 1.41 billion people it has now, according to U.N. projections, and may already have been overtaken by  India . The news has been met with gloom and doom, often framed as the start of China’s  inexorable decline  and, more broadly, the harbinger of a demographic and economic  “time bomb”  that will strain the world’s capacity to support aging populations. ...China is only the latest and largest major country to  join a club  that already includes  Japan, South Korea,   Russia ,  Italy  and others. ...But the alarmist warnings are often simplistic and premature. ...Shrinking ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/business/china-birth-rate.html By Alexandra Stevenson  and  Zixu Wang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible. The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China last year, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed economic experiment that led to  widespread famine  and death in the 1960s. Chinese officials have tried for years to slow down the arrival of this moment, loosening a one-child policy and offering incentives to encourage families to have children. None of those policies worked. ...Government handouts like cash for babies and tax cuts, have failed to change the underlying fact that many young Chinese people s...

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/nov/18/lab-grown-meat-safe-eat-fda-upside-foods By Oliver Milman , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The US government has cleared the way for Americans to be able to eat lab-grown meat, after authorities deemed a meat product derived from animal cells to be safe for human consumption. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)  will allow  a California company called Upside Foods to take living cells from chickens and then grow them in a controlled laboratory environment to produce a meat product that doesn’t involve the actual slaughter of any animals. The FDA said it was ready to approve the sale of other lab-grown meat, stating that it was “engaged in discussions with multiple firms” to do the same, including companies that want to grow seafood from the cells of marine life. ...Making food more sustainable is a major focus of the Cop27 climate talks, shortly finishing in Egypt. The global production of food is responsible for  a third o...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/india-faces-deepening-demographic-divide-as-it-prepares-to-overtake-china-as-the-worlds-most-populous-country By Hannah Ellis-Petersen , The Guardian.  Excerpt: India is currently home to more than 1.39 billion people – four times that of the US and more than 20 times the UK – while 1.41bn live in China. But with 86,000 babies born in India every day, and 49,400 in China, India is on course to take the lead in 2023 and hit 1.65 billion people by 2060. ...On 15 November the world’s population will reach a total of 8 billion people. Between now and 2050, over half of the projected increase in the global population will happen in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, the United Republic of Tanzania – and India....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/world/middleeast/jordan-water-cop-27.html By  Karen Zraick , The New York Times.  Excerpt: AMMAN, Jordan — Residents of Jordan, one of the driest countries in the world, have long been accustomed to a household water supply of only about 36 hours a week. But recently, even that meager flow has been curtailed by the debilitating combination of a warming planet and swelling demand. ...household taps ran dry this summer for as long as three weeks in parts of this small, dehydrated Middle Eastern nation. By early summer, when her taps did not spring to life on schedule, Ms. al-Bawabiji said she feared more outages were coming. ...Population growth, diminished water supplies and climate change have all taken their toll, while damaged and inefficient infrastructure and the considerable challenges posed by Jordan’s geography and topography have only made things worse. The resulting shortages serve as a warning of what the future might hold for the r...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/food-deficits-in-africa-will-grow-in-a-warmer-world By Aaron Sidder , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Africa has one of the world’s fastest population growth rates. Growth models project the continent’s current population of about 1.3 billion people will nearly double to 2.5 billion by 2050—and it’s likely to keep growing beyond that. At the same time, malnutrition is widespread in Africa—21% of the population faces food insecurity—and the continent is especially vulnerable to climate change. Warmer regions are already experiencing  desertification , and areas of low agricultural productivity are susceptible to climate shocks from adverse weather,  drought , flooding, and erratic rainfall. The combined effects of population growth and climate change raise a serious question for the continent: How will Africa  feed its growing populace  in increasingly unfriendly conditions? Beltran-Peña and D’Odorico  applied the results from agrohydr...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/18/magazine/herman-daly-interview.html By David Marchese, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Growth is the be-all and end-all of mainstream economic and political thinking. Without a continually rising G.D.P., we’re told, we risk social instability, declining standards of living and pretty much any hope of progress. But what about the counterintuitive possibility that our current pursuit of growth, rabid as it is and causing such great ecological harm, might be incurring more costs than gains? That possibility — that prioritizing growth is ultimately a losing game — is one that the lauded economist Herman Daly has been exploring for more than 50 years. In so doing, he has developed arguments in favor of a steady-state economy, one that forgoes the insatiable and environmentally destructive hunger for growth, recognizes the physical limitations of our planet and instead seeks a sustainable economic and ecological equilibrium. ...I’m not against...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/sink-your-grief-how-one-scientist-confronts-emotional-toll-climate-change Source:  By  David Malakoff , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: “I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts,” sustainability scientist Kimberly Nicholas recalls in her new book,  Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World . But as research has increasingly revealed how climate change will forever alter the ecosystems and communities she loves, she has struggled to address her feelings of sadness. “My dispassionate training,” the Lund University researcher writes, has “not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change,” or how to respond to students who come to her to share their own grief. It’s a situation many scientists and professors are facing these days, Nicholas writes. “Being witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job descriptio...