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May 17, 2007 - Population: boom and bust

Absolutely love the new campaign from the Optimum Population Trust: (PDF) do your bit for addressing climate change by having fewer children – or even no children.

The lifetime CO2 emissions of a UK citizen amount to 750 tonnes (the equivalent - apparently -of 620 return flights between London and New York), so the extra 10 million by which our population will rise between now and 2074 will, over their lifetimes, emit around 7½ billion tonnes of CO2.

I can’t recall any environmental or climate change organization ever suggesting that “births averted” is probably the most single most substantial and cost-effective intervention that governments could be using. Just to give another example, the Chinese government calculates that since the introduction of the One Child Family Policy in the early 80s, at least 400 million births have been averted.

Each Chinese citizen today emits an average of 3.5 tonnes of CO2 every year. Multiply the one (400 million) by the other (3.5 tonnes per annum), and you get a figure of 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2 per annum. By a million miles, that’s the biggest single CO2 abatement achievement since Kyoto came into force – a fact that George Bush conveniently forgets when he whinges on about Kyoto being useless because China doesn’t have the same target as the United States.

Mind you, everybody else ignores that too, including the vast majority of environmentalists. So, is this the very first time where George Bush and the whole of the environment movement are of exactly the same mind?

Posted on May 17, 2007 8:03 PM | | Comments (33) | TrackBacks (0)

June 13, 2007 - China: kids and carbon

I wouldn’t want anyone to think this blog is going to be population-obsessed, but I just have to record “a major, major step forward” for bloggers seeking to influence governmental negotiating positions.

Just four weeks ago, I suggested that the Chinese government should face down George Bush’s endless complaints about China doing nothing on climate change by referring to all the billions of tonnes of CO2 not emitted into the atmosphere because of China’s one-child family policy. Four weeks on, there’s Ma Kai, head of China’s State Economic Planning Agency doing exactly that on the margins of the G8 Plus 5 Summit in Heiligendamm last week:

“Without China’s strict family planning policies, the country’s population would have increased by 138 million since 1979, resulting in an extra 330 billion tonnes in emissions.”

The exceptionally sharp-eyed amongst you will observe that my diplomatic triumph is marred by a bit of a cock-up in my calculations. I initially quoted 400 million “births averted” as a consequence of China’s one-child family policy, on the basis of previous information picked up on a visit to China – a rather large discrepancy which I’ll need to look in to! But I rather assume that Mr Kai should know.

Unfortunately, the Chinese delegation at Heiligendamm had little else to offer by way of encouraging news on climate change. The International Energy Agency forecast earlier this year that China will overtake the US as the world’s largest emitter of CO2 by the end of 2007 – emitting more than 6 billion tonnes in comparison to America’s 5.9 billion tonnes.

Simply parroting its mantra of “growth first, climate change second” will, from that point on, sound more and more ludicrous.

Posted on June 13, 2007 11:53 AM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

September 21, 2007 - Bunting and population

I have absolutely promised not to let this blog get population-obsessed, but I have absolutely got to go on the record to clear up any misunderstanding caused by Madeleine Bunting’s recent article in the Guardian (September 10th) about why most environmentalists can’t bring themselves to utter the dreaded “p” word.

I’m sorry to have to do this. I think Madeleine is a brilliant journalist, and her ongoing battle with Richard Dawkins is just great – someone has to keep on pointing out just how prattish it is for someone like him to wage a war against religion with such religious intensity.

So I was delighted when Madeleine said she was about to do a piece on population – and sure enough, the first 80% of the article is excellent. Check it out for yourselves. But then we find these paras:

“Jonathon Porritt, chair of the government's Sustainability Development Commission, admits it is 'tough territory' but argues that 'it is intellectually unjustifiable' for the environmental movement not to address it. He wants to see a UK population policy that covers both family planning and immigration, aimed at long-term population decline. That would mark a dramatic shift in policy. In particular, he rejects the oft-cited need to keep up the birth rate to pay for pensions. But his attempts to get the government to engage have got nowhere.

"As Porritt ruefully admits, his position lands him in some unsavoury company. The Optimum Population Trust proposes some batty ideas such as government campaigns on the unattractiveness of parenthood. And it gets much worse. As is often the case where there is a disconnect between public debate and popular sentiment, the British National party (BNP) is stepping in to grab the territory. It argues that 'our countryside is vanishing beneath a tidal wave of concrete', 'immigration is creating an environmental disaster' and Britain could become 'a tarmac desert'."

