Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years.”
But this is nonsense. For a start, there is no exponential growth. In fact, population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it for their own good, the good of their families, and, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.
Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. As I show in my new book, Peoplequake, half the world already has a fertility rate below the long-term replacement level. That includes all of Europe, much of the Caribbean and the far east from Japan to Vietnam and Thailand, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Tunisia.
It also includes China, where the state decides how many children couples can have. This is brutal and repulsive. But the odd thing is that it may not make much difference any more: Chinese communities around the world have gone the same way without any compulsion—Taiwan, Singapore, and even Hong Kong. When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, it had the lowest fertility rate in the world: below one child per woman.
So why is this happening? Demographers used to say that women only started having fewer children when they got educated and the economy got rich, as in Europe. But tell that to the women of Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest nations, where girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry in their mid-teens. They have just three children now, less than half the number their mothers had. India is even lower, at 2.8. Tell that also to the women of Brazil. In this hotbed of Catholicism, women have two children on average—and this is falling. Nothing the priests say can stop it.
Women are doing this because, for the first time in history, they can. Better healthcare and sanitation mean that most babies now live to grow up. It is no longer necessary to have five or six children to ensure the next generation—so they don’t.
There are holdouts, of course. In parts of rural Africa, women still have five or more children. But even here they are being rational. Women mostly run the farms, and they need the kids to mind the animals and work in the fields.
Then there is the middle east, where traditional patriarchy still rules. In remote villages in Yemen, girls as young as 11 are forced into marriage. They still have six babies on average. But even the middle east is changing. Take Iran. In the past 20 years, Iranian women have gone from having eight children to less than two—1.7 in fact—whatever the mullahs say.
The big story here is that rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslim or Catholic, secular or devout, with or without tough government birth control policies in place, most countries tell the same tale of a reproductive revolution.
That doesn’t mean population growth has ceased. The world’s population is still rising by 70m a year. This is because there is a time lag: the huge numbers of young women born during the earlier baby boom may only have had two children each. That is still a lot of children. But within a generation, the world’s population will almost certainly be stable, and is very likely to be falling by mid-century. In the US they are calling my new book “The Coming Population Crash.”
Is this good news for the environment and for the planet’s resources? Clearly, other things being equal, fewer people will do less damage to the planet. But it won’t on its own do a lot to solve the world’s environmental problems, because the second myth about population growth is that it is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet.
In fact, rising consumption today far outstrips the rising headcount as a threat to the planet. And most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population, while most of the remaining population growth is in countries with a very small impact on the planet. By almost any measure you choose, a small proportion of the world’s people take the majority of the world’s resources and produce the majority of its pollution.
Let’s look at carbon dioxide emissions: the biggest current concern because of climate change. The world’s richest half billion people—that’s about 7 per cent of the global population—are responsible for half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 per cent of the population are responsible for just 7 per cent of emissions. Virtually all of the extra 2bn or so people expected on this planet in the coming 30 or 40 years will be in this poor half of the world. Stopping that, even if it were possible, would have only a minimal effect on global emissions, or other global threats.
Ah, you say, but what about future generations? All those big families in Africa will have yet bigger families. Well, that’s an issue of course. But let’s be clear about the scale of the difference involved. The carbon emissions of one American today are equivalent to those of around four Chinese, 20 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 40 Nigerians or 250 Ethiopians. A woman in rural Ethiopia can have ten children and, in the unlikely event that those ten children all live to adulthood and have ten children of their own, the entire clan of more than a hundred will still be emitting less carbon dioxide than you or me. It is over-consumption, not over-population that matters.
Economists predict the world’s economy will grow by 400 per cent by 2050. If this does indeed happen, less than a tenth of that growth will be due to rising human numbers. True, some of those extra poor people might one day become rich. And if they do—and I hope they do—their impact on the planet will be greater. But it is the height of arrogance for us in the rich world to downplay the importance of our own environmental footprint because future generations of poor people might one day have the temerity to get as rich and destructive as us. How dare we?
Some green activists need to take a long hard look at themselves. We all like to think of ourselves as progressives. But Robert Malthus, the man who first warned 200 years ago that population growth would produce demographic armageddon, was in his time a favourite of capitalist mill owners. He opposed Victorian charities because he said they were only making matters worse for the poor, encouraging them to breed. He said the workhouses were too lenient. Progressives of the day hated him. Charles Dickens attacked him in several books: when Oliver Twist asked for more gruel in the workhouse, for instance, that was a satire on a newly introduced get-tough law on workhouses, known popularly as Malthus’s Law. In Hard Times, the headmaster obsessed with facts, Thomas Gradgrind, had a son called Malthus. In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was also widely seen at the time as a caricature of Malthus.
