Recent news about slowing or even negative population growth in many countries around the world seems to have raised alarms and anxiety on several levels. Already the usually cautious and deliberately moving Chinese government endorsed a three-child family policy to avert its projected downsizing from a country of 1.4 billion people to one with 730 million by 2100.
Economists and demographers in the US have also expressed their discomfort after the 2020 census revealed the US population had grown only by 7.4% since 2010, almost as low as the 7.3% growth rate between 1930 and 1940. A number of countries, including South Korea, Singapore, France, Australia, Canada, Russia and Poland have adopted incentives to boost birth rates. It is doubtful though these policies will achieve their objectives given current dynamics.
As I wrote in an earlier post two months ago, population growth is a complex issue with beneficial and harmful consequences. As the title of the present post suggests I see population growth as a global issue that, like climate and the natural environment, calls for more comprehensive solutions. Before I continue, I would like to put forth two realizations I have come to believe they should be part of the debate on population growth.
First, we cannot be pro-population growth without also advocating ecological balance. Second, we cannot support population growth without addressing the depressing nexus between poverty, high birth rates and infant mortality. Population growth is not a free lunch.
The first concern was succinctly articulated in a letter to the New York Times editor this way: “People [with fewer or no kids] might say something like this: ‘There are already too many humans on planet Earth, and it is time to begin a transformation to a stable, smaller human footprint.” In a 2017 statement, 15,364 scientists from 184 countries declared rapid population growth as the primary drive behind many ecological and even social threats. The transformation needed to reduce the human-based carbon-dioxide footprint includes: fewer children, fewer vehicles, limited air travel, and adopting a plant-based diet.
I am not sure that as of now families consciously limit the number of offsprings to achieve the above results. At some point though we may come to this conscientious decision. Or we may hope that our technological prowess will enable us to survive with most of our modern comforts and in peace with nature. So far, however, technological progress has burdened our natural environment rather than preserved it. There is no guarantee future technologies will do better if left unchecked. Therefore, we do need to bring ecological considerations into the discussion of population growth.
As of now the momentum is against any restraining of human expansion into nature. I recently read that in the US the road system is so extensive that every part of what we call nature is within 20 miles of some road. The pandemic is making this encroachment worse. To avoid the confines of city life, families are leaving the big cities for open-space places. Reducing residential density adds to the burden of the natural environment. People must travel longer distances and more land is taken from nature. It’s questionable whether work from home will offset longer commuting times. Infrastructure projects like roads, rail systems, ports, dams, etc. are considered “progress” unless you ignore their impact on natural life and the climate.
Individual life-style preferences and powerful economic interests by businesses and labor hinder the adoption of serious environmental conditions on land use for residential and extracting purposes. I present these examples to highlight the difficult challenges we face and how, no matter how gradually, we inexorably move toward unsustainable future realities by doing what appears to be a good thing right now.
Counter to conventional thinking, poverty and high birth rates coincide. Due to limited information and means poor people apply less effective birth control practices but they also experience higher rates of infant mortality. Moreover, they see children as a supply of labor and family income. Therefore, their cost-benefit analysis drives them to have more kids. Conversely, this cost-benefit analysis drives more affluent people to have fewer kids. Parental aspirations for their children’s future require more expensive education and upbringing. Indeed, in parts of the world that live on $2 a day, families have on average 5 children compared to only 2 in higher income-level populations.
Population projections show that already by 2040 we will experience a movement from the poorest level of global population to the two middle levels, those with incomes between $4 and $16 a day. These income levels will number 6.9 billion people up from 5 billion today. Thus, there will be two countervailing forces. Birth rates will decline as incomes and parental aspirations rise. Since, however, income, spending, energy usage and encroachment of nature move together, we should expect a heavier environmental burden if all else is left as things are now.
Rising global prosperity will slow birth rates down so that, according to population projections, the number of children up to age 15 will be the same as now, that is, about 2 billion. Which means the segment of people over 60 will increase faster. This is what gives economists and governments nightmares and drives nation-based approaches that ignore the consequences of higher population growth on our planet. The countries with serious aging trends can rely on a couple of possible solutions. One is to admit more immigrants to achieve a better demographic balance. Developed countries can also rely on the growing purchasing power of the rest of the world to generate the wealth they will need to take care of their aging population.
What all this tells me is that public officials and we citizens must become a lot more cognizant of the intricate relationships of population trends, demographic shifts, distribution of prosperity, human footprint, and ecological impact.
Note: Most of the population trends come from Factfulness of Hans Rosling (2017).
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