More is … More?
Where an environmental crisis is used as a “seemingly” driving force behind extremist views, a fact check is called for — and reveals a dangerous pattern of shortsighted arguments and elevated confirmation bias.
What happened?
The running-up to any major holiday seems to show unmistakeable similarities across geographies — travel chaos, queues and overcrowded shopping centres are part of the programme. But it also seems as though the number of people that flock into city centres to run some last-minute errands is getting bigger by the year. The fact that the world population has hit the 8bn mark a little less than a month ago (titled The Day of 8 Billion by the UN) would reinforce this assumption. What appears to be unstoppable population growth (it took the world 125 years to grow from one to two billion habitants, but just twelve years to add the latest billion) driven by falling mortality rates, medical progress and improvements in food production has become the root cause of a global “Malthusian trap” panic on the exhaustion of natural resources and the acceleration of climate change that follows, not least reiterated by literary works like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and Donella Meadows’ The Limits to Growth. But where Malthusianism, eugenics and the population bomb attempt to connect the increase in population to some of most pressing contemporary issues facing our world (e.g., more population leads to more emissions), others question the validity of such a root-and-cause connection.
Give me the lowdown
First and foremost, it is essential to note that world’s population size is likely to plateau at roughly 11bn by the end of the century, as birth rates below the replacement level over the past decades have detrimentally changed the population growth trajectory. Combining this with the realisation that more populous areas do notnecessarily put more stress on resources or emit more carbon puts the “population growth panic” argument in question. Kenya, for instance, boasts 55mn people, which amounts to 95 times more than the US state of Wyoming. Wyoming’s carbon emissions, however, are almost 4 times higher than those of Kenya. Such a theme is reflected across the income spectrum, where in low-income countries, despite posting the most significant expansions in population, the demand for resources has stayed largely the same — in contrast to high-income, developed countries, where such demand has doubled since the year 2000. This introduces the “lifestyle” effect to the equation — the notion that consumption patterns matter more than the actual number of people in a given area (e.g., the fact that an average American’s water consumption is 15 times higher than that of a Sub-Saharan African). This is confirmed by scientist group Climate Interactive, who simulated effects on global warming under different population growth scenarios. A difference of 2bn people in the UN’s two growth scenarios would only lead to an increase of 0.2 degrees Celsius in global warming. Putting a tax on carbon (i.e., forcing a change in consumption pattern), on the other hand, can lower global warming by up to 0.7 degrees Celsius. Others have come to the same result by regressing forecasts of population growth, GDP per capita and individual emissions intensity against each other. The stark proof of the effect of people’s behaviour opens the door to vast inequalities when dealing with the consequences of such behaviour — the world’s 50% poorest people have only contributed 7% to all historic carbon emissions, but their countries will be most impacted by the effects of global warming.
Whilst, at COP27, representatives of those countries have gone as far as asking for loss and damage funding from wealthier nation at the root of the crisis, one begs to ask whether this is not really a question of population growth imbalance, but a global imbalance of wealth. Scenario analyses on just how many people the planet can hold support this idea, ranging from anywhere near 500mn to 1tn. One such analysis uses the “IPAT” equation, which compares a population’s “Impact” to “Population” x “Affluence” x “Technology”, effectively measuring the amount of resources required to produce a unit of GDP — “Affluence” being the variable with the highest statistical significance for the “Impact” figure. Another measure is the “Earth Overshoot Day”, a term most of us are familiar with (2022’s was as early as July 28). At current levels, human population is using resources equivalent to what 1.7 Earths could naturally provide every year — some call this “running a Ponzi scheme with our planet”, the notion of borrowing future resources to satisfy present needs, which, just like a Ponzi scheme, may work for some time, but not forever. What both measures also agree with is the reality that a few changes in consumption patterns would allow for our planet to carry the 11bn people expected by the end of the century (reducing meat consumption by 50% already sets Earth Overshoot Day back by 5 days).
What’s the takeaway?
Understanding the needed action for a way forward is as important as finding an immediate solution to manage the 227,000 people that we add to our planet every day. Identifying the link between a population parameter and underlying effects as not being mere exponential population growth does not mean exponential population growth is a welcome trend — but the immediate perspective should be put on enabling ownership of fertility, where undesired conceptions are reduced and the need for four-to-seven child families becomes less widespread. It’s a matter of empowering individual decision-making, not saving the world through eugenics. Once such ownership has been awarded, a population is also in a better position to tackle the mid- to long-term consequences of its wealth imbalance — of which climate change is one. A U.N. study, for instance, finds that, where social inequality within a country is reduced (such as through the empowering of individual decision-making on conception), the country’s social cohesion increases and its ability to react to those challenges is significantly improved. Therefore, picking up the “issue” of exponential population growth by naming people as the problem is wrong and dangerous, opening paths towards racism and xenophobia on people least at fault (the El Paso mass shooting being a frightening example, where a white supremacist shooter used an overpopulation rhetoric to kill immigrants). It is putting the blame for something on those with the least power to address it. Rather, looking at global resource systems with the aim of “decoupling” them from resource overuse and carbon emissions is the way forward — when solar facilities become cheaper than coal or gas plants, when cities become subject to more efficient planning and when farmlands can be turned into carbon sinks. Or dare we propose to go as far as focusing on a country’s Human Development Index, which measures aspects like life expectancy and access to schooling, as a measure of a its progress, rather than mere GDP growth?