That is all so misleading as to beggar belief! As a Patron of the Optimum Population Trust, am I really likely to slag it off in public for having batty ideas – especially as I spend most of my time telling anyone who will listen that it’s an excellent organization that they should actively be supporting. And would I really be talking of it as “unsavoury company”!

Worse yet, is it really fair, by virtue of (presumably deliberate?) juxtaposition to put the BNP and the OPT in the same category. Madeleine knows it’s not, and unless she can blame such sloppy journalism on her editor (which is of course perfectly possible), then she really has got a bit of explaining to do. I know I shouldn’t complain too much. It’s great that more people are joining the debate on such a critical issue, and it’s not as if I’m not aware of the controversies associated with taking a high profile on it. But it’s not really me I’m worried about in this instance: it’s the OPT, which may now, in the minds of many deluded Guardian readers, be seen as some kind of batty, BNP look-alike. Which is as far from the truth as one can possibly get.

You can do better than that, Madeleine.

Posted on September 21, 2007 5:04 PM | | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

June 9, 2008 - Population

I was able to give the ‘population pot’ a pretty good stir on Friday in an event for the Cheltenham Science Festival.

For some time now, I have been reflecting on the way in which the world is responding to the twin crises of HIV/AIDS and continuing high levels of population growth. The UN body responsible for coordinating HIV/AIDS has called for funding to grow to around $22 billion per annum – and it seems probable that governments, donor agencies and big foundations will respond positively.

By contrast, funding for family planning peaked some time ago (as a percentage of total expenditures on population-related activities), and is still on a downward curve.

Donor Expenditures199419992004
Family Planning Services55%37%9%
Reproductive Health Services18%30%25%
HIV/AIDS Activities 9%23%54%
Research & Development18%11%12%
Millions in Current US $131416554907

HIV/AIDS kills about 8000 people a month, and there are 5 million new infections every year, so I have no problem about the scale of expenditure in addressing this. However, along with many others, I do have major reservations about the way in which the sums are being invested, especially in terms of the US-driven programmes which are much more ideology-based than evidence-based.

But the fact that this year in Kenya (where the rate of population growth is on the rise again) a sum of around 480 million will be spent on HIV/AIDS, compared to just 7.7 million on family planning and reproductive health, is just completely bonkers. What that means is instead of Kenya’s population stabilising at 44 million by 2050, which is what would have happened with the Total Fertility Rate continuing to decline, it could now go as high as 80 million – and god knows how many of that vastly expanded population will have died of HIV/AIDS between now and 2050.

The additional suffering that all this imposes on some of the world’s most poorest countries is literally incalculable. Continuing population growth is already having a marked impact on the efforts being made to meet the Millennium Development Goals. As the All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development & Reproductive Health put it in 2007:

“The evidence is overwhelming: the Millennium Development Goals are difficult or impossible to achieve with the current levels of population growth in the least developed countries and regions.”

It’s still the case that most “progressive” development experts think that “addressing poverty first” remains the best response, and that most environmentalists, in a reprehensibly politically-correct way, think it is exclusively about over-consumption in the rich world, than over-population in the poor world.

But exactly what kind of world are these people living in? Certainly not in a world where water consumption is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth, where available arable land continues to decline year on year, where many of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are increasingly at risk specifically because of rapid population growth, where oil at $139 a barrel is already having a devastating effect on hundreds of millions of very poor people, and where accelerating climate change and rising sea levels are going to cause havoc over the next 20-30 years.

That’s our world – not some make believe cornucopian world that some still dream of, where the number of people on it is of no material significance.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on June 9, 2008 2:25 PM | | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

November 14, 2008 - Population

I thought it might be interesting to share an article done recently for Greenpeace Business.

They have just told me that they can’t use it – too controversial, apparently. If ever an article’s core hypothesis (in this case, that environmental NGOs are both gutless and less than honest in addressing population issues) was borne out by its editorial treatment, then this has to be it.

Which element in the following quotation (taken from a report about climate change issued earlier this year by the Ministry of Defence’s internal think-tank) most powerfully grabs your attention?

"The Earth’s population has grown exponentially in the last century, and rapid climate change of the kind that we have seen before would have more dramatic human consequences, resulting in societal collapse, mega-migration, intensifying competition for much-diminished resources, and widespread conflict."

