Population, climate change and inequality
By: Alistair Currie, Joe Williams, Caitlin Robinson, Martin Pask (the Guardian, Letters to the Editor)
It's not rocket science: more people consume more resources and cause more environmental degradation. But the problem of overpopulation is a self-correcting problem. While science has provided the means to more efficiency exploit nature and support a larger human population, the available resources are finite. Overpopulation is not sustainable.
The size of the human population will naturally decline as the environment becomes inadequate to sustain that population. While that may be emotionally troubling, there is little that can be done to expand finite resources. Employing technological alternatives that more efficiently exploit nature does not allow the earth's environment to become infinite. Technology only delays the inevitable and establishes a risk of catastrophic failure rather than gradual adaptation to finite limitations.
As has been pointed out, increasing affluence tends to slow population growth. That observed result seems to suggest that addressing inequality and disparities in access to technology provided by affluence would be a solution. That approach might, indeed, gradually reduce the size of the human population but will not alleviate the need to more efficiently exploit nature to support expanding affluence. Fewer people consuming more doesn't alter the problem of sustainability.
Somehow transforming the problem of over population to a problem of over consumption doesn't really change anything. Both situations are unsustainable. Inevitably an unsustainable condition will correct itself by catastrophic or gradual collapse. We may be able to prolong an unsustainable situation but we won't be able to avoid the inevitable. The problem will correct itself.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
It is very good to see you acknowledge the threats of a growing population, and offer a note of caution regarding the recent Lancet study, whose projections still show 2 billion more people on the planet by 2064 (Editorial, 23 July). The greatest risk attached to such projections is a belief that a reducing population will happen without further intervention, or that it is something to be feared. With more women today having an unmet need for contraception than 20 years ago, and reproductive health services, education and poverty alleviation all threatened by Covid-19, the changes that empower people to choose smaller families are vulnerable as never before.
It is necessary to prepare for a world with different demographics than we have today, but we undoubtedly have the resources and ingenuity to meet the challenges of smaller populations. The challenges of increased population and consumption, however, are even more profound, and far more threatening. Those include crashing biodiversity, hunger, poverty and worsening climate change.
Alistair Currie Population Matters
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• The idea that population growth is to blame for our ecological issues is perhaps the biggest myth in the history of environmentalism.
As your editorial concedes, Thomas Malthus's dire predictions never transpired, largely because he ignored the role of technology in increasing resource use efficiency. Malthus also overlooked the fact that there are huge inequalities in resource consumption, and it is these inequalities that are to blame for crises such as famine.
The question of inequality is particularly important now because wealthy countries have often used population as a way of blaming developing countries for environmental problems. The authors of a major report from 1991, which has shaped India's climate change policy since, argued that per-capita emissions were the "only morally defensible" unit of measurement, calling out what they considered to be "environmental colonialism" by Europe and North America. Global Justice Now rightly describes the overpopulation debate as fuelled by eugenics and racism.
Actually, resource consumption and environmental transformation are accelerating much more rapidly than population growth. Population is now the least important driver of environmental degradation, overtaken by disproportionately high consumption patterns in developed economies.
Overpopulation arguments let high-consuming economies in the global north off the hook, with the average Briton passing the average annual per-capita carbon emissions of a number of African countries within the first two weeks of 2020.
Joe Williams Department of geography, Durham University,
Caitlin Robinson Department of geography and planning, University of Liverpool
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• When Thomas Malthus described how exponential population growth must lead to premature death, he did not know that scientific knowledge and development would lead to a world demographic transition. We now know poor nations have high birth and death rates. Death rates come down with improved health and hygiene, and women's education. Once people realise their children will survive to become adults and be able to support them in old age, they have fewer children. As birth rates come down to match lower death rates population stops growing and can even go into reverse as is likely in Japan.
The key to it all lies in equality. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showed in their book The Spirit Level that equality is better for everyone. Our small planet needs big solutions such as massive international aid from developed nations and through the United Nations to end inequality and speed up the essential development of poorer nations.
Martin Pask York
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Trying to redefine the problem doesn't avoid the inevitable. An unsustainable situation will correct itself.
While making life miserable for almost everybody in the process. We're seeing something like that with Covid. Overpopulation is always a problem.
I don't think how many children one has is factored by wealth.
Hell, look at that dumb family that got a tv show for having twenty kids.
Imo religion plays a major part. The be fruitful and multiply, do not use birth control, etc.
It also has a lot to do with ego.
An individual doesn't define a population trend. Available information indicates that increasing affluence within a population results in declining birth rates and increases in longevity.
The trend of decreasing birth rate with increasing affluence is also observed in theocratic Muslim countries.
I agree with that. I just think it is not the only factor.
There are affluent people with five kids and poor people with one kid.
Edit: Take Mel Gibson for example. He has like seven kids and I thought I heard him say one time, because of him being Catholic.