Policy Series – II

Continuing our little series looking at some examples of 'population management' policies, today's one is SOUTH KOREA.

Like in Europe and the West previously, South Korea and a lot of developing countries experienced a rapid fall in death rates but no fall in births, resulting in massive population growth after WWII. So in 1962 they began a family planning campaign which focussed on education, maternal and child health services, and the provision of family planning supplies (e.g. contraception) and services. This was all in order to achieve 'modernisation' and of course economic growth.

top image: from 1974: "sons or daughter, let's have two children and raise them well";
bottom image: from 1981: "even two children per family are too crowded for our tiny country"

In fact, it worked so well that by the 1980s the total fertility rate had fallen below replacement level (below 2.1). So, the population began to age significantly and this put pressure on social services like the pension scheme. By 2005, the government had turned pro-natalist, with incentives like tax incentives, child care and assistance to infertile couples.

Once again, this makes you think of the different and sometimes conflicting consequences of population size and structure. What might be better for the environment – to have smaller populations – often causes stress to social and economic systems put in place for the human population. The question is really do we have the right to manipulate human activity and populations for our own, medium-term gain when this might be causing long-term damage to the global ecosystem?

Environmental Kuznets Curve

Something which I came across recently, which I have to say I hadn't heard of before, is the Environmental Kuznets Curve. The idea is quite straightforward: as income increases, environmental quality deteriorates as there is industrialisation until it reaches some income level or 'turning point', After this environmental pressures begin to lift. This creates an inverted U-shaped relationship between pollutants and per capita income (see below). This (according to Dinda, 2004) is for 2 reasons:

1. After the shift from a clean, agrarian economy to a polluting, industrial one, there is a further move to a clean service economy;
2. People with higher incomes tend to (and are able to) have higher preferences for environmental quality

source: Google images

This challenges the assumption (that I have made in previous posts) that as societies get richer and more people become consumers, environmental degradation worsens. Cropper and Griffiths (1994) examine the effect of population pressures on deforestation in developing countries and find that for example demand for fuelwood initially rises with income but then falls as more 'modern' sources of energy are used. They also find that the denser the population, the higher the income needed to 'offset' its effect on deforestation.

There are some issues I found with it and some that in fact Dinda (2004) does address towards the end of her article. Firstly, for this to work at a global scale – to combat climate change – we'd have to get the entire Earth's population past this 'threshold' (the value of which incidentally no one can agree on) over to the high income end of the spectrum. Even if this were miraculously to happen, what if in the process of doing so, we cause irreversible damage; even if no one were polluting much by that point, that wouldn't help if our atmosphere were already clogged with CO2. Actually Dinda makes the point that most of the world's population would be going from the poor 'pre-industrial economies' to the middle-income 'industrial economies' section, which is when income growth will cause the most environmental damage. Also, Dinda points out that an inverted U-shaped curve is not found for all pollutants, and certainly only ones with short-terms costs, as opposed to stocks of waste or pollutants with long-term, more dispersed costs (like I mentioned above).

So even though it's a comforting idea, especially coupled with the fact that population growth is slowing down, in practice it's not that simple. I definitely wouldn't place all my eggs in that basket.

Policy Series - I

Even though this blog isn't necessarily about the policy side of the population growth 'issue', I still think it's important to take at least a brief look at it. It's all well discussing 'overpopulation' and deciding it is an issue (or conversely that there aren't enough births) , but what about the next steps? How does one (or the government that is) go about managing it?

So over the next few weeks I'm going to introduce a series of different examples of 'population management' policies from the past and present; the good, the bad and the ugly. This will hopefully convey some of the challenges that exist when dealing with such a sensitive issue, and how if handled the wrong way, what other social and economic problems can arise.

I'm going to jump right in with the most obvious: CHINA!

In 1979, the Chinese government introduced the 'family planning policy', more commonly known as the 'one child policy' to alleviate social, economic and environmental problems. If families had more than one child, they were heavily fined. According to government officials, it has prevented some 200-400million births although these figures are disputed. However, its 'success' has come with human rights concerns about its implementation (rumours of illegal forced abortion and sterilisation abound) and its social consequences (female infanticide and sex imbalance as male children are preferred). 

In November this year (2013), the policy was relaxed, allowing only child parents to have 2 children.

Read more about it here

Overpopulation is (apparently) not the Problem

Here is an article that appeared in the Opinion Pages of the NY Times, byErle C. Ellis, associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland:

'Overpopulation is not the Problem'

'There is no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the future. There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity – increasing land productivity using existing technologies can boost global supplies and even leave more land for nature – a goal that is both more popular and more possible than ever.

The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving towards a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it"

source: www.environmentalgraffiti.com

My question is would it really be a better Anthropocene, one where we have altered the natural environment beyond recognition just to satisfy our own growing needs? He says we can continue without using more land, but how much more productivity can we squeeze out of the land we already currently use? We've already had the Green Revolution, we already employ spectacular technology and genetics to get that bit extra per hectare and we already dowse our crops in fertiliser and pesticide. I don't understand how, in the context of a growing population and a growing number of consumers, one could think we wouldn't need more resources and more land.