Unless you are part of that very small minority of environmentalists who put population right at the top of any league table of current crises, that reference to "exponential population growth" will have gone straight in one ear and straight out the other.

There are all sorts of reasons for this: fear of controversy (particularly linked to population's "evil policy twin", namely immigration); "religious sensitivities", in as much as some of the fiercest and most bigoted opponents of proper fertility management are Catholics or Muslims; inexcusable ignorance; an obstinate refusal to think beyond the historical abuses of human rights carried out in the name of "population control" in India or China in the past; economic anxieties that without constant population growth there won’t be enough young people paying their taxes in the future to keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed; and umpteen different shades of political correctness all the way through from “who are we to tell people in the third world how to live their lives?” to “it’s over-consumption in the rich world that’s the problem, not over-population in the poor world”.

Each of those requires proper refutation, but for the purposes of this article, I would like to focus on the "over-consumption versus over-population" debate. This is the argument most favoured by environmentalists who have never really looked into the issue, but are so incensed by the uncaring profligacy of the world’s richest one billion citizens that any other explanation of today's converging crises seems like an irresponsible distraction.

So let's get one thing absolutely clear: I have spent my entire life campaigning against that kind of uncaring profligacy, and no doubt will spend the rest of my life doing exactly the same. There may have been some excuse for the damage we did to the physical environment back in the 1960s and 70s (in that the evidence was often flimsy, and it somehow all seemed to be quite manageable), but today there is no excuse. The evidence is now in – on every count – and what we do today we do with full and shameful knowledge. There is no excuse, and this generation of politicians – in all the major Parties – already stand accused of the most heinous cowardice imaginable.

So I don’t need lecturing about the perils of excessive consumption, or the idiocy of relying on exponential economic growth – fuelled by increased per capita income – to secure a better world! But I’ve never been persuaded that that’s all we have to worry about – as if one mega-reality shaded out every other mega-reality that we are now having to face up to.

And the mega-reality I'm talking about here is carrying capacity: how many people can the Earth’s resources and life-support services sustain on an indefinite basis? The answer to that is obviously determined in part by the level of consumption of each individual human being. But even if, by some currently unimaginable miracle, the richest people in the world today learn to lead what WWF calls "one planet lifestyles", does anyone seriously suppose that this would work for the next 3 billion people aspiring to live in the same way – and the next 3 billion who will be staking a claim on those self-same resources and services before 2050?

It's fascinating to see how many environmentalists have woken up in the last couple of years to the phenomenon of peak oil – the likelihood that we have either already passed or are very close to the "half-way point" in terms of using up existing oil reserves. But I'm not at all sure that the full implications of this have really sunk in. Our near-total dependence on oil makes it very difficult for people to envisage a life without it; activists in today's Transition Towns movement are full of anecdotes of people’s horror as they become acquainted with this reality. Richard Heinberg (author of "The Party’s Over" and a leading activist in the Association for the Study of Peak Oil) likes to rub this in by reminding people that just three spoonfuls of oil provides the equivalent amount of energy as 8 hours of human labour!

Richard’s latest book is called "Peak Everything" – covering not just peak oil, but peak soil, peak wheat, peak rice, peak fisheries, peak precious metals and, perhaps most pressingly of all, peak water.

This is not just a question of more and more people at risk because of declining water resources. A recent report from WWF highlighted the invisible nature of the problem here in the UK. We ourselves are not "running out of water", so there is no direct threat to our current average water consumption of 150 litres per day. But each of us consumes on average thirty times as much "virtual water", which has been used in the production of food and textiles imported into the UK. Big exporting countries like Spain, Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Israel, Pakistan, South Africa and Uzbekistan are all facing acute water stress – and it’s quite sobering to be reminded that just one green bean from Kenya takes four litres of water to produce. As we work our way through more than 4500 litres of virtual water per person per day, because of these imports, are we, in effect, simply exporting drought?

There are of course all sorts of ways in which we can "fix" some of these problems. Hyper-efficient irrigation systems could reduce water consumption for agriculture by up to 50%. The next generation of solar-powered desalination technologies will bring some comfort to many coastal communities in water-stressed areas. If we had to, albeit at a massive cost, we could totally re-engineer our water and sewerage systems throughout the rich world to deliver exactly the same services for a fraction of current water consumption levels. All this is possible, but unbelievably difficult.

