Safety in numbers?
A casual glance at global demographics over the past 100 years or so would suggest that our planet will soon resemble a commuter train in London, Mumbai or Cairo at rush hour: wildly overcrowded, with not enough seats to go around and the vehicle – in this case the Earth – about to collapse under the weight of all those people. The human race all but quadrupled during the 20th century, from 1.65 billion in 1900 to 2.5 billion by 1950, and today, the number stands at 6.9 billion and is rising rapidly, by around 78 million people per year. Some time around 2050, we’re expected to hit nine billion.
Forecasts about just where all this could end up can be startling. If the fertility rates of 1995–2000 were to continue unabated, says the UN’s Population Division (UNPD), then the world’s population would reach an incomprehensible 134 trillion by 2300.
Critical threshold
All of these people are bad news for the planet. There are two main reasons why: where we are too numerous, we affect the immediate ecosystem; and, more widely, the consumption levels of so many of us make unsustainable demands on the world’s resources. ‘Beyond a certain critical threshold, additional people place more demands for resources on Mother Earth than she is capable of delivering,’ says Ashok Khosla, president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). ‘Such a critical threshold has been passed in many parts of the world. In rich countries, this is mainly because each additional person consumes so much. In poor countries, even though each individual has access to much smaller quantities of resources, the number of people can still push nature’s resilience to a level that it fails.’
The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) reckons that about half the Earth’s biological production capacity has already been diverted to human use. The poorest 20 per cent of countries account for only 1.3 per cent of consumption, but the depletion of natural resources occurs most rapidly in the poorest countries, where fertility rates are highest. The urgent drive for economic growth often leads to lax regulation of polluting industries and pressure to use marginal land for food production.
In particular, rapid population growth, economic development and industrialisation have led to the unprecedented transformation of freshwater ecosystems. The Nile Basin is home to several countries with rapidly expanding populations, and the use of fisheries and fresh water there, and in other major water basins, is well beyond levels that can be sustained. Egypt’s population is predicted to reach 121 million by 2050; Uganda’s is likely to double by 2040; and the number of Ethiopians is projected to increase from 83 million to 183 million. How can such an already over-exploited river meet the future demands that will be placed on it?
‘As the pressure on biological resources builds up, the system can go into “overshoot and collapse”,’ says Khosla. ‘When too much water is extracted from the aquifers below the ground, the quality and quantity won’t be available when it’s needed later. If too many trees are cut for building houses or to fuel cooking stoves, even nature can’t regenerate itself quickly enough to meet demand. Such things are happening extensively in the poorer countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.’
Malthusian scenario
Could this gruesome picture deteriorate still further? Birth rates suggest an unfolding Malthusian scenario, whereby our numbers grow exponentially until we eventually burn ourselves out, taking the planet’s ecosystems with us. But there’s a problem with this interpretation of population growth – the prevailing view of demographers is that it’s unlikely to unfold.
Contrary to popular perception, the global population, far from increasing between 2050 and 2100, is expected to shrink. A UN report, World Population Prospects, calculates that 9.1 billion will be the limit of global growth (although 9.1 billion is the medium range for the UN’s estimates, and is based on assumptions about widespread implementation of family planning – if women average just 0.5 more children over the next 40 years, the population would rise to 10.5 billion by 2050).
‘The situation is quite confusing,’ says Professor Wolfgang Lutz, leader of the World Population Program at the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). ‘We have rapid growth in Africa and west Asia – Africa is forecast to treble its population over the next few decades. Other countries are declining – Bulgaria is dropping from nine million in the 1990s to six million in the coming decades.’
But 9.1 billion is likely to be the limit of human expansion, according to Lutz, and from that point, it will decline, possibly quite abruptly. ‘If you have the fertility rates of Europe today applied worldwide, then we could quite easily see a population of between two billion and four billion, even with a dramatic increase in life expectancy,’ he says.
Jose Miguel Guzman, chief of the UNFPA’s population and development branch, agrees that the population will stabilise at around nine billion some time after 2050, with the bulk of that growth in developing countries, where the population will swell from 5.6 billion now to 7.9 billion by 2050. ‘Developed nations will stay more or less stable – rising from 1.23 billion now to 1.28 billion by 2050,’ he says.
The UNFPA reckons the replacement level of fertility is slightly above two surviving children per woman. But the trend is much lower already in many countries – in South Korea, it’s 1.1, and in Shanghai, it stands at 0.6. In Iran, where women averaged almost seven children during the Iran–Iraq war, the rate is now 1.8.
In southern and eastern Europe, the rate has dropped to 1.2 children. Globally, the UNPD has recorded a steady drop in fertility rates from 2.1 children to 1.85; some predictions have put it as low as 1.65 per woman.