Malthus, it should be remembered, spent many years teaching British colonial administrators before they went out to run the empire. They adopted his ideas that famine and disease were the result of overbreeding, so the victims should be allowed to die. It was Malthusian thinking that led to the huge and unnecessary death toll in the Irish potato famine.
We must not follow the lure of Malthus, and blame the world’s poor for the environmental damaged caused overwhelmingly by us: the rich. The truth is that the population bomb is being defused round the world. But the consumption bomb is still primed and ever more dangerous.
Fred Pearce is author of Peoplequake (Eden Project Books)
Read what James Lovelock, Bjorn Lomborg, Ed Miliband and many other experts have to say about climate change in Prospect’s Copenhagen special
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Comments (68):
Dear Mr Pearce,
I think most people understand that it’s population multiplied by consumption that is the reality facing us. At UK or US levels of consumption, the entire world is likely to be vastly overpopulated. At poor African levels, we could probably fit more people on earth.
So, sure, if we could find away to have people not comsume anything and not impact the environment at all, we could happily have infinite human beings on earth.
But in the real world, trying to significantly reduce rich western nations to consume less is a considerable undertaking.
Also, as long as the population is growing we can calulate the doubling point. As such, the ‘expontial function’ argument holds.
Regards,
Tim Gooding
I would really like to see where this information came from. References please!
OK, if people being born in high population growth but relatively low pollution countries stay in the countries in which they are born, environmental problems related to the consumptive Western lifestyle will continue to decrease with the declining Western population.
Therefore if we stop people from over populated countries from migrating to the West we will arrest environmental decline.
Sounds good. Stop immigration and allow Western countries consumption to decline with natural population decline. I.E. to become sustainable, close your borders.
I like it. Thanks.
Rubbish. First off, Malthus’ ideas should be judged on their own merits; slamming him because he was a favourite of 19th c mill owners or colonial administrators is basically an ad hominem.
But the main point is that the environmental effects of population growth are waved away in the article. If a poor country grows its population but remains poor the environmental impact is not that great; if it then stabilizes the population and goes on an economic growth binge the environmental footprint gets bigger and writers like Pearce say See, it’s all because of per capita consumption growth.
This is wrong: the base on which economic growth takes place is bigger because of population growth earlier. For example, China’s population growth in the 16th or 17th centuries is still having an environmental effect today. It enlarged the base on which today’s China is industrializing. Anti-Malthusians are trying to divert attention from this fact by focusing on the effects of economic growth only and taking the size of the developing world as a given.
Thanks for adding some clarity to this important discussion.
I think we have a problem here (society that is) with the labelling of every challenge to humanity as being problematic. This is illustrated in the type of language and terms borrowed from the media and used increasingly to describe situations, real or imagined that face us as a ’species’.
The use of the term ‘bomb’, ‘time-bomb’ etc to describe these challenges, particuarly here described as ‘primed’ by Fred Pearce, only serves, I feel, to irrationalise the very real challenges thrown up by nature, humanity and the environment. It also gives weight to a growing anti-human movement that obviously sees large populations and consumption as being not only problematic but also insumountable in terms of us, as humans, enduring and flourishing.
TWADDLE ! Non-consumer regions of Asia, and Africa have already been destroyed by advancing human communities encroaching on wildlife habitats, abusing water resources, and poisoning rivers and lakes with human excrement.
And consumerism in other areas offers no relief outlet. Not much wildlife, clean water and air left here either.
For those who think immigration restrictions still worth pursuing as a population policy: it only makes sense if you keep poor third world people from immigrating. The difference in ecological footprint coming from, say, Canada to Australia, is pretty irrelevant. So we only really need to keep the poor, dark skinned nations out. Malthus would approve.
Reducing consumption to sustainable levels is very do-able, especially if technology (the third factor in the populationists’ I=PAT formula) is used to reduce instead of create more pollution. On the other hand, rapidly reducing population is a scary idea if taken up by our current political leaders. There is no easy way to do it, other than what Fred Pearce describes is already happening anyway.
Mr Pearce see ‘The Problem’ as either/or, black and white. This is not the case. ‘The Problem’ is both too many rich people using too man resources, _and_ too many poor people having too many children.
Prior to Industrialisation and the heavy use of Fossil Fuels, the Global population was under a billion people, all of whom were living at or around subsistence level. With the advent of technology stemming from the IR, the ’sustainable’ population is likely higher, but nowhere near the current 6.9 billion. Indeed, the only thing keeping our population at current levels is those Fossil Fuels (even poor countries use some FF). Industrialised Agriculture, including exports and Aid to Third World countries (which under cut prices asked by local producers) are heavy users of Oil and Gas (for the farm mechinery and fertilisers/pesticides). Take away the Oil/Gas (Peak Oil), and production will drop.
