Michael P. Cameron has previously received funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment for research on the effects of climate change on population in New Zealand. Population growth plays a role in environmental damage and climate change.
But addressing climate change through either reducing or reversing growth in population raises difficult moral questions that most people would prefer to avoid having to answer. The English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus laid out a compelling argument against overpopulation in his famous book, An Essay on the Principle of Population.
He argued that increases in food production improved human wellbeing only temporarily. The population would respond to greater wellbeing by having more children, increasing population growth and eventually over-running the food supply, leading to famine.
But his essay could not have been timed worse, coming near the beginning of the longest period of sustained global population growth in history. This was driven in part by vast improvements in agricultural productivity over time. Read more: Worried about Earth's future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists can grasp.
This idea of hard environmental limits to population growth was resurrected in the 20th century in publications such as The Population Bomb , a book by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich , and The Limits to Growth , a publication commissioned by the Club of Rome think-tank. Not all of the factors are equally easy to affect though. Needless to say, that is not how things work in the real world. Avoiding unintended pregnancies is difficult even for women who use relatively effective methods and as a result, tens of millions of such pregnancies occur each year.
Happily, the accumulating evidence of plummeting birth rates in a few countries such as Ethiopia and Rwanda has now largely persuaded policymakers of the cost-effectiveness of these programmes 9. Religious and political opposition persists. To reduce rapid population growth and high birth rates, it is essential to start with a clear objective: within a decade, women everywhere should have access to quality contraceptive services. Even in rural areas of poor countries, women should have the choice of multiple contraceptive methods — including not only pills, injectables and barrier methods, but also long-acting methods such as intrauterine devices and systems IUDs and IUSs , implants and sterilization.
Where legal, safe abortion services should be made available. Other obstacles to contraceptive use, such as incorrect rumours about side effects and conservative social attitudes, should be addressed by the education of women and men, media campaigns and collaboration with community leaders. These efforts can be led by governments but better results are obtained when services are distributed through multiple channels, including private commercial providers and non-governmental organizations.
Importantly, coercion of any kind should be ruled out. Women and men have the right to decide freely on the number, timing and spacing of children, and on the means to achieve their reproductive goals. Achieving these aims requires substantially more resources than are available now. Funds are needed to build and equip clinics, to train and pay providers and to subsidize the direct cost of methods and services that are out of the reach of too many poor people. Over the past decade, investments in the developing world have risen, especially after the London Summit on Family Planning, at which many donors and governments renewed or increased their commitments.
This amount is inadequate; in too many countries, programmes remain weak and political commitment is lacking. Such a doubling of funding will be more than repaid by savings in other sectors such as education and health care in future years. The final, crucial ingredient for success is political will and a commitment to family planning at the highest levels of national and international policymaking.
A fundamental reason for the low priority assigned to the issue is that it is considered a health and human-rights problem. Hence, family planning is part of the health budgets of donors and the responsibility for family-planning programmes is assigned to ministers of health throughout the developing world. Most poor countries are battling a range of diseases, and family planning is often not seen as a high health priority. From a broader development perspective, the low priority is nonsensical.
Several actions would remedy this situation. At the international level, development agencies and donors should hire more population experts the World Bank, for example, employs thousands of economists but only a few demographers. These organizations write hundreds of reports on every dimension of development, yet only a fraction comment on population trends. Such reports should include a discussion of the role of demographic shifts in relevant sectors, of the development benefits of reduced birth rates and of the options available to change these trends.
At the national level, similar changes are needed. Typically, population trends are noted in government plans but are considered immutable and therefore of little interest. Ministries of finance or planning commissions often make detailed projections for specific sectors but rarely examine alternative population trajectories. They should. Economists at the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank, last year ranked family planning as one of the most cost-effective development interventions see go.
Family planning must be reclassified as a development intervention as well as being a health and human-rights intervention to give it the high national and global priority it deserves. This would lead to a more cost-effective use of scarce development resources, and to more rapid growth in living standards in poor countries. The median age of populations is rising, especially in the developed world, as a consequence of lower birth rates and rising lifespans. Europe and Japan now host the highest proportion of people aged over Further increase in this proportion is expected, putting enormous pressure on pension and health-care systems, and slowing economic growth.
The flow of people from poor and war-torn countries and continents to nearby developed ones for example, from Africa and the Middle East to Europe is rising. The tension this creates will grow as populations in poor countries rise, and while the economic disparities between sending and receiving countries remain large.
Low birth rate. In most developed countries and in a growing number of Asian and Latin American nations, women are having fewer than two children each — the level needed for long-term population stability. This causes population ageing and decline for example, the populations of Eastern Europe and Japan will probably shrink by more than one-third by The near-absence of children to provide support will make life difficult for the elderly in countries where societal safety nets are weak such as China.
Missing women. There are million fewer women than naturally expected owing to sex-selective abortion and greater female mortality throughout life for example, from female infanticide. In the past two decades, the number of such abortions has risen to about 1. These statistics document the widespread gender discrimination that still exists in many countries.
An excess of single men may lead to social unrest and trafficking in women and girls. Environmental degradation. Unprecedented global threats such as climate change and decreasing biodiversity have been building and will become more severe as populations, economies and consumption grow. Crucial local environmental problems — including shortages of fresh water and arable land, mounting waste, and air, water and soil pollution — adversely affect health and threaten the expansion of food production required to feed more people a better diet.
Economic stagnation. In poor societies, populations often double in size in two or three decades. Industries, offices, housing, schools, health clinics and infrastructure must be built at least at the same rate. Many communities are unable to keep up — as is evident from high unemployment rates, explosive growth of slum populations, overcrowded schools and health facilities and dilapidated public infrastructure such as roads, sewage systems and power grids. Furthermore, in rapidly growing regions, about half 1 of the population is aged under The low ratio of workers to dependents depresses living standards and makes it more difficult to invest in the physical and human capital needed.
The size of the formal labour force is also limited when women remain at home to care for large families. Maternal mortality. High birth rates mean frequent childbearing. Each pregnancy is associated with a risk of death or disability, and this is highest in countries with weak health-care systems.
For example, in the poorest countries of West Africa, a woman's risk of dying in childbirth before the end of her reproductive years is about 1 in The remark, connecting abortion with population control, caused an uproar. It should be noted that Sanders did not mention or advocate coerced family planning. These concerns about population are not new, of course. The population at the time had not yet reached a billion. To be fair to Malthus, the world did eventually experience a population explosion in the 20th century—reaching 1.
Always remember that more people doesn't just mean more mouths to feed, it also means more minds to create and more hands to build Global population is now seven times where it was when Malthus wrote his essay, and yet in the last 30 years alone, we have cut extreme poverty in half.
Fewer people are dying today of starvation than ever. Per capita income is higher, child labor is down. It turns out the main problem was never that the world was "overpopulated," but that its people were never free enough to create wealth, and when they did create something valuable they weren't allowed to keep it.
These considerations will not close the door on population debates, of course. However, contemporary debates often overlook an important fact: global population growth is already declining, and rather rapidly.
0コメント