Some regions are predicted not merely to decline but plummet. According to IIASA, the population of the European part of the former Soviet Union is expected to fall by more than half over the course of this century from around 230 million to 108 million in 2100 (though the longest-term projections are, IIASA, admits, highly variable and uncertain). ‘In all likelihood, an increasing number of governments will view too-low fertility rather than too-high fertility as the main population-related problem of the 21st century,’ says Lutz.
Cutting consumption
This trend doesn’t necessarily mean good news for the environment. ‘We know that in some cases, environmental damage isn’t caused by an increase in population but by the way in which resources are exploited,’ says Guzman.
‘There are reasons for concern right now – we are hurting future generations by running down biodiversity and ecosystems, so clearly I believe that lower fertility rates would be better,’ Lutz points out. ‘From a global perspective, lower fertility rates will make it easier to address the problems of climate change and our impact on the environment, but it won’t solve them. You can say the world would be better off with fewer people in it, but it depends on the people. If you had a world of three billion better-off, well-educated people, then no doubt things would be better. But not if they’re poor.’
The key, suggests Lutz, is to address the issue of per capita consumption and the development of technology, which will both enable humans to lighten their carbon footprint. ‘To say that the more people you have, the more emissions there are is very superficial,’ he says. ‘There are huge differences between social class and age – the young and the old don’t use as much energy. It’s more about household size – the fridge, the heating – rather than the number of people living in it. A world of nine billion people with a light carbon footprint could be quite a pleasant world in which to live.’
And as bad as things are when it comes to our impact on the environment, some argue that, even if numbers go up in the short term, this won’t necessarily exacerbate climate change. ‘I’m not saying more people have a smaller impact on the planet than fewer people; clearly they do,’ says Fred Pearce, environmental consultant for New Scientist and author of Peoplequake, a book in which he argues that predictions of a global over-population disaster are misplaced. ‘But it’s a very Malthusian idea that poor people keep breeding and breeding until a disease comes along that kills them, or until we can’t feed them. I don’t think people have ever bred in that sort of animal way. Humans won’t keep reproducing until we crash; the world simply isn’t like that.
‘In environmental terms, population growth is happening almost entirely in poorer countries where the carbon footprint is very small,’ he continues. ‘It doesn’t make sense to base climate change trends on being driven by over-breeding by people “out there” somewhere. Even 100 Ethiopians don’t have the impact on the planet of one American.’
The point, argues Pearce, is that Africa will inevitably follow European and east Asian trends for smaller families. ‘It seems perverse to worry about that,’ he says, ‘especially as Ethiopians and other developing nations are going to cease having such large families before long.’ He suggests that it’s ‘almost a certainty that we are heading for a fall [in population], even by the middle of the century’.
Shifting attitudes
So why do so many experts reckon that our population will drop – even plummet – back to the levels of the early 1900s? The reason isn’t that the human race is a self-limiting virus; what will push our numbers down are dramatic shifts in social attitudes and health and educational trends that are already taking place.
International development workers refer to the ‘education vaccine’ in relation to efforts to curtail the spread of HIV, but some also whisper of an ‘education pill’ – pointing out that improvement in education and human rights, particularly for women, is fundamental to lowering birth rates. ‘We know that many women want to have more children because there’s no prospect of them working in the formal market,’ says Guzman. ‘Where they have opportunities to work, this influences the number of children they have.’
The UN has no official population control policy, but Guzman acknowledges that the organisation actively promotes choice. ‘Since 1994, the UN has supported the decision of individuals to have the number of children they want,’ he says. ‘This is based on the fact that many people can now implement reproductive decisions because they have money or resources. Where women can’t implement their decisions, we make available access to resources.’
Guzman describes the present situation as ‘population inertia’. ‘The population will mainly continue to rise over the next four decades or so because the future mothers who will deliver those children have already been born,’ he says.
‘In most countries, even developed countries, two thirds of population growth will happen independently of what you do,’ he continues. ‘The only path you can influence is the remaining 25–30 per cent of population growth – and that’s the possibility for women to gain access to contraception and control the number of children they want to have.’
Offering choice
Another profound influence is the dramatic reduction of child mortality. Put simply, if you’re not confident your child will live beyond the age of five, you will have more of them, an anxiety to which even the ferocious breeders of Victorian Britain weren’t immune. ‘There’s a link between fertility and infant mortality,’ says Guzman. ‘Where infant mortality is high, you don’t just have one child. Investment in education of child mortality has an indirect effect on reducing fertility in the medium and the long term.’
These trends are ‘spectacular social changes’, according to Pearce. ‘My sense is that women today have half the number of children their mothers did, or that they had 40 years ago. There’s a global phenomenon going on here.
‘It has to do with giving women a choice,’ he continues. ‘These are spectacular social changes and social forces pushing us in a broadly opposite direction. The world population is growing up. The baby-boom generation was caused by women having large families and most of them surviving.
