Name: ______
Experiment 1: Human Population Lab
Upload this part of the experiment and your data chart as a single Microsoft word document. You may also submit your document as a pdf file if you like. Any file types that I cannot open and read, such as .wps files will receive zero points. Type your answers in the space provided after each question. To remove any ambiguity I have placed the word “Answer:” in each place where you should be providing an answer based on the question or questions in the preceding sentences. If you need more room make more room. If you don’t need as much room as I’ve put there take the blank lines out.
Part II Analysis
Population and health
1. This first question doesn’t actually use data from your chart. At the top of page 2 of the WPDS document is a table of the 10 most populous countries both in 2011 and projected for 2050.
a. Which of the top 10 most populous countries in 2011 is/are expected to approximately increase by at least 50% in population by 2050? You can determine this by multiplying the 2011 population numbers by 1.5 (this represents a 50% increase).
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b. Which countries currently in the top 10 will no longer be in the top 10 by 2050? Do these countries have anything in common such as their geographic region or whether they are developing or developed countries?
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c. Which countries currently NOT in the top 10 will be in the top 10 by 2050? Do they have anything in common such as their geographic region or whether they are developing or developed countries?
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2. Looking at rows 2-4 of your chart,
a. where is growth occurring in terms of geographic region or type of country (developing/developed, etc.)?
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b. where is population growth not occurring in terms of geographic region or type of country (developing/developed, etc.)?
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3. Page 3 of the WPDS document describes the demographic transitions that countries go through in the process of development. Read this carefully. Then, by looking at their birth and death rates (rows 4 & 5) determine what stage of the demographic transition each of your countries appear to be in and enter this in the table below. Use rows 3-5 of your chart to determine whether the population is stable or growing and enter that in the table also.
Country name / Demographic phase / Population stable or growing4. Based on row 7 of your chart (population density), is the U.S. crowded by world standards?
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5. On the basis of the data in your chart, determine whether the infant mortality rates (row 8) are positively or negatively correlated to both:
a. income (row 14) and
b. HDI value (row 16).
A positive correlation would mean that as income (or HDI) goes up, infant mortality goes up. A negative correlation would mean that as income (or HDI) goes up, infant mortality goes down. Answer:
6. You can gain some additional insight into whether there is a correlation between infant mortality and income by looking at graphical data. This can be nicely manipulated at the UN Development Programme website listed in #1d. in the directions. Go to this website and click on the Public Data Explorer link in the middle. Be patient, this page may take a while to load. To the left of the graph various Human Development Indicators are listed. By clicking on an indicator you get a pop-up menu and can select that indicator to appear on either the x or y axes of the graph. For one axis choose “under-five mortality” from the Health sub-menu. For the other axis choose GDP or GNI per capita from the Income sub-menu. From the Chart Options icon near the top-right of the graph window you can select what type of scale should be used for each axis. You have the option of using a linear or a log scale. The default is a linear scale but the log scale spreads things out a little differently by accentuating smaller numbers. Try the above-mentioned graph (Under 5 mortality vs. GDP per capita) with a log scale for the “under-five mortality rates”. Do you see the same correlation in this data that you found in your data table (question 5 above)? Does the data for the U.S. fit the general trend or does it seem to be a little out of line? What does this mean about the U.S.? (You may want to refer back to the introduction for this experiment.)
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7. Now let’s look at infant and adult mortality rates in one more place. Look at the countries with the top 25 HDI values (country 1-25 on page 158 of the HDR document). Which country ranked in the top 25 has the highest mortality rate for infants and adults? Comment on this and/or explain why this is the case.
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Information
Before moving on it is important to make a distinction between correlation and causation. Just because two quantities are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. It may but it may not. There is a really nice article from the Statistical Assessment Service (http://stats.org/faq_vs.htm) about this topic. I encourage you to read the entire article but quote just the first paragraph here.
“One of the most common errors we find in the press is the confusion between correlation and causation in scientific and health-related studies. In theory, these are easy to distinguish — an action or occurrence can cause another (such as smoking causes lung cancer), or it can correlate with another (such as smoking is correlated with alcoholism). If one action causes another, then they are most certainly correlated. But just because two things occur together does not mean that one caused the other, even if it seems to make sense.”
8. With this information in mind, what do you think about the relationship between infant mortality and the other variables you noted above? Can you determine from the data you have collected for this lab what actually causes infant mortality? If not, suggest some study that would be able to shed light on the cause of infant mortality.
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Money/GNIppp/Standard of living
Some people argue that when a person has to worry about where their next meal is coming from, that person will not worry about the biodegradability of the wrapper that the food came in, or worry about disposing of that wrapper properly afterwards. In other words, on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, being worried about the world environment comes pretty late. Thus, it might be productive to see where the rest of the world sits economically.
Assume that the world goes through good times, and every country’s total GNI or GDP increases by 50% by 2050. Everyone is better off, right? Not so fast. It also depends on what has happened to this country’s population in this time. If population is expected to increase by more than 50%, then the number of people dividing up that money increased faster than the money did, and that country actually gets poorer, per capita.
