By Richard Heinberg, originally published by Resilience.org
March 25, 2024
In February, I interviewed biochemist Chris Bystroff, whose peer-reviewed analysis suggests that world population is now peaking. I wanted a contrasting view on the matter, so I reached out to my friend Jane O’Sullivan, an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland and author of the paper, “Demographic Delusions: World Population Growth Is Exceeding Most Projections and Jeopardising Scenarios for Sustainable Futures.” Dr. O’Sullivan has been active in debates about overpopulation in Australia and the world for many years, as both an analyst and an activist.
Richard: Fertility rates are declining sharply in OECD countries, and China’s population is now dropping rapidly. Is world population growth in the rear-view mirror, a problem we no longer have to worry about?
Jane: “Declining sharply” and “dropping rapidly” are emotive terms that exaggerate the trends and distract from the far more rapid growth elsewhere. Globally we increase by somewhere between 70 million and 90 million annually, and that pace has been unrelenting for more than 40 years. We don’t have hard evidence that the curve has started to bend, let alone that it is on track to peak any time soon. So, the problem hasn’t gone away, and the impacts of the human population get more serious and intractable every year.
It’s important because there are things we could do, that we know work because many countries did them in the past, and that we’re not doing now. Not doing them is leaving hundreds of millions of women who want to avoid pregnancy without the services and means to do it. It is condemning their children to a world of increasing competition and diminishing opportunities, if not outright collapse of civil order.
What we’re not doing is sufficient provision and promotion of voluntary family planning. We’re not doing it because we have been taught, since the mid-1990s, that expressing concern about population growth will harm the people in high-fertility countries, as if all birth control programs involve forced sterilisations (very few did) and as if they’d be worse off with fewer children or siblings (they’re much better off). The hopeful myth was that women would get better services, and fertility would fall faster, if we only championed their rights and shut up about population. But the opposite happened: without the motivation to reduce population growth for the sake of economic development, the funding and policy support for family planning plummeted, and women were left worse off.
As a consequence, fertility declines slowed or stalled in many countries, but the projections haven’t adequately factored this in. In your recent interview with Chris Bystroff, he suggested world population could have peaked already, with birth rates much lower than the UN believes. In fact, the evidence all points in the opposite direction: that the UN has been over-anticipating fertility decline and underestimating population growth.
Every two or three years, the UN publishes an update of their population estimates and projections. Almost every update this century has revised the world population upward. Their mid-2022 release estimated the mid-2022 population to be 7.975 billion. This was 21 million higher than their 2019 projection anticipated it would be, despite more than 15 million unanticipated deaths due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It was 177 million more than the 2010 projection expected, and 253 million people more than was projected in 2000. Despite their consistent underestimation of growth, their model continues to assume all high-fertility countries are experiencing rapid fertility decline, even though their historical data show they haven’t.
Other research groups that attempt global population projections include Wittgenstein Centre in Austria, whose projections are used in climate change mitigation models. They anticipate faster and deeper fertility declines than the UN. History is proving them to be more wrong than the UN. This is worrying when all modeled scenarios that keep climate change below 2oC depend on world population growth quickly tapering off, without including any measures to help it do that.
However, the lower projections get a lot of support in the media because it is what people want to believe. They want to be reassured that doing nothing about population growth is safe and sufficient. So, they cling to myths and misrepresentations that fertility is “plummeting” everywhere and China’s population is “collapsing.”
China’s population fell by about 0.14% last year. It is absurd to regarded this as a “rapid” decline when 2.9% growth in Canada is presented as unproblematic. Growth is much more costly than shrinkage, economically, socially, and environmentally.
Richard: What are the implications for the non-OECD countries that still suffer high rates of population growth? And how could their problems spill over into the rest of the world?
Jane: The main implication is that they are stuck in a poverty trap that can only get worse. Back in the 1960s, when developing country population growth started to gather pace due to better health care, it was obvious to everyone that this would impede development. Everything you do is just running to keep pace, rather than getting ahead. You can improve farm yields, but the farmers’ kids get less land each or become landless. When they flock to the towns and cities, there are not enough jobs for them, and it’s impossible to house them decently. You struggle to improve education if you have to double school capacity every couple of decades. The situation breeds crime and violence, which makes good governance impossible and political instability virtually inevitable. ...
Read more: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-03-25/overpopulation-is-still-a-huge-problem-an-interview-with-jane-osullivan/