‘In the past, women felt they had to have five or six children in order to have a chance for two to survive to adulthood,’ Pearce says. ‘Improved mortality has changed that, and women can be more confident that the children they have will survive. If you make it difficult for women to combine a career with having a family, increasingly, they will opt for a career and perhaps have one child. That trend is hitting the Muslim and Catholic worlds as much as anywhere else.’
In such situations, cause and effect kick in, according to Lutz. ‘Once there has been such a major social change, where low fertility is the norm, then small family sizes will continue,’ he says. ‘Where women have had several decades of a one-child policy, even if you are then allowed to have two or more, it seems odd.’
School of thought
All of these issues are intertwined in India, according to AR Nanda, executive director of the Population Foundation of India. ‘The most important factor that can reduce momentum is to raise the age of marriage or cohabitation and increase the interval between marriage and first pregnancy, as this stretches out the time between generations,’ he says. ‘The strongest impact comes through increasing years of schooling for girls. Population momentum can also be curtailed by promoting valued roles for women other than motherhood, increasing young women’s access to education, income and financial credit, and providing young women and men with information and access to appropriate services.’
Where this has happened, India has seen dramatic changes in population growth patterns. ‘India is a country of striking demographic diversity,’ Nanda says. ‘There is already a north–south demographic divide. The southern states – Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka – are doing well in reduction of fertility. In the four large states – Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan – growth rates continue to be high.’
It’s no coincidence that these states are where the crux of India’s population problem lies.
All have low health indicators: high maternal and infant mortality, high child and maternal malnutrition, low literacy rates, high levels of poverty, high fertility rates, scarcity of natural resources, and low age at marriage. ‘These states account for nearly 40 per cent of India’s population and will contribute well over 50 per cent of growth in the coming decades,’ Nanda says. ‘The performance and the demographic outcomes of these states will determine the time and the size of population at which India will achieve population stabilisation.’
Family planning
So, as the level of education rises in developing nations and families become smaller, will those countries be better positioned to tackle the environmental legacy we will leave them? Lutz points to World Health Organization studies, which looked at increasing urban populations and singles out Nairobi, which may, because of climate change, become a malarial area in the next few decades. ‘All those people may face a new threat from malaria,’ he says. ‘But malaria can be eradicated – Singapore did it in 1980 after seven years. Why shouldn’t Kenya do the same when education levels are raised to those of Singapore? Raising education levels brings down the birth rate and that will help people defend themselves against climate change.’
Some observers, however, suspect that such conclusions may be possible in theory – for example, if the medium projections for population growth unfold – but may unravel, or are likely to be complicated by climate change and the realities of expanding access to family planning, especially in the least developed countries. ‘It’s too simplistic to say that a drop in population will resolve these issues,’ says Judy Oglethorpe, managing director of WWF-US’s climate-adaptation programme. ‘The UN’s medium projection of 9.1 billion people by 2050 is just that – a projection – and is based on assumptions about better access to family planning. We might even go over ten billion. Even if we do peak globally around 2050, it won’t be the peak point for some developing countries, particularly in Africa.’
Another problem that may prevent this scenario unfolding is that demographics rarely get incorporated into climate change discussions. According to the UNFPA, up to 200 million people may leave their homes in response to environmental degradation or climate change by the year 2050, yet population growth was barely addressed at the climate change talks in Copenhagen last December. Demographers fear that political and religious sensitivities mean their analysis rarely gets factored into the debate. ‘Look at the issues of the environment and climate change and you’ll see that population isn’t in the debate,’ says Guzman. ‘Many developing countries fear that if we mention population, then we are putting the problem of climate change onto their shoulders. In most countries, the office for national statistics is completely separate from the ministry of environment; there’s no connection between the two. We have very good instruments to map where events will take place, but you can’t see the true picture unless you put people on the map.’
Tackling taboos
Some deep-rooted cultural practices, such as the taboo of talking about sex and contraception, will also need to be handled gingerly. ‘The age at which women start having their children determines how many they have,’ says Guzman. ‘In many countries where there is forced marriage, it’s responsible for child bearing at a very early age. If we are able to implant policies that promote the empowerment of women and postpone marriage to a later age, then we delay child bearing.’
Lutz, too, suggests that a resolution may always be elusive. ‘Population and the environment is a very controversial subject,’ he says. ‘For many people, contraception equals reproductive rights equals abortions, and that view blocks reasoned discussion of the issue of population. Whenever ecologists suggest that a world with fewer people in it would be better, some people stick their hands up and there’s gridlock.’
Tellingly, even environmentalists who feel that they and demographers should be bolder can be reluctant to speak out. ‘We need to approach the population issue from the human rights point of view and argue the case for the environment,’ says one ecosystems specialist for a leading conservation organisation, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of his work. ‘Humans and ecosystems go together. Harm to one degrades the other.
