Population -March 14

March 14, 2009

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Planet Overload

David Nicholson-Lord, The New Statesman
The world’s population is 6.8 billion. That figure will rise to 9.2 billion by 2050. Meanwhile, climate change is speeding up alarmingly. So are there too many of us? If so, how long before our planet becomes unfit for purpose?

… I find it hard to conceive that an intelligent, acquisitive, expansive, territorial, aggressive and physically large species such as Homo sapiens could increase in numbers from 2.5 billion to 6.8 billion since 1950 and not cause an environmental crisis. Moreover, I cannot see how, on top of the existing 6.8 billion, we can accommodate another 2.4 billion people over the next 40 years (which is what the United Nations says we can expect) without something to go seriously wrong on the earth.

… Faced with sub-replacement birth rates in many countries in the developed world and with talk of a “birth dearth”, for instance, many governments have begun to promote the economic benefit of women having more babies or of higher immigration as a means of paying for our pensions. You hear less of this in the UK since the idea was rubbished by the Pensions Commission, but it is a remarkably durable piece of mythology that carries startling demographic implications. Since new arrivals grow old and then require pensions themselves, you need an ever-growing population to keep the “support ratio” between workers and non-workers the same. To maintain the present support ratio in the UK, for example, would demand a national population of 136 million in 2050 – more than double the current number.

… In 2007, 69 out of 195 countries had policies to lower population growth, compared with 39 in the mid-1970s.

This included 70 per cent of the less developed countries: 34 out of 53 African states, for example. And there have been some remarkable, and unexpected, success stories – not least Iran, which decided after a census in 1987 that population growth was holding back development and, between 1988 and 2000, reduced its fertility rate from 5.2 children per family to a below-replacement level of two. Thailand cut fertility rates from 6.3 in 1967 to 1.7 in 2003. Many other states have reduced their birth rates at a speed comparable to China but without coercion. They include Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Morocco, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Tunisia, Vietnam and India (the southern states).

Half a century after the first population and family planning programmes began, the ingredients of success are well established: strong government support, often through explicit population policies; partnership with NGOs; an emphasis on women’s status, rights and education; education on sex and relationships; and, above all, the ready availability of contraceptives – supplied in Iran, for example, by a nationwide network of “health houses”.
(7 March 2009)
Also at Common Dreams.


Green agendas and grey dawns

Alastair Bonnett, New Statesman
It’s not so much about how many of us there are on the planet, but how we consume, and how we cope with an ageing population

… Britain has never had a population policy, but it seems we are well on the way to having one. The population of this country is at present growing at approximately 1,000 people a day and is predicted to reach 77 million in 2050. The immigration minister, Phil Woolas, felt the need to “give assurances to people that that sort of figure is not on the horizon”. Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have been making similar noises of concern.

Yet the point of a population policy has yet to be made clear. Whether in England, which is now the most crowded large nation in Europe, or at a global level, concern about overpopulation is being expressed ever more freely. But the messages are often mixed, the rationales confused. Many think the real arguments for taking population seriously are green ones. If so, let’s hear them.

Environmental targets are much harder to meet with a rising population. Yet we also need to accept that, on a planet where a growing number of people are buying increasing quantities of stuff, merely stabilising numbers is not going to be enough. Consumer citizens gobble up resources at an alarming rate. If we demand such a lifestyle – and it seems that most of us do – we must also accept the environmental penalty clause. We need a decisive shift away from going for growth, and towards managing decline.

The sooner we get used to this transition, the easier it will be to cope with it. For one of the main facts in this whole debate is that fertility is in free fall in many countries.
(5 March 2009)


World population to reach nine billion by 2050: UN projections

AFP via Breitbart
The world population is projected to top nine billion in 2050, up from 6.8 billion this year and seven billion early in 2012, according to UN estimates released Wednesday.

Most of the additional 2.3 billion people will swell the population of the developing world, estimated to soar from 5.6 billion this year to 7.9 billion in 2050, and to spread among the 15-59 age group (1.2 billion) and those 60 or over (1.1 billion), the data showed.
(11 March 2009)


Tags: Population