9. Assuming a 50% increase in GNIppp by 2050 and the population projections from row 2 and 3 of your chart,
a. which of your countries would get richer (per person), that is, their population is expected to grow by less than 50% by 2050?
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b. and which of your countries would get poorer (per person), that is, their population is expected to grow by more than 50% by 2050?
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c. Can a country bring itself out of poverty while rapidly increasing in population? Why or why not?
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d. If the GNIPPP per capita goes down (by 2050) because the population is growing faster than the GNI, what would you expect to happen to infant mortality and disease by 2050?
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10. Which country is the ONLY country (Hong Kong is merely a city) among the 30 most developed in the world (30 top HDI index ranking) with a Gini coefficient above 40? This is easily found by looking back at page 135 of the HDR document, where the countries are listed in order of HDI.
Country name ______
Comment on this finding.
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Aside: If you look carefully, you will see that a combination of this Gini and the GNIppp seem to explain trends in infant mortality and life expectancy. It is not enough to have a rich country; the money must also be distributed in an equitable manner if health numbers for that country are to be good. For additional perspective on this see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States scroll to the bottom). Several of the academic theories outlined at this Wikipedia site put 84% of the U.S. in the lower middle class or below, with only 16% above lower middle class.
11. Rank the nine countries you compiled data for in the data table by the Human Development Index value from top to bottom. Be sure you are using the HDI value not the ranking. For example, the U.S. HDI rank is 4 but its HDI value is 0.910. Use the HDI values, not the HDI ranks but then rank the nine countries you have studied by their HDI values.
Country HDI index
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How do these rankings compare with what you found above for mortality, per capita income, etc.? Does that one number (the HDI) provide an accurate summary of the quality of life for the average citizen? How or why?
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Environment
12. Look for any positive or negative correlations between the ecological footprint and any other data you have collected for your nine countries. What correlations do you see, if any?
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13. On the basis of the data in your chart, what can CO2 emissions per capita be correlated with?
a. You have a whole chart of data. See how many correlations you can find that seem to make sense. Among others, be sure to check for a correlation between CO2 emissions per capita and GNIppp per capita.
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b. Now check the Public Data Explorer you used before (website noted in #1d. of directions) to see if the correlations you noted in part a. hold true for all the countries in that database, not just the 9 countries on your chart. The Public Data Explorer may not have all of the statistics that you have on your chart but, where possible, comment on whether these correlations still seem to hold for the many countries graphed in the Explorer program.
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14. Based on row 11 of your data table, which countries on your chart are depleting their natural resources at a significant rate compared to other countries? Note that “natural resources” in this context refers to such things as oil, gas, and ores mined from the earth, all of which cannot be replaced once they are used.
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Thought question: Why do you think they are doing this?
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15. Forests are a specific example of natural resources.
a. With regard to the % change in forest area, what would you expect to happen to this number in a country with a rapidly growing population?
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b. Do the rapidly growing countries in your list have a % change in forest area that matches your expectations?
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Aside: How can this forest habitat be preserved? In Brazil, the rainforest is being cut down for a variety of reasons, including the booming ethanol industry and booming corn and soybean agriculture that also feed a booming pork industry, all of which provide GDP (income) to the country and raise the standard of living. However, we try to make Brazil “save the rainforests.” What if people in other countries told us in the United States to put much of our farmland back into its natural habitat? How does it feel to have others tell us how to use our land? Do we have the right to tell Brazil how to use their land?
c. Comment on this topic.
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16. Can deaths from outdoor pollution be correlated with any of the other tabulated values in your data table?
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17. Now that you’ve looked at a bunch of data and ways to find and analyze data, come up with a few of your own ideas. Using the Nationmaster website or one of the others we have used find three sets of statistics for your counties on some area of interest to you within the broader areas of health and welfare of people, economics, or the environment. (Note that these are the three categories featured in the Triple Bottom Line). Place these statistics in rows 19-21 of your data chart and label the statistic carefully. Appropriate statistics would be things such as Municipal Waste per capita, NOx emissions, per capita nuclear energy production, etc.
What do you learn about your countries as a result of your additional statistics? Explain each one carefully and describe how you think they may be related to other criteria we have looked at in this lab exercise.
Answer: (Note that this question requires a longer answer than some of the previous questions.)
Information
So what’s the point? Population is a contributing factor (not necessarily the primary contributor) to most of the environmental problems facing the world; more people produce more waste, need more food, need more energy, use more resources, etc. Most of the population growth is occurring in developing countries. Demographic transitions tell us that, as they develop, their life expectancy and mortality numbers will improve and, in the short term, their populations will explode. But, in addition, as they develop further they will use energy and other resources in rapidly increasing amounts and become more highly polluting in the process.
There are two sides to this argument. Developed countries tend to want to point the finger at less-developed countries and tell them a) the world cannot afford for your population to become developed, so you must stay less developed and/or b) stop your population growth.