‘[An expanding population] is going to have a very large impact on biodiversity and will interfere with how species adapt to climate change,’ he continues. ‘I wonder if there’s even the capacity in the world without climate change. The damage to the planet is going to be pretty bad, and it may be difficult for the Earth to recover from some of the impacts.’
Unexpected twists
Other unexpected twists in the pattern of the world’s population are also bound to occur over coming decades. Lutz points out that in some European countries where fertility rates have dropped, there has been a slight recovery in the past ten years. ‘There’s never a linear trend – it goes down, then it recovers,’ he says. ‘No government wants its population to either be exploding or disappearing. The mechanism for evolution is in our sex drive, and that makes sure that we won’t die out.’
Fundamentally, however, conservationists and demographers are all in search of the same virtuous circle. ‘Conserving biodiversity is a direct and highly efficient way to improve the lives and livelihoods of people,’ says the IUCN’s Khosla. ‘This automatically leads to smaller families and therefore slower population growth. In the end, smaller populations mean that we can live in balance with nature and its ecosystems.’
China and the one-child policy
China’s one-child policy looms large in any debate on population control. The policy was introduced during the late 1970s to correct a baby boom instigated by Mao Zedong, who had entreated his population to breed in order to ‘bury the United States in a human wave’. The birth rate rose to 5.8 per couple but has steadily dropped over the past three decades, even while the population has risen, and now stands at around 1.7 per couple. Financial incentives have included retirement bonuses for those parents who complied, while state officials who failed to comply can still lose their jobs. Human rights groups continue to document forced sterilisation and forced abortion. In April, there were reports in Guangdong province that elderly parents of those who refused to be sterilised were detained in order to coerce their children.
Yet it’s uncertain to what extent the one-child policy has lowered birth rates. The policy was more relaxed in the countryside, but in some areas, the birth rate is lower than in those where the one-child approach was strictly enforced. ‘Much of the growth-rate reduction in China took place between 1970 and 1979, before the introduction of the one-child policy,’ says AR Nanda of the Population Foundation of India. ‘The decline in China’s growth rate has its roots in increasing education access, improvement in economy and in the status of women, which took place after the Communist Revolution and before the one-child policy. It isn’t entirely clear how much of China’s fertility decline can be actually attributed to the one-child policy alone.’
Low-impact living: the Terai
Nepal’s Terai region may offer one model of how the world could mitigate the impact of large numbers of people placing pressure on ecosystems.
The Terai was sparsely populated until the 1940s, when malaria was eradicated, whereupon huge inward migration took place – 48 per cent of Nepal’s population now lives there, on 17 per cent of its land. Successive generations subdivided the land, leaving many without enough to support themselves and instead turned to collecting wood for fire burning and cattle farming. This led to the wholesale destruction of forests and overgrazing. Three key species were particularly affected – the one-horned rhino, the Asian elephant and the Bengal tiger.
Between 1990 and 2005, Nepal lost 1.2 million hectares of forest, or about a quarter of its total coverage. The WWF and local partners aimed to recreate corridors of forest and encourage local communities to take charge of their forests. This included reducing cattle grazing and using cows to provide milk to improve nutrition for children. Biodigesters were provided that used cowpats for cooking, reducing the need for women to spend hours collecting firewood and enabling them to assert more control over their lives.
Family planning policies were introduced – on average, women in the Terai begin to use contraception when they are 25 years of age and have three children, and there’s still some way to go: the average household size of some indigenous groups is 7.1. The WWF promoted the message that limiting family size can contribute to prosperity and organised endowments for girls to go to school. It argues that if people’s livelihoods improve, they are better able to withstand shocks such as drought and illness.
Optimum population size: the effect of ageing
How many people would be right for the world? The question has mesmerised and frustrated philosophers and demographers since Plato first mused on the subject. In 470 BC, he declared: ‘A suitable total for the number of citizens cannot be fixed without considering the land.’
‘The point is not how many people we have, but how those people behave in terms of consumption,’ says Professor Wolfgang Lutz. ‘If, in 20 years, we have more people, all at the level of consumption of today, you can see it will be a pretty horrible, unsustainable situation. But many ecologists argue that three billion could be a nice number.’
There is also some uncertainty that significant rises in life expectancy will offset some of the impact of us all having fewer children. ‘Some people doubt there is a biological limit on life expectancy,’ says Lutz. ‘People think it could be about 120 years. That could mean a third of the population of some countries over 80.’
What impact will have this on the environment? Fred Pearce suspects it may actually be beneficial. ‘Some of the demographic changes will be extremely helpful to tackling climate change,’ he says. ‘A stable, falling or older population won’t solve climate change, but it might influence our thinking of how to deal with it. Our species has never been dominated by an older generation, it’s terra incognita.