Given all that, one has to point out that it would be a great deal easier to do it for 3 billion people than for 6 billion, let alone 9 billion.

That was exactly the sort of thinking China’s leaders went through 30 years ago: that it might just be possible to sustain a population of around 1 billion on China’s limited land and natural resources, but completely impossible to do the same for 1.5 billion. The "one child family" policy introduced at that time has pegged China’s population at around 1.3 billion; according to the figures the Chinese government uses, it would otherwise have been 1.7 billion. That’s 400 million births averted.

This is where you have to start doing the sums. Per capita emissions of CO2 in China today are around 3.8 tonnes per person. An extra 400 million Chinese citizens legitimately going about their business of improving their economic standard of living, in exactly the same way that citizens of every single one of our rich nations have done over many decades, would today be emitting an additional 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2. When asked which country I believe is doing most about addressing the challenge of climate change, I’m only being partly mischievous when I tell my questioner that it is China.

But logic does not come easily to the hundreds of millions of people who are only just waking up to the threat of accelerating climate change. To be told that the best thing you can do by way of a personal contribution to the problem is to have fewer children (or enable the millions of women all around the world who would just love to have fewer children to do exactly that) comes as a bit of a shock. If, instead of 70 million additional people arriving every year, we had 70 million fewer, then we might still have a chance of arriving at a sustainable future for the whole of humankind. Without that, we are looking at very long odds indeed.

There's a double irony here. Every single one of the multiple socio-economic issues that preoccupy campaigns today would be eased by full-on, government-led interventions to help reduce average fertility – especially in the world’s poorest countries. And we know exactly how to generate that double dividend: massively increase funding for education for girls, for improved reproductive and other health interventions for women, and for ensuring access for women to a choice of reliable and cheap (preferably free) contraceptives. That's what successful family planning looks like.

Yet to listen to critics of family planning, you would still think it’s all about coercion and control. Whilst only too happy to regale you with the shocking statistics about compulsory abortions and sterilisations (let alone very high levels of female infanticide) in China, they know nothing of the success stories in places like Kerala, Thailand, Korea – and even in Iran. With the full support of Islamic leaders in that country, their total fertility rate fell from 6 children per woman in 1974 to 2 children per woman by 2000. And a brilliant education campaign was at the heart of this success story.

The wilful ignorance of environmentalists is one of the reasons why funding for family planning and reproductive healthcare has been falling over the last decade, instead of increasing, despite a rising number of requests for financial support from countries the world over. The other main reason is the vengeful fundamentalism of the George Bush regime, which decreed nearly 8 years ago that no organisation would receive US funding if it so much as acknowledged that abortion is a necessary (though always regrettable) part of any concerted strategy on family planning. Great company for such right-on environmentalists to be keeping.

This is not some abstract lament, detached from the reality of people's lives. In countries like Ethiopia and Kenya, there are tragedies unfolding in front of our eyes right now. In Kenya, the total fertility rate declined from 8 children per woman in 1979 to 4.7 children by 1998. Good news - but then, funding collapsed and average fertility is now on the rise again. If the downward trend had been continued, the population of Kenya in 2050 would have been 44 million. On current trends, it will be more than 80 million.

It's case studies like these (both good and bad) which persuaded the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health to re-engage in this debate in 2007. Its report, ("Return of the Population Growth Factor"), couldn't have been clearer in its overarching conclusion: "The evidence is overwhelming: The Millennium Development Goals are difficult or impossible to achieve with the current levels of population growth in the least developed countries and regions."

So what exactly is going on here? The governments of many of the poorest countries in the world are crying out for financial support for family planning, but are not getting it. The lives of countless millions of women are devastated by their inability to manage their own fertility, and hundreds of thousands die every year because of illegal abortions or complications from unwanted pregnancies. But their voices go largely unheard. On top of all that, every single one of the environmental problems we face today is exacerbated by population growth, and the already massive challenge of achieving an 80% cut in greenhouse gases by 2050 is rendered completely fantastical by the prospective arrival of another 2.5 billion people over the next 40 years.

Yet most environmentalists will still find this article offensive. They will go on banging their utterly inadequate "over-consumption drum", and somehow sleep easy in their beds that they are doing "a good job". I think not.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on November 14, 2008 2:07 PM | | Comments (43) | TrackBacks (0)

January 30, 2009 - Don’t always trust The Guardian!

