I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch ofemails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has justpushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Programmeis struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief (1). Sowhy, like most environmentalists, won't I mention the p-word? According to itsmost vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Erlich), population is "ournumber one environmental problem" (2). But most greens will not discuss it.
Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both. Population growthhas always been politically charged, and always the fault of someone else.Seldom has the complaint been heard that "people like us are breeding toofast." For the prosperous clergyman Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, theproblem arose from the fecklessness of the labouring classes(3). Through the19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists warned that white people would beoutbred. In rich nations in the 1970s the issue was overemphasised, as it is theone environmental problem for which poor nations are largely to blame. But thequestion still needs to be answered. Is population really our number oneenvironmental problem?
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The Optimum Population Trust cites some shocking figures, produced by the UN.They show that if the global population keeps growing at current rates, it willreach 134 trillion by 2300(4). This is plainly ridiculous: no one expects it tohappen. In 2005, the UN estimated that the world's population will more or lessstabilise in 2200 at 10 billion(5). But a paper published in Nature lastweek suggests that that there is an 88% chance that global population growthwill end during this century(6).
In other words, if we accept the UN's projection, the global population willgrow by roughly 50% and then stop. This means it will become 50% harder to stoprunaway climate change, 50% harder to feed the world, 50% harder to prevent theoveruse of resources. But compare this rate of increase to the rate of economicgrowth. Many economists predict that, occasional recessions notwithstanding, theglobal economy will grow by about 3% a year this century. Governments will doall they can to prove them right. A steady growth rate of 3% means a doubling ofeconomic activity every 23 years. By 2100, in other words, global consumptionwill increase by roughly 1600%. As the equations produced by Professor RoderickSmith of Imperial College have shown, this means that in the 21st Century wewill have used 16 times as many economic resources as human beings have consumedsince we came down from the trees(7).
So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issueas population growth. And, if governments, banks and businesses have their way,it never stops. By 2115, the cumulative total rises to 3200%, by 2138 to 6400%.As resources are finite, this is of course impossible, but it is not hard to seethat rising economic activity - not human numbers - is the immediate andoverwhelming threat.
Those who emphasise the dangers of population growth maintain that times havechanged: they are not concerned only with population growth in the poor world,but primarily with growth in the rich world, where people consume much more. TheOptimum Population Trust (OPT) maintains that the "global environmentalimpact of an inhabitant of Bangladesh … will increase by a factor of 16 if heor she emigrates to the USA"(8). This is surely not quite true, as recentimmigrants tend to be poorer than the native population, but the general pointstands: population growth in the rich world, largely driven by immigration, ismore environmentally damaging than population growth in the poor world. In theUS and the UK, their ecological impact has become another stick with whichimmigrants can be beaten.
But growth rates in the US and UK are atypical; even the OPT concedes that by2050, "the population of the most developed countries is expected to remainalmost unchanged, at 1.2 billion"(9). The population of the EU-25 (thefirst 25 nations to join the Union) is likely to decline by 7 million(10).
This, I accept, is of little consolation to people in the UK, where thegovernment now expects numbers to rise from 61 million to 77 million by2051(11). Eighty per cent of the growth here, according to the OPT, is thedirect or indirect result of immigration (recent arrivals tend to produce morechildren)(12). Migrationwatch UK claims that immigrants bear much of theresponsibility for Britain's housing crisis. A graph on its website suggeststhat without them the rate of housebuilding in England between 1997 and 2004would have exceeded new households by 30-40,000 a year(13).
Is this true? According to the Office of National Statistics, average netimmigration to the UK between 1997 and 2004 was 153,000(14). Let us (generously)assume that 90% of these people settled in England, and that their householdsize corresponded to the average for 2004, of 2.3(15). This would mean that newimmigrants formed 60,000 households a year. The Barker Review, commissioned bythe Treasury, shows that in 2002 (the nearest available year), 138,000 houseswere built in England, while over the 10 years to 2000, average householdformation was 196,000(16). This rough calculation suggests that Migrationwatchis exaggerating, but that immigration is still an important contributor tohousing pressure. But even total population growth in England is responsible foronly about 35% of the demand for homes(17). Most of the rest is the result ofthe diminishing size of households.
Surely there is one respect in which the growing human population constitutesthe primary threat? The amount of food the world eats bears a directrelationship to the number of mouths. After years of glut, the storerooms aresuddenly empty and grain prices are rocketing. How will another three billion befed?
Even here, however, population growth is not the most immediate issue: anothersector is expanding much faster. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisationexpects that global meat production will double by 2050 (growing, in otherwords, at two and a half times the rate of human numbers)(18). The supply ofmeat has already tripled since 1980: farm animals now take up 70% of allagricultural land (19) and eat one third of the world's grain(20). In the richnations we consume three times as much meat and four times as much milk percapita as the people of the poor world(21). While human population growth is oneof the factors that could contribute to a global food deficit, it is not themost urgent.
None of this means that we should forget about it. Even if there were noenvironmental pressures caused by population growth, we should still support themeasures required to tackle it: universal sex education, universal access tocontraceptives, better schooling and opportunities for poor women. Stabilisingor even reducing the human population would ameliorate almost all environmentalimpacts. But to suggest, as many of my correspondents do, that population growthis largely responsible for the ecological crisis is to blame the poor for theexcesses of the rich.
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References:
1. A WFP official, speaking at the World Economic Forum, cited by Gillian Tettand Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, 26th January 2008. Food supplies too scarce tomeet relief needs. The Financial Times.
2. Paul and Anne Ehrlich, 1990. The Population Explosion. Simon and Schuster,New York, 1990.
3. Thomas Malthus, 1798. Essay on the Principle of Population.
4. Optimum Population Trust, 2007. Toomany people: Earth's population problem
5. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2005. World PopulationProspects. The2004
Revision.
6. Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov, 20th January 2008. Thecoming acceleration of global population ageing. Nature.doi:10.1038/nature06516
7. Roderick A Smith, 29th May 2007. Lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering.Carpe Diem: The dangers of risk aversion. See Appendix 1. Reprinted in CivilEngineering Surveyor, October 2007.
8. Optimum Population Trust, 30th May 2006. Mass migration damaging the planet. Pressrelease.
9. Optimum Population Trust, 2007. Too many people: Earth'spopulation problem
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10. ibid.
11. BBC Online, 23rd October 2007. Population‘to hit 65m by 2016′.
12. Optimum Population Trust, 2007. Migration:UK.
13. Migrationwatch UK, 13th June 2006. Briefing paper 7.7: Theimpact of immigration on housing demand.
14. ONS, cited by Optimum Population Trust, 2007. Migration:UK.
15. Kate Barker, March 2004. Final report of Delivering stability: securing ourfuture housing needs. Chart1.3, p16.
16. Kate Barker, ibid, p16.
17. Population trends for England can be found here:As only some years are given, I took the average growth rate over 1991-2001,divided it by 2.3 and then expressed it as a percentage of total housing demandin 2000.
18. UNFAO, 2006. Livestock'sLong Shadow, pxx.
19. ibid, pxxi.
20. ibid, p12.
21. ibid, Table 1.5, p15.
