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Tag: Population growth and decline

  • Singapore’s birth rate is falling and ‘throwing money’ at the problem won’t solve it

    Singapore’s birth rate is falling and ‘throwing money’ at the problem won’t solve it

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    Data from the Institute of Policy Studies showed that women aged 20 to 24 are now less likely to give birth than women aged 35 to 39.

    Mai Yo | Klaud9 | Getty Images

    SINGAPORE — Almost two decades ago, Loh and her husband made a decision not to have children.

    Today, 17 years later, the two of them are convinced they made the right choice.

    “I may feel differently when I’m on my deathbed and have to die alone, but at the moment, the choice seems right to us,” said the 46-year-old who works in the tech industry.

    Loh, who did not want to give her full name, is not alone.

    Singapore’s birth rate hit a record low in 2022, after years of decline.

    Live births last year plummeted by 7.9%, to usly expensive it is to live in Singapore, and the high cost of living that continues to steer many away from expanding their family, analysts told CNBC.

    Having a child is tied to many things — the affordability of a house, a spouse, and the maturity of the job market that makes you feel secure enough to do it.

    Jaya Dass

    Asia-Pacific managing director, Ranstad

    Birth rates increased slightly in 2022 to 1.12 from 1.1 the year before when people stayed home during Covid and had more children.

    Still, fertility trends have shown women are also choosing to have children later in life, or not at all.

    Data from Singapore-based think tank Institute of Policy Studies showed that women between the ages of 20 and 24 are now less likely to give birth than women between 35 to 39 years old.

    “Having a child is tied to many things — the affordability of a house, a spouse, and the maturity of the job market that makes you feel secure enough to do it,” Jaya Dass, Ranstad’s Asia-Pacific managing director.

    “The attractiveness of wanting to have a child has actually reduced significantly because of how life has matured and changed,” Dass said.

    Money isn’t the solution

    Already grappling with an aging population, Singapore is also facing one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, prompting the government to dole out incentives and “bonuses” to encourage people to have children.

    Couples with babies born from Feb. 14 will receive 11,000 Singapore dollars ($8,000) each for their first and second child, and S$13,000 for their third child and beyond — that’s a 30% to 37% jump from before.

    Women in Singapore are choosing to have children later in life, or not at all.

    D3sign | Moment | Getty Images

    Government-paid paternity leave was doubled, increasing from two to four weeks for fathers of babies born from 2024. 

    Although there are a slew of government policies aimed at encouraging more couples to have children, “throwing money” at the problem will not solve it, said Wen Wei Tan, analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

    “Tackling the fertility rate will require us to confront some of the weakness of the underlying systems … Which means not only addressing demographic challenges, but also helping to build social cohesion, and perhaps look at how we can foster healthier attitudes towards risk taking,” EIU’s Tan said.

    Most expensive city

    In 2022, the EIU ranked Singapore as the most expensive city to live in, sharing the top spot with New York City. 

    Owning a home together is also a challenge for young couples. 

    House prices in the city-state continue to rise rapidly, increasing by 7.5% year-on-year in June 2023, CEIC data showed. 

    Public housing apartments — known locally as HDB flats — are in high demand but supply is not catching up, said Tan from the EIU.

    Construction came to a standstill during the pandemic, as labor shortages and the high cost of raw materials delayed housing projects, and couples had to wait twice as long for their apartments, causing some to marry later.

    This, however, is just one part of the problem, as there are many other costs associated with raising children in Singapore, according to Mu Zheng, assistant professor at the department of sociology and anthropology at the National University of Singapore.

    “There is a sense of instability is dragging people further away from having children,” Zheng told CNBC.

    Working mothers

    The high cost of living in Singapore is leading to more couples with two incomes and no kids —  sometimes referred to as Dinks, a slang for “dual income, no kids.”

    That is also due to a mindset change and more couples being willing to put their career ahead of marriage and having kids. 

    “Once women have children, they’re going to see a slowdown in their career progression. Many make the decision to wait till they feel secure and stable in their jobs so there won’t serious threat to their income if they take time away from work,”  Tan said.

    More couples are willing to put their career ahead of marriage and having kids.