Earlier this month, The Guardian published an extraordinary article about Carl Djerassi, commenting on an article he himself had written about population issues in Austria and elsewhere – claiming, amongst other things, that Djerassi had blamed the Pill (of which he was one of the inventors) for Austria’s very low birth rate. This had been seized on by the Catholic church.

At the time, I was gobsmacked by all of that, and duly repeated it all in my own blog piece. And it now turns out that The Guardian got it mostly wrong!

Carl Djerassi is rightly very upset - and all I can say to him is that I’m really sorry! By way of reparation, the best thing I can do is to use his own words to show what he really said:

"Your article on my alleged thoughts about the pill began with the sentence: "Roman Catholic leaders have pounced on a 'confession' by one of the inventors of the birth control pill who has said the contraceptive he helped create was responsible for a 'demographic catastrophe'" (Church grabs chance to attack birth control, 7 January).

Let me pounce back on this statement, which in the meantime has escalated throughout the Catholic press in the US, Italy and elsewhere under such headlines as "Pill inventor slams pill" and "Co-inventor of birth control pill now calls it a catastrophe".

This calumny was prompted by a long article I published in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard on 13 December, where I decried the dramatic shift to the right in Catholic Austria's recent election and its startlingly xenophobic overtones. Given that this happened on the 70th anniversary of the Anschluss, I as a former refugee from Austria - a country that has recently placed my face on a postage stamp - felt obliged to speak out.

Contraception, birth control, abortion, or the pill were nowhere mentioned in my article. I accused the disturbingly large xenophobic segment of Austrian voters (notably young ones) of assuming that their small country was not situated in the middle of Europe but rather on an island where God permits them to live independently to enjoy their schnitzels.

I warned against an impending demographic catastrophe. Without immigration, a country requires 2.1 children per family to maintain its population level; so those xenophobic Austrians would have to have at least three children (which I considered totally unlikely) in order to raise the small size of most of their compatriots' families to a national average of 2.1.

I drew attention to Bulgaria, a country to which I fled in 1938 from Nazi Austria, and which possesses roughly the same current population, age distribution and average family size (1.4 children) as Austria. Nobody these days wants to emigrate to Bulgaria, in contrast to Austria or other western European countries. As a result, demographic estimates predict a 35% drop in Bulgaria's current population by 2050.

I also indicated that Germany's family size (1.3 children) requires an annual immigration of 200,000 just to maintain the current population. Consequently, I emphasised the need in Austria for continuing immigration.

To assume that I attributed the decline in Austria's family size (matched by all-Catholic Italy and Spain) to the pill is absurd. People don't have smaller families because of the availability of birth control, but for personal, economic, cultural and other reasons, of which the changes in the status and lifestyles of women during the last 50 years is the most important. Japan has an even worse demographic problem than western Europe, yet the pill was only legalised there in 1999 and is still not used widely.

One only needs to read my 2001 memoir, This Man's Pill: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Pill, to find my personal views on contraception, the pill, and the de facto separation of sex and reproduction - which sooner or later the Catholic church must face realistically and humanely."

Carl Djerassi is an author and playwright and is emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University. His most recent book (2008) is Sex in an Age of Technological Reproduction
djerassi@stanford.edu

First published in The Guardian, Comment is free, Tuesday 27th January 2008.
I never blamed the pill for the fall in family size

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on January 30, 2009 12:19 PM | | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

March 4, 2009 - A sustainable population

I’ve always felt that logic and sound evidence provide a pretty solid foundation for good policy-making. But some issues are more amenable to logic than others, and population is clearly the least amenable of all.

I’m in the population doghouse yet again. On 1st February the Sunday Times carried a front page story based on comments I had made that as we are heading off into some very troubled times, it would come to be seen as “irresponsible” for families to have more than two children.

You’d have thought I’d advocated compulsory sterilisation, emasculation, euthanasia, and baby-slaughtering all in one fell swoop. Melanie Philips likened me to Pol Pot and Hitler (who was “green” after all!), and when Fox News in the US got hold of the story, every religious nutcase with nothing better to do crawled out from under their stones to suggest the best thing I could do to help address population pressure would be to top myself. Instantly. Logic and sound evidence were not much in evidence.

So let’s just start all over again – here’s the logic, in 12 easy steps.

