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CHAPTER 1
Coastal Population Growth
The Ultimate Threat
Throughout much of the world, coastal areas are overdeveloped, overcrowded, and overexploited. Coastal waters and bays are often horribly polluted with untreated (or partially treated) municipal, industrial, and agricultural wastes. Rivers bring in more pollutants, including organic chemicals and heavy metals, along with increasing loads of sediment. Rich coastal ecosystems, such as estuaries, salt marshes, and mangrove swamps, have been decimated. Figure 1.1 summarizes some of the main threats to the world’s coastlines by region, including population density. The dark lines along the coasts represent areas under stress from development-related activities. More than half of the world’s coastlines suffer from severe development pressures (WRI 1995). Globally, little is being done to manage the crisis of our coasts.
Underlying the crisis are escalating human numbers and needs. Over 50 percent of the world’s population—some 3.2 billion people—already live along a coastline or within 200 kilometers of one (Hinrichsen 1994; Deichmann 1996). Future population projections indicate that by 2025, 75 percent of the world’s population, or 6.3 billion people, could reside in coastal areas—500 million more people than the current global population (Hinrichsen 1996).
Using new demographic techniques, including GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technology, demographer Uwe Deichmann and his colleagues at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) at the University of California at Santa Barbara were able to calculate population densities for each major region of the world (Deichmann 1996). The population density maps reproduced in this and later chapters (see figure 1.2) graphically illustrate that the majority of the world’s people are concentrated in coastal areas and along major river valleys (e.g., the Gangetic Plain in India).
Much has been made of the world’s exploding population, but where people live and work is a more important demographic indicator than basic growth rates. Population distribution gives a clear picture of population stress on a country’s resource base. It also allows for the development of more rational management plans, especially in terms of future infrastructure needs, crucial services, and the provision of jobs. The global database assembled at NCGIA contains over 19,000 administrative units for some 217 countries (Tobler et al. 1995). In most cases, data
Figure 1.1. World Coastlines Threatened by Development, 1997.
Sources: D. Hinrichsen, “Pushing the Limits,” Amicus Journal 18, no. 4 (winter 1997), pp. 18–19; D. Bryant, E. Rodenburg, T. Cox, and D. Nielsen, “Coastlines at Risk: An Index of Potential Development-Related Threats to Coastal Ecosystems,” World Resources Institute, Washington, D.C., 1995, pp. 1–8.
Figure 1.2. Estimated Population Densities for the World, 1995.
Source: Waldo Tobler, Uwe Deichmann, Jon Gottsegen, and Kelly Maloy, Global Demography Project, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1995.
Figure 1.3. Coastal Ecosystems Threatened by Development, 1995.
Source: D. Bryant, E. Rodenburg, T. Cox, and D. Nielsen, “Coastlines at Risk: An Index of Potential Development-Related Threats to Coastal Ecosystems,” World Resources Institute, Washington, D.C., 1995.
are available for the smallest enumerated areas: local districts or counties. Such disaggregated data can be used to pinpoint areas of dense human populations. It should also motivate governments to design better urban planning systems, including zoning measures that regulate industrial, commercial, and residential development and minimize negative impacts on the environment.
In 1995, the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington, D.C., issued an indicator brief entitled Coastlines at Risk: An Index of Potential Development-Related Threats to Coastal Ecosystems. In addition to Deichmann’s population density data, the WRI analysis includes four other basic indicators: cities, major ports, road density, and pipeline density (WRI 1995). The world map included in the WRI analysis and reprinted here (figure 1.3) indicates that half of the world’s coastlines are already suffering from severe development impacts. (More detailed regional maps are included in the chapters on the Baltic and North Seas, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.)
What the population data in figure 1.3 underscore is that in virtually every major region of the world, dramatic population shifts, mostly from in-migration, have fed the influx of people into coastal areas, especially municipalities. With coastal urbanization has come rapid industrial and commercial development. The rampant and often unplanned growth of coastal areas, in turn, has undermined the capacity of national governments to manage remaining resources on a sustainable basis.
The movement of people from the hinterlands to coastal areas is nothing new. It has been going on since the Middle Ages, when Europe’s coastal cities became centers for international trade and commerce. As we approach the millennium, however, the mass movement of people from the interior to coastal urban areas has become one of the dominant demographic trends of the late twentieth century, clearly visible in developed and developing regions alike.
Since 1980, population growth rates have been dropping steadily throughout much of the developing world, with a few exceptions such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. Southeast Asia and Latin America had annual growth rates of 3 percent or above during the 1950s and 1960s. Today, both Southeast Asia’s and Latin America’s average population growth rates stand at 1.9 percent. In 1960, Thai women, on average, had nearly 6 children over the course of their reproductive lives. Today they average 2.2. Brazil’s and Indonesia’s total fertility rates—the average number of children a woman is likely to have over the course of her reproductive life—also dropped significantly: from an average of nearly 6 children per woman in 1960 to just under 3 in 1996 (Ehrlich 1990; Sadik 1993, 1995, 1996). Better maternal and child health care and access to reproductive health and family planning services have made the lower rates possible.
In most areas of the world, population growth and fertility levels continue to fall. But the world’s population continues to increase because of the sheer momentum of human numbers. For example, although China’s growth rate—now at 1.1 percent a year—is falling rapidly, the country’s massive population base (1.2 billion) still translates into an extra 13 million people a year.
In the developing world, coastal areas harbor many of the most rapidly developing towns and cities. These cities are turning into economic hothouses, responsible for energizing economies and “growing” the bulk of new jobs. The 1970s and 1980s heralded the emergence of “primate cities,” cities containing a preponderance of infrastructure, investment, services, and skilled workforce. Many of these primate cities are coastal, historic centers of trade and commerce that have experienced rapid economic development over the past four decades, especially as subsistence economies have been shoved aside by modern, interconnected market economies.
Rushing to the Coast: China
When Xiao Sun came to Shanghai in 1990, at the age of fifteen, she had only the clothes on her back. She came searching for a better life than the one she had left in a poor farming village in Jiangsu Province. An attractive girl, with limited education, she took a job as a nanny with a university professor’s family.
Sun considers herself one of the lucky ones. She impressed her employer with her native intelligence and boundless capacity for work. After a few years, at nineteen, she married the professor’s eldest son. She now lives a comfortable life in China’s largest metropolis and vows to make sure her own child has advantages she did not. “I will never go back to my village to live,...