    Carlina Teteris | Moment | Getty Images

    Delaying marriage means people may get more opportunities to pursue higher education, leading some to be more selective and have greater expectations of their future partners, said Dass. 

    In 2022, 36.2% of residents who were 25 years and above had a university degree — that’s compared to 25.7% a decade ago.

    However, Dass highlighted that this is not necessarily a bad thing because “the minute education and literacy increases among women, their ability to come into the workforce and contribute to the economy increases.” 

    Shrinking labor force

    A declining birth rate, coupled with an aging population, will have repercussions on Singapore’s labor force. 

    “Having fewer children means you have a smaller workforce that can contribute to the economy. And with Singapore’s high life expectancy, the dependency ratio will increase,” said EIU’s Tan. 

    Singapore’s population is ageing rapidly and 1 in 4 Singaporeans will be over 65 years old by 2030.

    Jayk7 | Moment | Getty Images

    Tan warned that a shrinking workforce could hurt the government’s tax revenues and exacerbate the problem, especially when coupled with the challenges of an aging population.

    “You’re collecting less money from a smaller workforce. So the government has less fiscal resources to channel to economic purposes that the country might need,” Tan said, citing examples of upgrading infrastructure and investing in research and development. 

    “So it’s more taxes for those in the workforce, and more financial burden to care for the elderly. And if one gets married and has children, there are more financial considerations at play.”

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  • Colorado Springs reckons with past after gay club shooting

    Colorado Springs reckons with past after gay club shooting

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    COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — When officials unfurled a 25-foot rainbow flag in front of Colorado Springs City Hall this week, people gathered to mourn the victims of a mass shooting at a popular gay club couldn’t help but reflect on how such a display of support would have been unthinkable just days earlier.

    With a growing and diversifying population, the city nestled at the foothills of the Rockies is a patchwork of disparate social and cultural fabrics. It’s a place full of art shops and breweries; megachurches and military bases; a liberal arts college and the Air Force Academy. For years it’s marketed itself as an outdoorsy boomtown with a population set to top Denver’s by 2050.

    But last weekend’s shooting has raised uneasy questions about the lasting legacy of cultural conflicts that caught fire decades ago and gave Colorado Springs a reputation as a cauldron of religion-infused conservatism, where LGBTQ people didn’t fit in with the most vocal community leaders’ idea of family values.

    For some, merely seeing police being careful to refer to the victims using their correct pronouns this week signaled a seismic change. For others, the shocking act of violence in a space considered an LGBTQ refuge shattered a sense of optimism pervading everywhere from the city’s revitalized downtown to the sprawling subdivisions on its outskirts.

    “It feels like the city is kind of at this tipping point,” said Candace Woods, a queer minister and chaplain who has called Colorado Springs home for 18 years. “It feels interesting and strange, like there’s this tension: How are we going to decide how we want to move forward as a community?”

    Five people were killed in the attack last weekend. Eight victims remained hospitalized Friday, officials said.

    In recent decades the population has almost doubled to 480,000 people. More than one-third of residents are nonwhite — twice as many as in 1980. The median age is 35. Politics here lean more conservative than in comparable-size cities. City council debates revolve around issues familiar throughout the Mountain West, such as water, housing and the threat of wildfires.

    Residents take pride in describing Colorado Springs as a place defined by reinvention. In the early 20th century, newcomers sought to establish a resort town in the shadow of Pikes Peak. In the 1940s, military bases arrived. In the 1990s it became known as a home base for evangelical nonprofits and Christian ministries including broadcast ministry Focus on the Family and the Fellowship of Christian Cowboys.

    “I have been thinking for years, we’re in the middle of a transition about what Colorado Springs is, who we are, and what we’ve become,” said Matt Mayberry, a historian at Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.

    The idea of latching onto a city with a bright future is partly what drew Michael Anderson, a Club Q bartender who survived last weekend’s shooting.

    Two friends, Derrick Rump and Daniel Aston, helped Anderson land the Club Q job and find his “queer family” in his new hometown. It was more welcoming than rural Florida where he grew up.

    Still, he noted signs the city was more culturally conservative than others of similar size and much of Colorado: “Colorado Springs is kind of an outlier,” he said.

    Now he’s grieving the deaths of Rump and Aston in the club shooting.

    Leslie Herod followed an opposite trajectory. After growing up in Colorado Springs in a military family — like many others in the city — she left to study at the University of Colorado in liberal Boulder. In 2016 she became the first openly LGBTQ and Black person elected to Colorado’s General Assembly, representing part of Denver. She is now running to become Denver’s mayor.

    “Colorado Springs is a community that is full of love. But I will also acknowledge that I chose to leave the Springs because I felt like when it came to … the elected leadership, the vocal leadership in this community, it wasn’t supportive of all people, wasn’t supportive of Black people, wasn’t supportive of immigrants, not supportive of LGBTQ people,” Herod said at a memorial event downtown.

    She said she found community at Club Q when she would return from college. But she didn’t forget people and groups with a history of anti-LGBTQ stances and rhetoric maintained influence in city politics.

    “This community, just like any other community in the country, is complex,” she said.

    Club Q’s co-owner, Nic Grzecka, told The Associated Press he’s hoping to use the tragedy to rebuild a “loving culture” in the city. Even though general acceptance the LGBTQ community has grown, Grzecka said false assertions that members of the community are “grooming” children has incited hatred.

    Those who have been around long enough are remembering this week how in the 1990s, at the height of the religious right’s influence, the Colorado Springs-based group Colorado for Family Values spearheaded a statewide push to pass Amendment 2 and make it illegal for communities to pass ordinances protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination.

    Colorado Springs voted 3 to 1 in favor of Amendment 2, helping make its narrow statewide victory possible. Though it was later ruled unconstitutional, the campaign cemented the city’s reputation, drawing more like-minded groups and galvanizing progressive activists in response.

    The influx of evangelical groups decades ago was at least in part spurred by efforts from the city’s economic development arm to offer financial incentives to lure nonprofits. Newcomers began lobbying for policies like getting rid of school Halloween celebrations due to suspicions about the holiday’s pagan origins.

    Yemi Mobolade, an entrepreneur running for mayor as an independent, didn’t understand how strong Colorado Springs’ stigma as a “hate city” was until he moved here 12 years ago. But since then, he said, it has risen from recession-era struggles and become culturally and economically vibrant for all kinds of people.

    There has been a concerted push to shed the city’s reputation as “Jesus Springs” and remake it yet again, highlighting its elite Olympic Training Center and branding itself as Olympic City USA.

    Much like in the 1990s, Focus on the Family and New Life Church remain prominent in town. After the shooting, Focus on the Family’s president, Jim Daly, said that like the rest of the community he was mourning the tragedy. With the city under the national spotlight, he said the organization wanted to make it clear it stands against hate.

    Daly noted a generational shift among Christian leaders away from the rhetorical style of his predecessor, Dr. James Dobson. Whereas Focus on the Family published literature in decades past assailing what it called the “Homosexual Agenda,” its messaging now emphasizes tolerance, ensuring those who believe marriage should be between one man and one woman have the right to act accordingly.

    “I think in a pluralistic culture now, the idea is: How do we all live without treading on each other?” Daly said.

    After a sign in front of the group’s headquarters was vandalized with graffiti reading “their blood is on your hands” and “five lives taken,” Daly said in a statement Friday it was time for “prayer, grieving and healing, not vandalism and the spreading of hate.”

    The memorials this week attracted a wave of visitors: crowds of mourners clutching flowers, throngs of television crews and a church group whose volunteers set up a tent and passed out cookies, coffee and water. To some in the LGBTQ community, the scene was less about solidarity and more a cause for consternation.

    Colorado Springs native Ashlyn May, who grew up in a Christian church but left when it didn’t accept her queer identity, said one woman from the group in the tent asked if she could pray for her and a friend who accompanied her to the memorial.

    She said yes. It reminded May of her beloved great-grandparents, who were religious. But as the praying carried on and the woman urged May and her friend to turn to God, she felt as if praying had turned into preying. It unearthed memories of hearing things about LGBTQ people she saw as hateful and inciting.

    “It felt very conflicting,” May said.

    ———

    Metz reported from Salt Lake City. AP writers Brittany Peterson and Jesse Bedayn in Colorado Springs contributed.

