Global warming and population growth.

The Anthropocene. This is the official name for the epoch we are now living in and it means “the age of humans”. It is named this because we humans are causing global change everywhere that can be seen in geological structures.

We have become aware, all too slowly unfortunately, of the effect humanity is having on our planet, with loss of other species, floods, fires, storms, water shortages, and movement of people because of famine or war. Programmes such as David Attenborough’s “Dynasties” have shown the dire effect of loss of habitat and plastic pollution on other species; and we have just had a conference in Poland on global climate change, and which has had some success in promoting the reduction of harmful emissions, thanks partly to close collaboration in Poland between the U.S. and Chinese delegations (despite Mr. Trump not believing any of it). These delegates worked closely to foster a remarkable consensus that all countries must follow uniform standards for measuring emissions and tracking the achievement of their national targets. But is it enough? It hardly mentioned the fact that there is already 9 billion of this and us could rise to over 11 million in 2050. This must surely be the main driver behind our problems.

But it could be so good. There are obviously far too many of us but in most of the world fertility is falling. Fertility in all European countries is now below the level required for full replacement of the population in the long run (around 2.1 children per woman), and in the majority of cases, fertility has been below the replacement level for several decades. Eastern Europe shows the biggest projected drop; Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine, all are struggling to grow their populations, especially with migration of the young and healthy to wealthier countries; and in Asia, the drop in population in South Korea and Japanis projected to be even bigger. This is due to women having more choices in life and choosing to have fewer children. It is an ideal situation because fewer children per family means a better upbringing for them; women are happier, and no one need be dragooned into having children when they don’t want them. If you follow the UN projections of population growth, you can see that even in the most pessimistic scenario the fertility rate of the world would be at replacement level, even for the least developed countries, in less than a hundred years (2099). The population would have stabilized, with birth and deaths being approximately equal. But of course the actual numbers of people on this earth could be as many as 15 billion by then, so we are reducing our numbers by too little and too late. No one thinks 15 billion would be sustainable.

Despite the drop in fertility rates, the population is still increasing because people are also living much longer, so the number of deaths has been decreasing. Our health has improved immensely due to higher standards of living, better diet, better treatment of sewage, fewer infections and much better treatment with all the advances of modern medicine. Old people do not reproduce but they certainly consume – often in a big way. So the effect on our climate and resources will still be unsupportable.

The main danger at the moment as we all know, is global warming due to rising amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. We have to reduce our consumption now and change our ways right now in order to safeguard our environment. We need to turn to renewables instead of burning fossil fuels, eat less meat, stop using plastic – all these things which have had such a bad effect on our planet, and the other living organisms, which share our planet with us. But don’t think we in the rich world don’t have to reduce our population even further.  Each extra child in the west will consume  more than 12 times  the  earth’s resources than a child in a developing country.

The changes we have to make will have consequences for our prosperity and our economic system, because that depends on growth and increased consumption. We have to work towards a stable system, and this is likely to mean reducing the huge profits that are made by the few at the moment, and find ways of managing the economic consequences. Otherwise we will destabilize the natural world so that extinctions of plants and animals continue inexorably; and we will pollute the land, the oceans and our atmospheres so that our children and grandchildren will inherit a terrible legacy. So if people in the wealthy countries don’t also reduce their fertility rates even more, there is very little chance of saving the planet and our descendants. Social attitudes help; people without children are no longer considered odd or selfish, although many feel pressurized by parents to have grandchildren.

What about other parts of the world especially those that haven’t so far enjoyed the benefits which the rich world has had for many centuries? Looking at Asia, India and China are the two countries with the biggest populations; China is the biggest but India is forecast to overtake it in the next five years. China of course had its “one child policy” – which was supported by over 70% of Chinese people, but was much criticized in the rest of the world. (Actually over 50% of couples were allowed two children so it wasn’t as draconian as we thought). It is said that China’s low fertility was achieved two or three decades earlier than would be expected given its level of development, and that more than 500 million births were prevented between 1970 and 2015, some 400 million of which may have been due to one-child restrictions. In addition, by 2060 China’s birth planning policies may have averted the births of as many as 1 billion people in China when one adds in all the eliminated descendants of the births originally averted by the policies. So we do have to thank China, though no one now wants to be – or perhaps needs to be – quite as draconian as that. There is no doubt that the improvement in China’s economy has been dramatic since they also embraced the market instead of using a state directed economy.

