An American couple that forgoes a child might take an extra vacation, say, a road trip across Peru — burning extra fossil fuel for airfares and extra driving. Because of this higher-intensity consumption by childless couples, while lower fertility could reduce long-run emissions, it probably has no net impact on short-run emissions — or even increases them.
And short-run emissions have the largest impact on future temperatures because there is a time delay between carbon emissions and climate impact. But this is all moot when considering the United States!
The US has lower carbon intensity per dollar of GDP than average for the world, and US population growth is an extremely small component of global emissions forecasts. And since US population and GDP growth are already extremely low in comparison to the rest of the world, marginally raising fertility will have an infinitesimally small impact on the growth path of carbon emissions.
Virtually the entire determinative calculation for future carbon emissions can be summed up in the pace of shifts away from fossil fuels in the largest economies, and the population and economic growth trajectories in developing countries. As you can see, even if US population stopped growing at around million people in and flatlined out, it would produce at best a marginal change in global emissions.
Plus, accomplishing that trend would require draconian anti-fertility policies and extremely strict immigration laws. On the other hand, even if US population rises over million people, the impact on the world is barely noticeable. Meanwhile, lowering US carbon intensity by about a third, to around the level of manufacturing-superpower Germany today, has a bigger effect than preventing million Americans from existing.
Now, obviously, we should provide the resources for women to take ownership of their fertility: We should want to reduce undesired conceptions and increase desired conceptions. We should facilitate the kind of human development that tends to reduce desired fertility from the four- to seven-child range to the two- to four-child range as well.
But we should do these things because it is morally good to empower individual decision-making , not because we can save the climate through Malthusian reductions. There is only one way to effectively prevent, alleviate, or reverse dangerous climate change: technological, geographic, and social advancement.
Population has little to do with it — especially not in the US. Lyman Stone, a Vox columnist, is a regional population economics researcher who blogs at In a State of Migration. He is also an agricultural economist at USDA. Find him on Twitter lymanstoneky. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea vox. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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In particular, we wanted to redirect the conversation away from alarm about rising numbers of people on the planet and toward the need to guarantee human rights for girls and women, including access to education and reproductive health services.
I understand this reaction. Elephants Versus Dinosaurs Without a doubt, the growing number of people on the planet puts a significant strain on natural resources and the ecosystems that support life. But a careful look at population trends reveals that while the total number of people on the planet is increasing, the rate of population growth is slowing. Meanwhile, carbon emissions are experiencing no such decline. While political and social momentum to wean society off fossil fuels is building, no progress has been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
In fact, the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere reached a new record in We need to transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
But what fundamentally stops us from doing this has less to do with population and more to do with who has power, and who is profiting from the current status quo—the mere 90 fossil-fuel companies that are responsible for two-thirds of the observed increases in global surface temperatures between and Every single one of us should be organizing to reclaim our political system so we can rein in the biggest polluters that are destroying the ecosystems we need to survive.
Some readers were quick to point out that an increasing population is a big part of what is causing emissions to rise in the first place, but this is not how I see it. The main imperative right now is to find alternatives to oil, gas, and coal to fuel our energy needs, but that ambitious task is being constantly stymied by—you guessed it—our current political leaders.
Reproductive rights are an environmental issue. In order to make sure we leave room for wildlife, it's critical that every pregnancy is planned and that people take the environment into consideration when planning when — or if — they want their family to grow. When women have access to voluntary contraception and equal education, they tend to choose to delay childbearing and have smaller families, leading to lower fertility rates.
We support unfettered access to education, reproductive healthcare and contraception for women and men, whether they prefer condoms, oral birth control or long-acting contraceptives like an IUD or vasectomy. Every person should have the tools, information and ability to make the best reproductive choice for themselves, their partner and the planet. Tackling the Population Problem Every day we add , more people to the planet — and the UN predicts that human population will surpass 11 billion by the end of the century.
Current world population: Unsustainable population growth and lack of access to reproductive health care also puts pressure on human communities, exacerbating food and water shortages, reducing resilience in the face of climate change, and making it harder for the most vulnerable communities to rise out of intergenerational poverty.
The real challenge will be to use them effectively. Copyright: Project Syndicate , Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Join the conversation with the hashtag Dev This article is more than 5 years old. Population growth in Africa: grasping the scale of the challenge. Read more. Overpopulation, overconsumption — in pictures. Isn't it Europe that is overpopulated, rather than Africa? Topics Working in development Development Population Sustainable development goals comment.
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