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  • World Population hits 8 billion, creating many challenges

    World Population hits 8 billion, creating many challenges

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    LAGOS, Nigeria — The world’s population is projected to hit an estimated 8 billion people on Tuesday, according to a United Nations projection, with much of the growth coming from developing nations in Africa.

    Among them is Nigeria, where resources are already stretched to the limit. More than 15 million people in Lagos compete for everything from electricity to light their homes to spots on crowded buses, often for two-hour commutes each way in this sprawling megacity. Some Nigerian children set off for school as early as 5 a.m.

    And over the next three decades, the West African nation’s population is expected to soar even more: from 216 million this year to 375 million, the U.N. says. That will make Nigeria the fourth-most populous country in the world after India, China and the United States.

    “We are already overstretching what we have — the housing, roads, the hospitals, schools. Everything is overstretched,” said Gyang Dalyop, an urban planning and development consultant in Nigeria.

    The U.N.’s Day of 8 Billion milestone Tuesday is more symbolic than precise, officials are careful to note in a wide-ranging report released over the summer that makes some staggering projections.

    The upward trend threatens to leave even more people in developing countries further behind, as governments struggle to provide enough classrooms and jobs for a rapidly growing number of youth, and food insecurity becomes an even more urgent problem.

    Nigeria is among eight countries the U.N says will account for more than half the world’s population growth between now and 2050 — along with fellow African nations Congo, Ethiopia and Tanzania.

    “The population in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to double between 2022 and 2050, putting additional pressure on already strained resources and challenging policies aimed to reduce poverty and inequalities,” the U.N. report said.

    It projected the world’s population will reach around 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.4 billion in 2100.

    Other countries rounding out the list with the fastest growing populations are Egypt, Pakistan, the Philippines and India, which is set to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation next year.

    In Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, where more than 12 million people live, many families struggle to find affordable housing and pay school fees. While elementary pupils attend for free, older children’s chances depend on their parents’ incomes.

    “My children took turns” going to school, said Luc Kyungu, a Kinshasa truck driver who has six children. “Two studied while others waited because of money. If I didn’t have so many children, they would have finished their studies on time.”

    Rapid population growth also means more people vying for scarce water resources and leaves more families facing hunger as climate change increasingly impacts crop production in many parts of the world.

    “There is also a greater pressure on the environment, increasing the challenges to food security that is also compounded by climate change,” said Dr. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “Reducing inequality while focusing on adapting and mitigating climate change should be where our policy makers’ focus should be.”

    Still, experts say the bigger threat to the environment is consumption, which is highest in developed countries not undergoing big population increases.

    “Global evidence shows that a small portion of the world’s people use most of the Earth’s resources and produce most of its greenhouse gas emissions,” said Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India. “Over the past 25 years, the richest 10% of the global population has been responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions.”

    According to the U.N., the population in sub-Saharan Africa is growing at 2.5% per year — more than three times the global average. Some of that can be attributed to people living longer, but family size remains the driving factor. Women in sub-Saharan Africa on average have 4.6 births, twice the current global average of 2.3.

    Families become larger when women start having children early, and 4 out of 10 girls in Africa marry before they turn 18, according to U.N. figures. The rate of teen pregnancy on the continent is the highest in the world — about half of the children born last year to mothers under 20 worldwide were in sub-Saharan Africa.

    Still, any effort to reduce family size now would come too late to significantly slow the 2050 growth projections, the U.N. said. About two-thirds of it “will be driven by the momentum of past growth.”

    “Such growth would occur even if childbearing in today’s high-fertility countries were to fall immediately to around two births per woman,” the report found.

    There are also important cultural reasons for large families. In sub-Saharan Africa, children are seen as a blessing and as a source of support for their elders — the more sons and daughters, the greater comfort in retirement.

    Still, some large families “may not have what it takes to actually feed them,” says Eunice Azimi, an insurance broker in Lagos and mother of three.

    “In Nigeria, we believe that it is God that gives children,” she said. “They see it as the more children you have, the more benefits. And you are actually overtaking your peers who cannot have as many children. It looks like a competition in villages.”

    Politics also have played a role in Tanzania, where former President John Magufuli, who ruled the East African country from 2015 until his death in 2021, discouraged birth control, saying that a large population was good for the economy.