India has a higher fertility rate overall than China, America or Europe and so is projected to be the most populous country in the world in the next 10 years. India is a huge heterogeneous country, and there is a vast difference between educated city dwellers where women have fewer than 1.5 children on average, and some rural illiterate populations which still have more than four children. The key here, as in all areas, is education of women, and this is rapidly improving in India, but its neighbour, Pakistan, has a population growth completely out of control, with dire consequences for water, food sustainability and risk of war over resources. Its government is belatedly, recognizing that and trying to do something about it. Bangladesh however with a similar mix of people has made great strides in enabling women to control their family sizes and now has a fertility rate of 2.1 down from 6.6 in 1960, due to education and availability of birth control.

Then there are the countries of the Middle East.
They have a different mindset. They are, like Pakistan, in the grip of fundamentalist religious teaching, which at bottom seems to me to be based on getting demographic advantage, as it was undoubtedly so in Old Testament times. The age old imperative – go forth and multiply – is still at the root of religious teaching, It is interesting to note that before the advent of oil wealth, Islam as a religion was much more tolerant. It was Saudi Arabia which used its wealth to promote its particular hard line Wahhabism. Iran, which until recently could be commended for its success in educating girls to the point that they too wanted fewer children and the fertility rate dropped, is now trying to compel women to have more children. Thy think it is a way to increase the population at a time when Iran is surrounded by Sunni Muslim countries which are increasingly hostile, and are themselves increasing their populations – although it has to be said that this is as much as a result of immigration from poor countries as increased indigenous fertility rates. Yet the middle East is arid and becoming even drier, and their consumption of energy, mostly oil, is huge as they have so much of it. Using air conditioning is even more energy intensive than heating homes. There were many causes of the war in Syria but climate change and lack of water, partly as a result of damming rivers for agriculture further up, led to a rise in young men from farming areas pouring into the cities and finding no work.
Another case in point is poor, suffering Gaza. It is the third most populated country in the world (after small rich countries like Hong Kong, and Monaco) yet contraception is illegal and in 2014 had an annual population growth rate of 2.91%, the 13th highest in the world. Most people blame this on Israel, which is of course responsible for the fighting and the economic blockade and for the fact that people cannot leave. But even so, how can you justify forbidding contraception on religious grounds in such a situation? Historically people in Palestine wanted to make sure they outnumbered Jews so that they would ultimately inherit the land. It was also the country that gave women almost no rights. Though literacy is now high in Gaza and Palestine, thanks to the UN, girls still cannot choose how many children they can have. There seems no way out – if modern religions insist on fighting to get more and more followers regardless of the well-being of our shared planet then fight to the death they will – our deaths.

Other regions where things also look bad are South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. South America is suffering already from poverty, water shortages, and farmers can no longer make a living. It is difficult for governments to make a difference, and many are totally corrupt anyway. Hence the migration towards the Mexican border. Africa is experiencing a population boom, and this is what is striking fear into European and Western hearts. It isn’t only racists who don’t like this idea; lots of people don’t necessarily like the idea of people so different from them taking over the population growth. Culture does matter.

But the effect of extra people in South America and Africa on global warming and the Earth’s survival on will be small, initially at least. Burning of fossil fuels causes global warming and all the associated dangers, and even in the big African cities, fossil fuel use is low. But even now many poor people in some parts of Africa feel that they have no hope of a decent life, and have fallen victim to organized gangs of people traffickers and try to come to Europe. Fortunately countries bordering the Sahara have now clamped down on the people smugglers and the flow of people northward has slowed to a trickle. But the fertility rates in many central African countries are sky high. All attempts to try to improve their standards of living founder on this. If you manage improve the yield of agriculture by 50 % (by technology for instance) you still can’t feed people if they reproduce by 200%. In many areas women still don’t have access to contraception. But even when they do, it is often not used . Why?

Historically population in Africa has been very slow to rise, compared with Asia. East Asia was the first area to increase rapidly in population, in the centuries before Christ, presumably because climate supported agriculture. Europe’s population increase came much later and is still way below Asia’s. But after the industrial revolution Europe’s population began to rise, and colonization of Africa (and the rest of the world) began. But Africa’s total population was still way behind, and it is only in the last 50 years that the massive rise in population has happened. Why did it take so long? Colonization, disease prevalence, slavery, theft of resources, subjugation as well as difficult climatic conditions all contributed to slow growth of populations in Africa.
Now the huge child mortality that was common in Africa has been reduced, due to higher standards of living and modern medicine, and the population has finally risen. You can understand why people who have lived with such high infant mortality rates (as well as high rates of maternity deaths) for so long would have a culture of wanting more babies, and resistance to contraception. Reliable contraception has only been available for 60 years, and it has taken some time for contraception to be used widely. There is still determined resistance to it in educated affluent societies, driven mostly by religious beliefs, so one can understand how people in rural and traditional societies which have never even thought of contraception because so few children survive anyway. distrust it. And these populations are poor, and depend on their children to support them in their old age. No wonder they see contraception as a trick by the West to try to exterminate them. Religion holds things back here too. The Catholic church has a lot to answer for, although it has to be said that more and more Catholics show a very healthy distrust of its teaching and the fertility rate has fallen all over some areas of Africa and South America as a result of education. We need a wholesale and determined effort to educate girls in Africa. This is the tried and tested way of reducing fertility and allowing standards of living to rise. With pro-natalist policies in America and other countries now it gets harder to provide the resources to do this but a determined effort needs to be made by world governments and charities to do this. Our survival depends on it.