1. The more human beings there are on the planet, the bigger our collective impact. There were about 3 billion of us in 1950, and there will be about 9 billion by 2050 – if we just carry on as usual. That’s an extra 6 billion in 100 years!

2. Our impact is felt in many different ways – in terms of soil erosion, over-fishing, deforestation, water shortages, loss of species and habitats, and so on. Most particularly, it’s felt in terms of the rising emissions of C02 and other greenhouse gases that we’re putting into the atmosphere, with the prospect of horrendous consequences by the end of the century if we can’t turn this around.

3. Each individual is responsible for their own carbon footprint. Here in the UK, it’s about 12 tonnes per person per annum. In China, it’s about 4 tonnes per person per annum. It soon mounts up. Were it not for China’s ‘one child family’ policy (which is certainly very controversial), there would be as many as 400 million additional Chinese alive today – with a combined annual carbon footprint of around 1.6 billion tonnes of C02!

4. Population and environmental impact are therefore inextricably intertwined. New technology (around energy efficiency and renewables) can do a lot to help reduce that impact. But at the moment, the efficiency gains it gives us are not even keeping up with the combined increase in human numbers and economic growth.

5. Here in the UK, we have adopted some extremely ambitious targets to reduce emissions of C02 and other greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050. On a per capita basis, that means going from around 12 tonnes per person per annum today to around 2.5 tonnes per person per annum by 2050 – if our population remains the same in 2050.

6. But it’s not going to! Current projections indicate that our population is going to grow from 61 million today to 77 million by 2050. Logically, that means there’s a lot less C02 to go round (in terms of our per capita allocation), making it all the harder to achieve that 80% target. (A target, incidentally, which many scientists now see as the absolute minimum which will be required in rich countries like ours).

7. It also means a lot more overcrowding, a lot more pressure on housing, on water supplies, on our trains, on our already congested roads and so on.

8. If you accept that this is a not very attractive proposition, and that it would be better to aim for a lower, rather than a higher population, there are two things that have to happen here in the UK.

9. The first is to allow into our country no more people than leave it on an annual basis. That’s called “net zero immigration”. This is not xenophobic, let alone racist. It’s just common sense.

10. The second is to see if we might persuade (please note, persuade, not coerce!) the 26% of women in the UK who are currently expected to have more than two children to ‘stop at two’. (The other 74% already do stop at two, or have one child or none.) If we did this, we would be able to cut our forecast population by around 7 million people.

11. Combine both policies (neither of which, I think you’ll agree, are that extreme, let alone threatening, let alone totalitarian!), and the consequences are enormous: instead of a population of 77 million, we’d have a population of around 55 million – 6 million fewer than we have today.

12. Amazingly, if we then applied ourselves to doing more or less the same for women the world over, during the course of the next 20 years or so, by the tried and tested means of improving education for all (but particularly for girls), including healthcare for all (but particularly for women), and ensuring a choice of contraception for all women so that they are free to manage their own fertility, without fear of oppressive religious and male-dominated constraints, then we might just be able to stabilise world population to something closer to 7.8 billion instead of 9.2 billion. And just work out what that means for climate change, the planet and all future generations.


So that’s the logic. Of course, it isn’t as easy as that. The barriers are still huge.
Many religious people still think the use of any contraception other than abstinence or the ‘natural method’ runs counter to the will of God. Many economists still think that a declining population will create an increasingly problematic imbalance between those at the end of their working lives and those whose taxes will be needed to support them.

But there seems to be little reason, on either count, to declare that population must remain for ever a taboo subject, beyond rational discourse, worthy only of the rantings of Daily Mail columnists and religious extremists.

So I shall stick to my guns on this one! As a Patron of the Optimum Population Trust, I shall be keenly supporting their ‘Stick at Two’ campaign. And as an environmentalist with a bit of a track record, I shall continue to point out to many of my colleagues that their continuing silence on the links between population, climate change and social justice is actually a betrayal of everything that they stand for – however ‘politically correct’ they may imagine it to be.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on March 4, 2009 5:17 PM | | Comments (43) | TrackBacks (0)

October 6, 2009 - George Monbiot, The Guardian & population

Under attack, yet again, from George Monbiot in The Guardian (September 28th) for continuing to campaign on population issues. Yes, well …….

On 27th January 1979, George Monbiot was celebrating his 16th birthday. I’m sure he was having lots of fun, in a precociously environment-friendly way.

