The Population Bust Won't Solve the Climate Crisis
We've all heard that human overpopulation is a crisis. In 2017, Bill Nye warned us about the planet's 'people problem,' and that same decade David Attenborough told us that 'we are a plague on the Earth.' Project Drawdown, an environmental nonprofit, lists slower population growth among its top climate solutions.
And now, fertility rates everywhere are falling.
In most of the world, the birthrate is already below the average of two births per two adults needed to stabilize the population. By the 2080s, according to United Nations projections, the global population will be declining. Then change could come fast: a population that shrinks by two-thirds each century. That's what would happen in a future in which, for every two adults, there were 1.5 kids.
Depopulation might seem welcome. It is true that people caused today's environmental problems. And it is right to prioritize the challenges of climate change, global poverty and inequality. In our careers, we've worked for aggressive decarbonization, reproductive freedom, caste and gender equity and better public health and health care. But falling birthrates are not the answer to our world's problems. Confronting climate change requires that billions of people live differently. It does not require that billions of future people never live.
Over the past few decades, there has been important progress on environmental priorities like particulate air pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion and acid rain. In each case, progress came from ending or changing the destructive activity part of people's destructive activity. Not the people part.
Take China's smog crisis. In 2013, with the country's population growing and economy industrializing, particulate air pollution from fires, coal plants and vehicles darkened the sky. Newspapers around the world called it the 'airpocalypse.' The U.S. Embassy gave the air quality in central Beijing a rating of 755 — on an air quality scale that ran from 0 to 500.
In the decade that followed, China grew by roughly 50 million people — more than the entire population of Canada. But air pollution didn't scale up as the population grew; it declined by half. Leaders and the public in China decided that the smog was unacceptable. The authorities put into effect new regulations and requirements on coal-fired power plants and heavy industry. The government devoted new resources to monitoring and enforcement. Many polluting factories and power plants adopted cleaner technologies already in use elsewhere. Others were shut down.
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