If the modern western countries do achieve the goal of reducing their populations by natural means, and also manage to reduce consumption so that the world does not totally fry in the next 50 years, what happens next? At present people in rural Africa and South America contribute virtually nothing to global warming, however many children they have. The wealthy North has produced it all. Perhaps these under-developed countries could grow gradually wealthier by using solar and wind power, bypassing the terrible effects of coal and oil consumption, now that the technology is there. And they do show signs of doing just that. And natural justice should mean that underdeveloped countries should themselves get the chance to get wealthy enough to voluntarily use contraception to reduce their populations to a sustainable level. Many economists argue that there is a demographic dividend in those countries in Africa with a very large youth bulge due to high fertility rates, and this would kick start economic growth But a demographic dividend for the economy is not just the number of workers, but how educated they are. If a worker cannot read what job can he do? Fewer children means higher education spending on each child, which leads to a higher education level.

But as such countries get richer, as one would hope, the existing population would impact even more on their local environment and wildlife, and there would still be problems of water shortage in most areas. And if global warming then makes their agriculture unsustainable, then this extra glut of young people will not be able to survive, let alone reach their potential. There is already a threat of mass migration of people from very poor countries leading to loss of the brightest and best, further diminishing chances of a better life locally. If large number of these young people do reach the west and manage to increase their prosperity their extra consumption will of course further exacerbate global warming.

So, now at a pivotal point in our planet’s history, with global warming threatening to engulf everyone, we have Europe and most of its diaspora (USA Australia etc.) in a demographic clash with Africa and South America; with so many countries doing their best to try to stop the tide of humanity rushing towards them to escape poverty and stagnation.

I do totally understand why Europeans are not very keen on welcoming millions of poor people from sub Saharan Africa. Germany is to be commended by admitting 1m Syrians, but they are educated people fleeing a dreadful war caused mostly by wealthy rulers, (including western meddling), and by climate change as drought increases in the middle east due to population increases there. And Germany has been successful, by and large; but look how that was viewed and how it has led to the rise of populism and the far right. Racial differences may things worse, and some European people feel totally threatened by these immigrants; in the USA as well, where Donald Trump has stopped the government functioning in order to bring about a huge wall. In the long run Africa has to become a place where its population wants to stay.

Nobody knows if civilization as we know it, will survive through the next 50 years. But these actions might help.
1. Provide free contraception throughout the world, giving long acting contraceptive implants to every woman who wants it (and is allowed it by their society) but prioritizing young girls who have not yet got pregnant. If you can give them 5 years to grow up and get educated then they will know when they are ready to have children, who will in turn be healthier and more intelligent. Early marriage should not be tolerated.
2. A drive to allow women to choose and to decrease the power of male dominated religions (we all know which they are). Buddhism has an excellent record of tolerating women’s choice. If procreation strains the ability of resources to support life, then procreation is against the basic principles of Buddha.
3. Big corporations should be forced by their shareholders and governments to improve the welfare of their workers in poor countries so that fewer feel the need to leave.
4. Wildlife and rainforests should be protected until such time as the pressures of diminishing space and resources can be reduced
5. A total drive to eliminate fossil fuels and to switch to renewable energy all over the world including poor countries which can then leap frog over rich countries in developing technology.

I think it is very possible that we will continue to reduce our fertility with beneficial effects on consumption. Those countries which want to maximize the demographic advantage, usually for political reasons, have a hard time of it. South Korea is trying to boost its fertility rate but failing; Japan has probably given up and is adjusting to the economics of “steady state” consumption. Germany has also given up the struggle and that is probably why they could countenance welcoming 1 million refugees. For the world as a whole, we need to understand that people are not special in any way, except for the damage we can cause. We don’t need to go forth and multiply any more – that has been done. Human life is not sacred. When we have had enough of living, or are ill, or feel guilty at being a burden, we should be able to make a mature decision to end our lives.

The alternative to lowering fertility and consumption is hardly something we can contemplate.