‘An older society will be less frenetic, less consumerist and less wasteful – ageing might push us into a greener direction,’ he continues. ‘People fret an awful lot about an ageing population, but we have been used to having a dependent population of non-working women. Women are now economically active, and their place is being taken by old people, so the number of economically inactive people isn’t going to change hugely.’
August 2010
Forecasts about just where all this could end up can be startling. If the fertility rates of 1995–2000 were to continue unabated, says the UN’s Population Division (UNPD), then the world’s population would reach an incomprehensible 134 trillion by 2300.
Critical threshold
All of these people are bad news for the planet. There are two main reasons why: where we are too numerous, we affect the immediate ecosystem; and, more widely, the consumption levels of so many of us make unsustainable demands on the world’s resources. ‘Beyond a certain critical threshold, additional people place more demands for resources on Mother Earth than she is capable of delivering,’ says Ashok Khosla, president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). ‘Such a critical threshold has been passed in many parts of the world. In rich countries, this is mainly because each additional person consumes so much. In poor countries, even though each individual has access to much smaller quantities of resources, the number of people can still push nature’s resilience to a level that it fails.’
The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) reckons that about half the Earth’s biological production capacity has already been diverted to human use. The poorest 20 per cent of countries account for only 1.3 per cent of consumption, but the depletion of natural resources occurs most rapidly in the poorest countries, where fertility rates are highest. The urgent drive for economic growth often leads to lax regulation of polluting industries and pressure to use marginal land for food production.
In particular, rapid population growth, economic development and industrialisation have led to the unprecedented transformation of freshwater ecosystems. The Nile Basin is home to several countries with rapidly expanding populations, and the use of fisheries and fresh water there, and in other major water basins, is well beyond levels that can be sustained. Egypt’s population is predicted to reach 121 million by 2050; Uganda’s is likely to double by 2040; and the number of Ethiopians is projected to increase from 83 million to 183 million. How can such an already over-exploited river meet the future demands that will be placed on it?
‘As the pressure on biological resources builds up, the system can go into “overshoot and collapse”,’ says Khosla. ‘When too much water is extracted from the aquifers below the ground, the quality and quantity won’t be available when it’s needed later. If too many trees are cut for building houses or to fuel cooking stoves, even nature can’t regenerate itself quickly enough to meet demand. Such things are happening extensively in the poorer countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.’
Malthusian scenario
Could this gruesome picture deteriorate still further? Birth rates suggest an unfolding Malthusian scenario, whereby our numbers grow exponentially until we eventually burn ourselves out, taking the planet’s ecosystems with us. But there’s a problem with this interpretation of population growth – the prevailing view of demographers is that it’s unlikely to unfold.
Contrary to popular perception, the global population, far from increasing between 2050 and 2100, is expected to shrink. A UN report, World Population Prospects, calculates that 9.1 billion will be the limit of global growth (although 9.1 billion is the medium range for the UN’s estimates, and is based on assumptions about widespread implementation of family planning – if women average just 0.5 more children over the next 40 years, the population would rise to 10.5 billion by 2050).
‘The situation is quite confusing,’ says Professor Wolfgang Lutz, leader of the World Population Program at the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). ‘We have rapid growth in Africa and west Asia – Africa is forecast to treble its population over the next few decades. Other countries are declining – Bulgaria is dropping from nine million in the 1990s to six million in the coming decades.’
But 9.1 billion is likely to be the limit of human expansion, according to Lutz, and from that point, it will decline, possibly quite abruptly. ‘If you have the fertility rates of Europe today applied worldwide, then we could quite easily see a population of between two billion and four billion, even with a dramatic increase in life expectancy,’ he says.
Jose Miguel Guzman, chief of the UNFPA’s population and development branch, agrees that the population will stabilise at around nine billion some time after 2050, with the bulk of that growth in developing countries, where the population will swell from 5.6 billion now to 7.9 billion by 2050. ‘Developed nations will stay more or less stable – rising from 1.23 billion now to 1.28 billion by 2050,’ he says.
The UNFPA reckons the replacement level of fertility is slightly above two surviving children per woman. But the trend is much lower already in many countries – in South Korea, it’s 1.1, and in Shanghai, it stands at 0.6. In Iran, where women averaged almost seven children during the Iran–Iraq war, the rate is now 1.8.
In southern and eastern Europe, the rate has dropped to 1.2 children. Globally, the UNPD has recorded a steady drop in fertility rates from 2.1 children to 1.85; some predictions have put it as low as 1.65 per woman.
Some regions are predicted not merely to decline but plummet. According to IIASA, the population of the European part of the former Soviet Union is expected to fall by more than half over the course of this century from around 230 million to 108 million in 2100 (though the longest-term projections are, IIASA, admits, highly variable and uncertain). ‘In all likelihood, an increasing number of governments will view too-low fertility rather than too-high fertility as the main population-related problem of the 21st century,’ says Lutz.