On 27th January 1979, I was happily engaged in drafting the Ecology Party’s Manifesto in preparation for the General Election in May 1979. As it happens, that Manifesto was particularly strong on equity issues, with an uncompromising call for the burden of taxation to target the very rich, and for economic policy explicitly to combat conspicuous consumption. As a member of the Green Party for the next 30 years, I’ve continued to advocate policy positions of that kind at every single point in my career.

I only mention all that just in case there’s anyone else out there (apart from George Monbiot) who believes that just because I’m concerned about the issue of population that I must, by definition, be unconcerned about poverty, unconcerned about the super-rich, and only happy when schmoozing with billionaires on their luxury yachts.

It seems extraordinary that I should have to account for myself in that way. But the characterisation of people concerned about population as elitist, uncaring monomaniacs demeans those who use such rhetorical devices to exercise their own dim prejudices about population – such as George Monbiot.

For this particular attack, George prays-in-aid a new report from the eminent academic David Satterthwaite, just published in the journal Environment and Urbanisation. David has looked at the correlation between population growth and growth in greenhouse gas emissions in different parts of the world between 1980 – 2005. He comes to the not terribly surprising conclusion that in somewhere like sub-Saharan Africa, population has grown very fast (18.5%) and emissions hardly at all (2.4%), whereas it’s the other way round in countries like the US. He goes on from there to suggest that the West simply shouldn’t bother about spending billions of aid money providing contraception in the developing world, because poor people have such low per capita emissions anyway.

All very logical at first glance. But all very baffling when you dig a bit deeper. David’s article also refers to China – where emissions have risen by 44.5% since 1980 (as per capita incomes rose fast), even as the population grew by very little because of their ‘one child family’ policy.

So just try out this retrospective hypothesis for the fun of it. Imagine, back in 1978, that the Chinese Government had petitioned rich countries to fund its family planning programme. Imagine, we’d said ‘no’, not on ethical grounds (for the purpose of this retrospective hypothesis), but because we didn’t think it would represent ‘good value for money’ in terms of helping China keep future emissions of greenhouse gases under control.

30 years later, as we now know, had there been no ‘one child family’ policy in place, there would have been 400 million additional Chinese citizens, each one of them now emitting on average 4.5 tonnes per annum – precisely because they’ve been getting richer faster. So do you think we might feel then just a touch regretful?

Fast forward to today. Imagine India came to us now asking for help with a new family planning programme. Simply not worth it, says David, because India’s emissions are currently very low – less than 2 tonnes per person. So no family planning programme takes place – despite the fact that India’s population is currently growing by around 15 million a year.

By 2035, that means that India’s population will have risen by roughly one third of a billion additional citizens. Average per capita emissions will then have risen to (say) 4.5 tonnes per person – where China’s emissions are today. (I can assure you that India would be very disappointed at such a slow rate of growth, by the way). That means another 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2 a year, that could have been abated, right now, at a remarkably low price. Nice one, David.

The point is a simple one. Hopefully (because poverty in these countries is wretched), poor people today (even in Africa) won’t stay poor. And certainly I hope there’s no one out there who believes that they will have to stay poor to help us with the problem of climate change. As incomes rise, so too will emissions. And if population is rising too, the end result is a substantial net increase in emissions – which could so easily be averted.

Take Uganda. 50% of Uganda’s population of 33 million is aged below 15. Population is growing at 3.2%. Average fertility is around 6.5 children per woman. On a business-as-usual projection, Uganda’s population will be around 100 million by 2050. (These figures are from the Population Reference Bureau.)

Worst case for Uganda? The country implodes, primarily because of completely unsustainable population growth. That means emissions stay low, but that’s hardly a good economic outcome either for Uganda or for the world.

Slightly better case? Uganda’s rich thrive, their incomes rise fast, and average emissions soar, even as the poor stay poor and their emissions don’t rise.

Best case? Uganda introduces the best ever family planning programme in Africa, with unstinting support from the rich world. Incomes rise by more than in any other scenario, emissions rise too, but with a population of around 40 million (instead of 100 million) that’s not really so much of a problem.

Unfortunately, Uganda’s President Museveni is an out-and-out pro-natalist. He can’t wait for Uganda to have a population in excess of 100 million. Neither, apparently, can George Monbiot.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on October 6, 2009 4:35 PM | | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

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