Furthermore, agriculture, through land-use changes and fuel use, contributes fully 30% of Anthropogenic GHG emissions. If the Scientific consensus around AGCC is to be believed, then even ‘going green’ with our electricity and transport, we will still be emitting too much GHGs into the atmosphere to avert unwanted Climate Change (or Climate Weirding).
As to your statement “In the past 20 years, Iranian women have gone from having eight children to less than two—1.7 in fact—whatever the mullahs say.”. it is, in fact, the policy of Iran to reduce its population. Iran, despite being notionally a fundamentalist Theocracy, has State-sponsored ‘Family Planning’ infrastructure, including state-funded abortions. The ruling factions of Iran have recognised that population pressure is undesirable.
The poor nations of the world aspire to live like The West. NGOs constantly express their desire to eradicate poverty and malnutrition. Governments send food and financial aid. All of this places pressure and creates a desire to increase a standard of living, which traditionally means increasing consumption.
Consumption _and_ population are the problem, not one or the other.
A most deceptive and delusional view of the real world. Perhaps the author believes that the good Lord will provide for the 1.02 billion people currently undernourished and will he resurrect the dead bodies of the innocent which abound, wiped out by hunger, disease and wars over food and water?
Increasing global consumption and population appear to go hand in hand in our “global” economy.
Environmentalism is fraud. The existence of humans will have no lasting impact on the ultimate course of the planet. Eventually it will be destroyed by an expanding Sun. Environmentalism is elitist intellectual masturbation, arrogant anthropo-centric nonsense. Overpopulation makes life harder and more unpleasant. Fewer people make life more pleasant. If you don’t like consumption, by all means, don’t consume. But don’t be so rude as to tell others what to do. Mind your own business.
For those who want more people on the planet, is there an absolute limit that they might suggest? Eighty trillion–or fewer? Is it true that every child born will increase the CO2 pollution? Or will they reduce it? With the amount of arable land per person now at about a half an acre, where will the food be grown? What about the lack of fresh water? They keep on bringing up Malthus. He didn’t mention climate change, pollutions, the use of irreplaceable natural resources , the destruction of the rainforests, illegal immigration, or other problems caused by overpopulation. He mentioned food production—and with a billion malnourished people, it is probably worse than he thought in terms of raw numbers. Let’s get some factual projections about how more or fewer people will impact the planet. An opinion based on wishful thinking is not enough. For some alarming facts and some possible solutions may I suggest reading “In Search of Utopia” (http://andgulliverreturns.info) and http://overpopulation.org
While on thesubject, the state certainly needs more unwanted children. They will help to fill the prisons and mental hospitals, creating more jobs in construction of facilities, for prison guards, and for psychiatric techs. Unhappily those babies won’t be fit to fill our armies because most will be in the 75% who are unfit for service.
I suggest reading the aforementioned ebook series and the books by child psychiatrist Jack Westman. Intelligent minds might be changed with evidence.
Regarding Malthus, it is a logical fallacy to criticize the man rather than the argument.
Another thought–If we use only the carbon footprint as a measure of overcrowding the world can handle about 16 billion people living at the level of an average Indian, but only about 1.5 billion if we are to live at the level of the US.
So what is the point of having more people? Why not 10 or 100 or 100 million?
The total landmass of earth is about 149000000 km2.
That is 45.63 people on every sq km witch is the same that every human have 21915 sq meters each.
Half of the landmass rougly is not suiteble for humans to live on.
Besides we share this earth with all millions of other species, shall we kill them to make room for ouer own speice?
Could Mr Pearce illustrate his argument that population growth is not exponential by showing a graph of world population against time (linear scales for both axes please)?
Thank you for giving an opposing view on this topic. I don’t agree with it, but it’s refreshing to see someone give a different opinion.
The problem I have with it, that the world is already polluted terribly and we have, as a species, not yet understood how to manage our own numbers effectively yet.
Get those two things fixed and then we’ll talk about adding more numbers. But three billion in 40 years? Definitely putting the cart before the horse in my humble opinion.
http://www.kenny.org
I find in reading those sites that say that population problems are a myth that their evidence is very sparse and inconclusive. Recently I read Book 1 of the free e-book series “In Search of Utopia” (http://andgulliverreturns.info), it blasts their lack of evidence relative to their calling overpopulation a myth. The book, actually the last half of the book, takes on the skeptics in global warming, overpopulation, lack of fresh water, lack of food, and other areas where people deny the evidence. I strongly suggest that anyone wanting to see the whole picture read the book, at least the last half.
How about countering the arguments posed in the free ebook series “In Search of Utopia” in Book 1. (http://andgulliverreturns.info) I think they shoot down the ‘myth’ argument.