Cutting consumption
This trend doesn’t necessarily mean good news for the environment. ‘We know that in some cases, environmental damage isn’t caused by an increase in population but by the way in which resources are exploited,’ says Guzman.
‘There are reasons for concern right now – we are hurting future generations by running down biodiversity and ecosystems, so clearly I believe that lower fertility rates would be better,’ Lutz points out. ‘From a global perspective, lower fertility rates will make it easier to address the problems of climate change and our impact on the environment, but it won’t solve them. You can say the world would be better off with fewer people in it, but it depends on the people. If you had a world of three billion better-off, well-educated people, then no doubt things would be better. But not if they’re poor.’
The key, suggests Lutz, is to address the issue of per capita consumption and the development of technology, which will both enable humans to lighten their carbon footprint. ‘To say that the more people you have, the more emissions there are is very superficial,’ he says. ‘There are huge differences between social class and age – the young and the old don’t use as much energy. It’s more about household size – the fridge, the heating – rather than the number of people living in it. A world of nine billion people with a light carbon footprint could be quite a pleasant world in which to live.’
And as bad as things are when it comes to our impact on the environment, some argue that, even if numbers go up in the short term, this won’t necessarily exacerbate climate change. ‘I’m not saying more people have a smaller impact on the planet than fewer people; clearly they do,’ says Fred Pearce, environmental consultant for New Scientist and author of Peoplequake, a book in which he argues that predictions of a global over-population disaster are misplaced. ‘But it’s a very Malthusian idea that poor people keep breeding and breeding until a disease comes along that kills them, or until we can’t feed them. I don’t think people have ever bred in that sort of animal way. Humans won’t keep reproducing until we crash; the world simply isn’t like that.
‘In environmental terms, population growth is happening almost entirely in poorer countries where the carbon footprint is very small,’ he continues. ‘It doesn’t make sense to base climate change trends on being driven by over-breeding by people “out there” somewhere. Even 100 Ethiopians don’t have the impact on the planet of one American.’
The point, argues Pearce, is that Africa will inevitably follow European and east Asian trends for smaller families. ‘It seems perverse to worry about that,’ he says, ‘especially as Ethiopians and other developing nations are going to cease having such large families before long.’ He suggests that it’s ‘almost a certainty that we are heading for a fall [in population], even by the middle of the century’.
Shifting attitudes
So why do so many experts reckon that our population will drop – even plummet – back to the levels of the early 1900s? The reason isn’t that the human race is a self-limiting virus; what will push our numbers down are dramatic shifts in social attitudes and health and educational trends that are already taking place.
International development workers refer to the ‘education vaccine’ in relation to efforts to curtail the spread of HIV, but some also whisper of an ‘education pill’ – pointing out that improvement in education and human rights, particularly for women, is fundamental to lowering birth rates. ‘We know that many women want to have more children because there’s no prospect of them working in the formal market,’ says Guzman. ‘Where they have opportunities to work, this influences the number of children they have.’
The UN has no official population control policy, but Guzman acknowledges that the organisation actively promotes choice. ‘Since 1994, the UN has supported the decision of individuals to have the number of children they want,’ he says. ‘This is based on the fact that many people can now implement reproductive decisions because they have money or resources. Where women can’t implement their decisions, we make available access to resources.’
Guzman describes the present situation as ‘population inertia’. ‘The population will mainly continue to rise over the next four decades or so because the future mothers who will deliver those children have already been born,’ he says.
‘In most countries, even developed countries, two thirds of population growth will happen independently of what you do,’ he continues. ‘The only path you can influence is the remaining 25–30 per cent of population growth – and that’s the possibility for women to gain access to contraception and control the number of children they want to have.’
Offering choice
Another profound influence is the dramatic reduction of child mortality. Put simply, if you’re not confident your child will live beyond the age of five, you will have more of them, an anxiety to which even the ferocious breeders of Victorian Britain weren’t immune. ‘There’s a link between fertility and infant mortality,’ says Guzman. ‘Where infant mortality is high, you don’t just have one child. Investment in education of child mortality has an indirect effect on reducing fertility in the medium and the long term.’
These trends are ‘spectacular social changes’, according to Pearce. ‘My sense is that women today have half the number of children their mothers did, or that they had 40 years ago. There’s a global phenomenon going on here.
‘It has to do with giving women a choice,’ he continues. ‘These are spectacular social changes and social forces pushing us in a broadly opposite direction. The world population is growing up. The baby-boom generation was caused by women having large families and most of them surviving.
‘In the past, women felt they had to have five or six children in order to have a chance for two to survive to adulthood,’ Pearce says. ‘Improved mortality has changed that, and women can be more confident that the children they have will survive. If you make it difficult for women to combine a career with having a family, increasingly, they will opt for a career and perhaps have one child. That trend is hitting the Muslim and Catholic worlds as much as anywhere else.’
