Recently there was a long discussion of whether ecologists are the problem,
and a few posters pointed out that the biggest problem is overpopulation.
There was not much discussion of this, as it is a hrad problem to solve, it
is easier to get rid of ecologists. However the following Economist article
is quite intriguing.
Bill Silvert
Green.view
Fewer feet, smaller footprint
Sep 21st 2009
From Economist.com
A world with fewer people would emit less greenhouse gases
FAMILY planning is five times cheaper than conventional green technologies
in combating climate change. That is the claim made by Thomas Wire, a
postgraduate student at the London School of Economics, and highlighted by
British medics writing in the Lancet on September 19th.
Ever since Thomas Malthus, an English economist, published his essay on the
principle of population in 1798, people have been concerned about population
growth. Sir Julian Huxley, the first director general of the United Nations
Education, Science and Cultural Organisation when it was established in
1945, remarked that death control made birth control a moral imperative. Sir
Julian went on to play a role in establishing what was then the World
Wildlife Fund, a nature conservation agency, linking population growth to
environmental degradation.
According to Roger Short of the University of Melbourne, the world's
population is 6.8 billion and is expected to reach 9.1 billion by 2050. Some
95% of this growth is occurring in developing countries. In a paper
published on September 21st in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society B, he points out that fewer people would produce less
climate-changing greenhouse gas.
A companion study published in the same issue by Malcolm Potts of the
University of California, Berkeley, reckons that there are 80m unintended
pregnancies every year. The vast majority of these result in babies. If
women who wanted contraception were provided with it, 72% of these
unintended pregancies would have been prevented, according to a report by
the United Nations Population Fund called "Adding it Up: the Benefits of
Investing in Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare".
The study by Mr Wire was commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust, a
British environmental charity. It examined the cost-effectiveness of
providing global access to family planning between 2010 and 2050. Mr Wire
totted up the cost of supplying contraception to women who wished either to
delay their childbearing years or to end them artificially but who were not
using contraception. He examined projections of population growth and of
carbon-dioxide emissions made by the United Nations and concluded that
reducing carbon emissions by one tonne would cost just $7 spent on family
planning, as opposed to at least $32 spent on green technologies.
Mr Wire points out that if all women who wanted contraception were provided
with it, it would prevent the release of 34 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide
between 2010 and 2050. Given the myriad of other reasons to limit human
fertility (Dr Potts notes, for example, that slowing population growth is
essential if poverty is to be eradicated), your correspondent cannot help
but commend the report to mandarins meeting in Bangkok on September 28th to
discuss the forthcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in
Copenhagen.
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights
reserved.
