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LETTERS to New Scientist in response to coverage of environmental issues often raise a glaring omission: why aren鈥檛 we mentioning the elephant in the room, namely the number of humans on the planet?
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A pandemic assisted by our incursions into nature has now given questions about human population size a renewed focus. Such questions have been hugely contentious since at least 1798, when Thomas Malthus issued the dire warnings that still set the tenor of the debate in An Essay on the Principle of Population.
See The great Population debate: Are there to many people on the planet?听 where you will find our analysis of where that debate stands today. While longer-term reductions in human numbers can only be good for the planet, those who advocate limiting population as an environmental panacea must answer two outstanding questions.
The first is what they propose we do to reduce our impact as we grapple with the climate emergency in the crucial coming years, given that efforts to reduce population necessarily play out over decades. The second is what tools they propose we use to reduce our headcount.
鈥淲e know what works to limit population growth, and it is broadly what the world has been doing鈥�
We know what works to limit population growth without resorting to brutal and disastrous coercion. It is broadly what the world has been doing for the past half century, albeit often in the face of significant opposition: assisting the economic development of those, mainly poorer, countries with high population growth, broadening access to education, especially for girls and women, and ensuring access to contraception and abortion.
There are worrying signs that the pandemic, by limiting access to family planning, has increased birth rates in some lower-income countries, reversing a decades-long downwards trend. Access to education has also been hit.
Consumed by the economic shock of covid-19 at home, richer countries may be tempted to turn their backs on these problems. For the long-term future of everyone on the planet, they should look to where all our interests lie: in redoubling their efforts to help the less well-off achieve economic growth more sustainably than they did themselves, while urgently reducing their own consumption, too.