In such situations, cause and effect kick in, according to Lutz. ‘Once there has been such a major social change, where low fertility is the norm, then small family sizes will continue,’ he says. ‘Where women have had several decades of a one-child policy, even if you are then allowed to have two or more, it seems odd.’
School of thought
All of these issues are intertwined in India, according to AR Nanda, executive director of the Population Foundation of India. ‘The most important factor that can reduce momentum is to raise the age of marriage or cohabitation and increase the interval between marriage and first pregnancy, as this stretches out the time between generations,’ he says. ‘The strongest impact comes through increasing years of schooling for girls. Population momentum can also be curtailed by promoting valued roles for women other than motherhood, increasing young women’s access to education, income and financial credit, and providing young women and men with information and access to appropriate services.’
Where this has happened, India has seen dramatic changes in population growth patterns. ‘India is a country of striking demographic diversity,’ Nanda says. ‘There is already a north–south demographic divide. The southern states – Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka – are doing well in reduction of fertility. In the four large states – Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan – growth rates continue to be high.’
It’s no coincidence that these states are where the crux of India’s population problem lies.
All have low health indicators: high maternal and infant mortality, high child and maternal malnutrition, low literacy rates, high levels of poverty, high fertility rates, scarcity of natural resources, and low age at marriage. ‘These states account for nearly 40 per cent of India’s population and will contribute well over 50 per cent of growth in the coming decades,’ Nanda says. ‘The performance and the demographic outcomes of these states will determine the time and the size of population at which India will achieve population stabilisation.’
Family planning
So, as the level of education rises in developing nations and families become smaller, will those countries be better positioned to tackle the environmental legacy we will leave them? Lutz points to World Health Organization studies, which looked at increasing urban populations and singles out Nairobi, which may, because of climate change, become a malarial area in the next few decades. ‘All those people may face a new threat from malaria,’ he says. ‘But malaria can be eradicated – Singapore did it in 1980 after seven years. Why shouldn’t Kenya do the same when education levels are raised to those of Singapore? Raising education levels brings down the birth rate and that will help people defend themselves against climate change.’
Some observers, however, suspect that such conclusions may be possible in theory – for example, if the medium projections for population growth unfold – but may unravel, or are likely to be complicated by climate change and the realities of expanding access to family planning, especially in the least developed countries. ‘It’s too simplistic to say that a drop in population will resolve these issues,’ says Judy Oglethorpe, managing director of WWF-US’s climate-adaptation programme. ‘The UN’s medium projection of 9.1 billion people by 2050 is just that – a projection – and is based on assumptions about better access to family planning. We might even go over ten billion. Even if we do peak globally around 2050, it won’t be the peak point for some developing countries, particularly in Africa.’
Another problem that may prevent this scenario unfolding is that demographics rarely get incorporated into climate change discussions. According to the UNFPA, up to 200 million people may leave their homes in response to environmental degradation or climate change by the year 2050, yet population growth was barely addressed at the climate change talks in Copenhagen last December. Demographers fear that political and religious sensitivities mean their analysis rarely gets factored into the debate. ‘Look at the issues of the environment and climate change and you’ll see that population isn’t in the debate,’ says Guzman. ‘Many developing countries fear that if we mention population, then we are putting the problem of climate change onto their shoulders. In most countries, the office for national statistics is completely separate from the ministry of environment; there’s no connection between the two. We have very good instruments to map where events will take place, but you can’t see the true picture unless you put people on the map.’
Tackling taboos
Some deep-rooted cultural practices, such as the taboo of talking about sex and contraception, will also need to be handled gingerly. ‘The age at which women start having their children determines how many they have,’ says Guzman. ‘In many countries where there is forced marriage, it’s responsible for child bearing at a very early age. If we are able to implant policies that promote the empowerment of women and postpone marriage to a later age, then we delay child bearing.’
Lutz, too, suggests that a resolution may always be elusive. ‘Population and the environment is a very controversial subject,’ he says. ‘For many people, contraception equals reproductive rights equals abortions, and that view blocks reasoned discussion of the issue of population. Whenever ecologists suggest that a world with fewer people in it would be better, some people stick their hands up and there’s gridlock.’
Tellingly, even environmentalists who feel that they and demographers should be bolder can be reluctant to speak out. ‘We need to approach the population issue from the human rights point of view and argue the case for the environment,’ says one ecosystems specialist for a leading conservation organisation, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of his work. ‘Humans and ecosystems go together. Harm to one degrades the other.
‘[An expanding population] is going to have a very large impact on biodiversity and will interfere with how species adapt to climate change,’ he continues. ‘I wonder if there’s even the capacity in the world without climate change. The damage to the planet is going to be pretty bad, and it may be difficult for the Earth to recover from some of the impacts.’
