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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 (32) | 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 (7) | TrackBacks (0)

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