Population bomb or consumption explosion?

 By HKPuiPui27

Today, on World Population Day, the Royal Society has launched two year inquiry into human population growth and how it might affect social and economic development.

Contrary to what some might have you believe, discussing population isn’t a taboo. Rather the debate is heavily polarised between those who champion (directly or indirectly) coercive population control and those who believe following good, gender-aware development and poverty reduction is all that is necessary.

We welcome the study and hope that it will place discussions on population in the broader context of social and economic drivers of population growth. We plan to feed into the inquiry, particularly in relation to our recent report: Consumption Explosion Third UK Interdependence Day report.

In Consumption Explosion, published on World Ecological Debt day last year, we argued the recent revived focus on global population as an environmental issue is a critical distraction from tackling overconsumption on wealth countries. In other words, it isn’t that population is the problem, but rather the enormous disparities between over consumers in the global north and under consumers in the global south – or to put it another way, wealth.

And there is no exponential population growth. Approximately 50 years ago, the average woman had between 5 and 6 children. Now she has 2.6 – closing fast on the level of 2.1 at which populations stablise. Go below this rate, and over time levels begin to decline. This, too, is in the absence of tough government birth-control policies.

Birth rates are a function of poverty, and are directly correlated to a number of factors: lack of basic education (particularly for girls); lack of access to reproductive health services; high infant/child mortality rates; and dependence on adult children for income (not least migrants). So, the only effective and socially acceptable path to influence population dynamics is through eradicating poverty and reducing inequality, and that given, environmental realities, this is hard-wired to ending rich-world consumption. And, what are the alternatives?

Thirty years since China implemented its one-child family policy, research now suggests there were a number of unforeseen and unintended consequence of such coercive population control – especially in contrast to simply following good, gender-aware development and poverty reduction.

Using  the ‘ecological footprint’ metric, the number of hectares required to provide each of us with food, clothing and other resources reveals just how unequal consumption is across the globe. The average American takes 9.5 hectares, while Australians required 7.8, Britons 5.3, Germans 4.2, Chinese 2.1, and Indians and most Africans (where the majority of the future population growth will take place) 1.0 or less.

While fast-rising populations can sometimes create serious local environmental crises, viewed at the global level, economists predict the world’s economy will grow by 400 per cent by 2050. If so, only a tenth of that growth will be due to rising human numbers.

As Fred Pearce (author of Peoplequake: Mass migration, ageing nations and the coming population crash) writes:

Yes, some of those extra people will become rich. But it is the height of hubris to downgrade the culpability of our own environmental footprint because future generation of poor people might one day get to be as rich and destructive as we are. Every time we talk about too many babies in Africa or India, we are denying that simple fact.

The current economic system, which creates and depends on unstable consumption, has greatly increased income and asset inequality within and between nations. It has also degraded the environment, resulting in climate change, and failed substantially to reduce global poverty.

So overall, a new low-carbon, high well-being economic system that redefines prosperity and a redistribution of wealth will be central to a ‘demographic transition’ that can defuse any population explosion.

Photo by HKPuiPui27 via Flickr