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Population Growth and Climate Change
Statement by the Optimum Population Trust July 2009
1. Background Facts:
All environmental problems, and notably those arising from climate change, would be easier to solve with a smaller future population.
Population restraint in rich countries and communities would reduce the future number of major carbon emitters (who will also be victims). Restraint in poor countries and communities would reduce the number of minor emitters and likely major victims. The gap between the extremes of the UN (2008) population range for 2050 is 3 billion people. Current trends, with less aid for family planning, point towards the higher end - 11 bn with no change in fertility; (the UN median projection, at 9.2 bn, assumes a considerable reduction). Just meeting known, unmet need for family planning services, however, would point them near the lower end - 8 bn.
The recent Global Humanitarian Forum on the Human Impact of Climate Change in Geneva accepted OPT's position that population growth is a major environmental problem, making equitable mitigation and adaptation policies harder - and ultimately impossible - to solve.
2. OPT recommends that climate change negotiators:
a) recognise that population restraint is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the solution of the problems caused by climate change;
b) accept the need for all countries to adopt non-coercive population policies;
c) accept programmes to implement such policies in poorer countries as legitimate candidates for climate change funding;
d) give immediate priority to meeting the existing unmet demand for family reproductive health care in the poorest countries;
e) recognise that programmes educating and empowering women to control their own fertility are also essential for the success of population restraint programmes;
f) take account of the major humanitarian benefit of lower fertility in relieving the suffering of many of the poorest women and children in the world.
3. OPT also recommends:
That the principle of "contraction and convergence" (rich and poor converging towards a common per person emissions target) be accepted as an equitable starting point for distributing total tolerable carbon emissions, provided that this is allocated to states on the basis of their population size at a specific date. This would encourage the adoption of population restraint policies; whereas allocation on a simple per person criterion would encourage continued population growth, thus continuously reducing every person's carbon entitlement.
"Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race..." UNICEF Report 1992.
www.optimumpopulation.org July 2009
This statement is endorsed by OPT Patrons: Sir David Attenborough; Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta; Professor Paul Ehrlich; Professor John Guillebaud; James Lovelock; Professor Aubrey Manning; Sara Parkin; Jonathon Porritt; and OPT supporter Dr. Chris Rapley.