Unexpected twists
Other unexpected twists in the pattern of the world’s population are also bound to occur over coming decades. Lutz points out that in some European countries where fertility rates have dropped, there has been a slight recovery in the past ten years. ‘There’s never a linear trend – it goes down, then it recovers,’ he says. ‘No government wants its population to either be exploding or disappearing. The mechanism for evolution is in our sex drive, and that makes sure that we won’t die out.’
Fundamentally, however, conservationists and demographers are all in search of the same virtuous circle. ‘Conserving biodiversity is a direct and highly efficient way to improve the lives and livelihoods of people,’ says the IUCN’s Khosla. ‘This automatically leads to smaller families and therefore slower population growth. In the end, smaller populations mean that we can live in balance with nature and its ecosystems.’
China and the one-child policy
China’s one-child policy looms large in any debate on population control. The policy was introduced during the late 1970s to correct a baby boom instigated by Mao Zedong, who had entreated his population to breed in order to ‘bury the United States in a human wave’. The birth rate rose to 5.8 per couple but has steadily dropped over the past three decades, even while the population has risen, and now stands at around 1.7 per couple. Financial incentives have included retirement bonuses for those parents who complied, while state officials who failed to comply can still lose their jobs. Human rights groups continue to document forced sterilisation and forced abortion. In April, there were reports in Guangdong province that elderly parents of those who refused to be sterilised were detained in order to coerce their children.
Yet it’s uncertain to what extent the one-child policy has lowered birth rates. The policy was more relaxed in the countryside, but in some areas, the birth rate is lower than in those where the one-child approach was strictly enforced. ‘Much of the growth-rate reduction in China took place between 1970 and 1979, before the introduction of the one-child policy,’ says AR Nanda of the Population Foundation of India. ‘The decline in China’s growth rate has its roots in increasing education access, improvement in economy and in the status of women, which took place after the Communist Revolution and before the one-child policy. It isn’t entirely clear how much of China’s fertility decline can be actually attributed to the one-child policy alone.’
Low-impact living: the Terai
Nepal’s Terai region may offer one model of how the world could mitigate the impact of large numbers of people placing pressure on ecosystems.
The Terai was sparsely populated until the 1940s, when malaria was eradicated, whereupon huge inward migration took place – 48 per cent of Nepal’s population now lives there, on 17 per cent of its land. Successive generations subdivided the land, leaving many without enough to support themselves and instead turned to collecting wood for fire burning and cattle farming. This led to the wholesale destruction of forests and overgrazing. Three key species were particularly affected – the one-horned rhino, the Asian elephant and the Bengal tiger.
Between 1990 and 2005, Nepal lost 1.2 million hectares of forest, or about a quarter of its total coverage. The WWF and local partners aimed to recreate corridors of forest and encourage local communities to take charge of their forests. This included reducing cattle grazing and using cows to provide milk to improve nutrition for children. Biodigesters were provided that used cowpats for cooking, reducing the need for women to spend hours collecting firewood and enabling them to assert more control over their lives.
Family planning policies were introduced – on average, women in the Terai begin to use contraception when they are 25 years of age and have three children, and there’s still some way to go: the average household size of some indigenous groups is 7.1. The WWF promoted the message that limiting family size can contribute to prosperity and organised endowments for girls to go to school. It argues that if people’s livelihoods improve, they are better able to withstand shocks such as drought and illness.
Optimum population size: the effect of ageing
How many people would be right for the world? The question has mesmerised and frustrated philosophers and demographers since Plato first mused on the subject. In 470 BC, he declared: ‘A suitable total for the number of citizens cannot be fixed without considering the land.’
‘The point is not how many people we have, but how those people behave in terms of consumption,’ says Professor Wolfgang Lutz. ‘If, in 20 years, we have more people, all at the level of consumption of today, you can see it will be a pretty horrible, unsustainable situation. But many ecologists argue that three billion could be a nice number.’
There is also some uncertainty that significant rises in life expectancy will offset some of the impact of us all having fewer children. ‘Some people doubt there is a biological limit on life expectancy,’ says Lutz. ‘People think it could be about 120 years. That could mean a third of the population of some countries over 80.’
What impact will have this on the environment? Fred Pearce suspects it may actually be beneficial. ‘Some of the demographic changes will be extremely helpful to tackling climate change,’ he says. ‘A stable, falling or older population won’t solve climate change, but it might influence our thinking of how to deal with it. Our species has never been dominated by an older generation, it’s terra incognita.
‘An older society will be less frenetic, less consumerist and less wasteful – ageing might push us into a greener direction,’ he continues. ‘People fret an awful lot about an ageing population, but we have been used to having a dependent population of non-working women. Women are now economically active, and their place is being taken by old people, so the number of economically inactive people isn’t going to change hugely.’
August 2010
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