    He opposed family planning programs promoted by outside groups, and in a 2019 speech urged women not to “block ovaries.” He even described users of contraceptives as “lazy” in a country he said was awash with cheap food. Under Magufuli, pregnant schoolgirls were even banned from returning to classrooms.

    But his successor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, appeared to reverse government policy in comments last month when she said birth control was necessary in order not to overwhelm the country’s public infrastructure.

    Even as populations soar in some countries, the U.N. says rates are expected to drop by 1% or more in 61 nations.

    The U.S. population is now around 333 million, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The population growth rate in 2021 was just 0.1%, the lowest since the country was founded.

    “Going forward, we’re going to have slower growth — the question is, how slow?” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “The real wild card for the U.S. and many other developed countries is immigration.”

    Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, says environmental concerns surrounding the 8 billion mark should focus on consumption, particularly in developed countries.

    “Population is not the problem, the way we consume is the problem — let’s change our consumption patterns,” he said.

    ———

    Asadu reported from Abuja, Nigeria. Associated Press writers Krista Larson in Dakar, Senegal; Sibi Arasu in Bengaluru, India; Wanjohi Kabukuru in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt; Christina Larson in Washington; Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, and Jean-Yves Kamale in Kinshasa, Congo, contributed.

    ———

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Endangered whale’s decline slows, but population falls again

    Endangered whale’s decline slows, but population falls again

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    PORTLAND, Maine — The decline of an endangered species of whale slowed last year, as it lost about 2% of its population, but scientists warn the animal still faces existential threats and is losing breeding females too fast.

    The North Atlantic right whale’s population was more than 480 in 2010 and fell by more than 25% over the following decade. The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, a group of scientists, government officials and industry members, said Monday that the population fell to an estimated 340 last year.

    That is a decline of eight animals from the previous year, when the population was initially thought to be even fewer. The whales are vulnerable to ship collisions and entanglement in commercial fishing gear, and they have suffered from poor reproduction and high mortality in recent years.

    “The reality is we are still seeing unsustainable levels of human impacts on the species,” said Heather Pettis, research scientist in the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life and executive administrator of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium. “We’re still injuring these animals to a point where it’s not just about survival. It’s about health, it’s about reproduction.”

    The right whales live off the East Coast and migrate every year from calving grounds off Georgia and Florida to feeding grounds off New England and Canada. They were once abundant but were decimated during the commercial whaling era, when they were hunted for their oil and meat.

    The whales have been listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act more than 50 years but have been slow to recover. The population was even lower in 1990, when it was 264, Pettis said. One of the biggest challenges facing the right whales today is that the number of female whales that are capable of breeding appears to be falling.

    An article that appeared this month in the scientific journal Frontiers in Marine Science reported that the estimated population of female right whales fell from 185 in 2014 to 142 in 2018. The largest decline was seen in breeding females, and only 72 were estimated to be alive at the beginning of 2018, the article said.

    The whales appear to be getting smaller, and that is hurting their ability to reproduce, Peter Corkeron, chair of the Kraus Marine Mammal Conservation Program at the Cabot Center and one of the authors of the article.

    “The world needs more fat whales,” Corkeron said.

    The plight of the right whale has emerged as a major issue for commercial fisheries in the U.S., especially the American lobster industry, which is based mostly in Maine. The whales are particularly vulnerable to becoming entangled in the kind of fixed vertical underwater lines used to fish for lobsters and crabs.

    The federal government has crafted new restrictions on lobster fishing in an effort to save the right whale, and fishermen have argued that the rules could put them out of business. A group of lobster fishermen sued to stop the rules, and their case is pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

    Warming oceans are also a concern. The whales are aided by a network of protected zones designed to allow them to eat the tiny organisms they feed on without danger of entanglements and collisions. However, warming waters have caused their food to move, and they have followed it into unprotected areas where they are more vulnerable, scientists have said.

    Conservation groups have advocated for vessel speed restrictions and stricter fishing regulations to save the whales.

    “These latest population numbers confirm that the species continues to teeter on the verge of functional extinction, and current measures to save it are falling short,” said Sarah Sharp, a veterinarian with International Fund for Animal Welfare. “Nevertheless, there is hope on the horizon. Solutions do indeed exist.”

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