It’s time to ditch the generations-long argument between those who blame overpopulation and those who worry about consumption
John Vidal is a former Guardian environment editor
By a remarkable coincidence, just as governments, campaigners and business owners are meeting in Egypt to address climate breakdown today, the world is officially crashing past the symbolic 8 billion population milestone . This means global population is on its way to 10 billion or more by the turn of the century.
But there will be no attempt by countries at Cop27 to connect the inexorable growth of human numbers with the seemingly unstoppable rise in temperatures. Despite the fact that the several billion more people expected to be alive in 70 years’ time will put more pressure on resources and will produce far more emissions, the population explosion is yet again being ignored, sidestepped or denied by world leaders.
Part of this is down to sensitivity about talking about human numbers. History is littered with violent governments trying to force sterilisation on vulnerable people. Suggestions, too, that human numbers be cut have often been peddled by authoritarian regimes and far-right extremists, and genuine concern today in rich countries is often met with accusations of racism or eco-fascism.
Yet as the scientist James Lovelock was fond of saying, anyone who failed to see the connection between climate and population was “either ignorant or hiding from the truth”, adding: “These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”
Until now, the orthodox western intellectual argument has been that the number of people does not matter as much as how people use resources. Consumption and inequality are the problem, not population size. True, the wealthiest10%consume about 20 times more energy overall than the bottom 10%. So of course the rich must change their behaviour. But making climate breakdown all about consumption has become an excuse for countries to do nowhere near enough to reduce their populations.
The hard fact is that in an age of climate breakdown, human numbers matter. And the ecological impact of another 2-3 billion humans will be immense.
This is also about women’s rights too. By ignoring population, the needs of women and girls are being sidelined by governments that are too obsessed with consumption to notice how vital education and family planning are in tackling the climate emergency.
The Nobel peace prizewinner Malala Yousafzai summed it up best last year. “When girls are educated and when they stay in schools they get married later in their lives, then they have less children and that helps us to reduce the impacts of climate change that the population increase brings,” she said. “If every girl was able to exercise her sexual and reproductive health and rights through quality education and had access to modern contraception, it could reduce total emissions.”
According to the UN population fund (UNFPA), 257 million women have an unmet need for proper contraception, half of all global pregnancies are unplanned, and nearly a quarter of all women do not have enough agency to refuse sex.
Yet the world’s richest countries together contribute just a few hundred million dollars annually to the UN’s population agency, with some now pushing “pro-natalist” policies to grow their numbers. In 2017, Donald Trump cut US funding to the UNFPA, and last year the UK followed, by cutting its contribution to the agency by 85%, from an expected $200m to a paltry $32m. US funding has since been partly restored but the British money alone, it has been estimated, would have helped to prevent the deaths of about 250,000 mothers and children, 14.6 million unintended pregnancies and 4.3 million unsafe abortions.
The generations-long argument between those who uniquely blame overpopulation and those who maintain that consumption is the biggest contribution to the climate emergency must be ditched.
Finally, and barely noticed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s consensus of climate scientists, identified global population growth as one of the two biggest drivers of growing CO2 emissions, saying earlier this year that “globally, GDP per capita and population growth remained the strongest drivers of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the last decade”. It also warned that if population continues to grow, “it will be much harder to limit warming to 1.5C”.
This should be proof enough for everyone that population growth and its future environmental impact are now twin global crises – and UN agencies and civil society groups meeting in Egypt must urgently recognise that both are driving planetary destruction, and poverty.
John Vidal was the Guardian’s environment editor. He is the author of McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial
