Its coming: Depopulation won't solve our problems

We’ve all heard that human overpopulation is a crisis. In 2017, Bill Nye warned us about the planet’s “people problem,” and that same decade, David Attenborough told us that “we are a plague on the Earth.” Project Drawdown, an environmental nonprofit, lists slower population growth among its top climate solutions.

And now, fertility rates everywhere are falling.

In most of the world, the birthrate is already below the average of two births per two adults needed to stabilise the population. By the 2080s, according to United Nations projections, the global population will be declining. Then change could come fast: a population that shrinks by two-thirds each century. That’s what would happen in a future in which, for every two adults, there were 1.5 kids.

Depopulation might seem welcome. It is true that people caused today’s environmental problems. And it is right to prioritise the challenges of climate change, global poverty and inequality. In our careers, we’ve worked for aggressive decarbonization, reproductive freedom, caste and gender equity, and better public health and health care. But falling birthrates are not the answer to our world’s problems. Confronting climate change requires that billions of people live differently. It does not require that billions of future people never live.

Over the past few decades, there has been important progress on environmental priorities like particulate air pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion and acid rain. In each case, progress came from ending or changing the destructive activity part of people’s destructive activity. Not the people part.

Take China’s smog crisis. In 2013, with the country’s population growing and economy industrialising, particulate air pollution from fires, coal plants and vehicles darkened the sky. Newspapers around the world called it the “airpocalypse.” The U.S. Embassy gave the air quality in central Beijing a rating of 755 — on an air quality scale that ran from 0 to 500.

In the decade that followed, China grew by roughly 50 million people — more than the entire population of Canada. But air pollution didn’t scale up as the population grew; it declined by half. Leaders and the public in China decided that the smog was unacceptable. The authorities put into effect new regulations and requirements on coal-fired power plants and heavy industry. The government devoted new resources to monitoring and enforcement. Many polluting factories and power plants adopted cleaner technologies already in use elsewhere. Others were shut down.

And it wasn’t only China. Global average exposure to particulate air pollution has fallen over the last decade, even as the world’s population grew by over 750 million people. These facts challenge the old, sticky idea, popularised in large part by Paul R. Ehrlich’s best-selling 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” that the way to reduce pollution is to reduce humanity. Ehrlich’s book, published with the support of the Sierra Club, declared that the only options were “population control or race to oblivion” and floated the idea of poisoning public water supplies with sterilants.

Although overpopulation fears still linger in public debate, most environmental leaders have moved on from the idea that “population control” is a solution to anything.

Of course, someone might say that, in the face of a challenge as huge as climate change, depopulation could at least help.

The problem with such thinking is that the global population is a big ship, slow to turn. Imagine that, in 2030, voices calling for voluntary human extinction persuaded everyone to do something hardly thinkable: agree to skip a generation — no babies for 20 years. What would that do to humanity’s carbon footprint?

Less than one might expect, and far less than we need. The global population in 2050 would be smaller than today’s, yes, but only by about 14 percent. If that were our whole plan to reduce emissions — if we froze progress on policy and technology, to ask only what difference population could make — then emissions in 2050 would be about 14 per cent lower, too. That would be a failure, slower than the pace of per-person emissions reductions actually achieved in Europe and the United States over the past 20 years. And, of course, any real shift in birthrates would accomplish far less.

We’re not just working against pollution, we’re racing against time.

Worries about overpopulation aren’t only about the environment. Overpopulation doomers like Thomas Robert Malthus in the 18th century and Ehrlich in the 20th warned of famine and scarcity. But on every continent, more and better food is available per person than when humanity numbered half as many. In every country, life expectancy is now greater than 50 years ago. Of every four children who would have died then, three now live. And the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from two billion in 1990 to under 700 million today.

The New York Times