The End of Population Growth

"There has been enormous concern about the consequences of human population growth for the environment and for social and economic development. But this growth is likely to come to and end in the foreseeable future"

This is taken from the first line of Lutz, Sanderson and Sherbov's 2001 'letter to Nature'. They used UN and US Census Bureau to create thousands of simulations in order to find trends in population growth and size and to determine about when our population will stop growing.

source: Lutz, Sanderson and Sherbov (2001)

What the graph above shows is the probability that the population will stop growing before a given date. So for example there's a 90% chance that population growth in the European former USSR will stop before 2050, whereas only less than 10% chance that will happen in Sub-Saharan Africa. In any case what this tells us is that there is an 85% chance that the world population will stop growing by the end of the century. 

The figure below shows when (and at what value) they project the world population size to peak, along with UN projections. They find that the median peak would be at 2070, with 9 billion people, after which it would begin to decline.

source: Lutz, Sanderson and Sherbov (2001)

So the main idea here is: why is everyone worrying so much about population growth when in less than 100 years our population won't even be growing anymore? The natural trend is for our population to peak and then stablise and even decline, ergo, population growth won't really be contributing anymore to environmental issues.

I suppose technically if our population stops growing by 2100, we will no longer be able to say 'right now' population growth is having negative effects on our environment, but that doesn't mean that it's not an issue in 2013 or that having a population of 9 billion doesn't have dangerous repercussions for the Earth systems. A lot can happen in 86 years and we already know (and I've already mentioned) that a lot of the current population that is 'poor' is expected to become a lot wealthier and we know what that means: more consumption. 

Something they did talk about which is worth mentioning here is the social and economic challenges that a stabilising and declining population has, the main issue being aging of course. I'll return to this topic though, it's a really important one because it brings up questions of how much the health of the environment matters, vs the social welfare of the human population, which is a tricky subject and not really the topic of this blog but everything is interlinked so I will no doubt write a post about it.

The Skeptical Environmentalist

I thought I would introduce a man who has quite infamously controversial views on the whole climate change (and thus population) debate: Bjørn Lomborg. He is not an environmental scientist and many are in turn skeptical about his statistical claims about human impact on the environment as being little more than 'manipulating the data'. This is why I'm just presenting him here with a few links to his work and the criticism that surrounds it.

His main argument is a cornucopist one: that as societies grow and become wealthier, technology will become more advanced and sophisticated – enough so as to meet our resource needs. He uses such examples as the green revolution to show how we were able to sustain a growing population and still are. He believes that economic growth is the answer and we should be focussing our resources on more pressing issues such as HIV/AIDS and poverty.

While I don't disagree that solving health and poverty issues that affect people today is extremely important too, I don't think we can just stop all efforts to keep the Earth systems healthy and 'hope for the best'. I cant help thinking that without a massively inflated population we wouldn't need new technologies that enable oil extraction in the most difficult and remote locations for example, and for that matter the ecosystems in those locations would be better off without them!

Here is his website and the trailer for his documentary 'Cool It': 

www.lomborg.com/

Links to articles (one relatively recent) he has written, summarising his arguments: 

'The Economist' article

'The Limits to Panic'

Link to the article published in the journal 'Nature', criticising his work; it's a book review of The Skeptical Environmentalist:

'Nature' article

Having dinner with Bjørn Lomborg when he came to speak for the UCL Economics and Finance Society (I'm on the right)

Consumers, not Population Growth

A paper I came across by David Satterthwaite makes the interesting point that it is consumers, and not people per se that are the cause of global warming. In other words we shouldn't blame population growth for rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although I didn't agree with everything he wrote (I'll keep my comments until the end though), I want to present his argument here because it's a fair one, and use it as a sort of bridge between showing that high population growth is a problem for the environment and finding out the arguments denying 'overpopulation'.

Satterthwaite starts off by pointing out that the lifetime contribution to GHG emissions of each person varies by a factor of more than 1,000 (depending on their circumstances etc.) and so it is misleading to see population growth as driving environmental change. He reviews CO2 emissions and their evolution from 1950 to 1980, then 1980 to 2005 and finds little association between nations with rapid population growth and growth in their emissions. He finds plenty of examples of countries where CO2 emissions are high but population growth rates low and vice versa (see table below). 

He puts this down to the fact that many households in countries with high population growth (often low- and middle- income) don't have access to electricity for example, or do not consume the goods and services that generate GHG emissions. He analyses data on cooking fuel and access to electricity for 43 countries and finds that for 20 of them, more than half the urban population rely on non-fossil fuel cooking fuels like wood or straw and that even when they do switch, consumption remains low. He takes the stance that this will remain that way as a large portion of the world's population lives in extreme poverty and this is unlikely to change, looking at the failure of the last 50 years of development  practices (his words).

Source: Satterthwaite (2009)

All this leads him to conclude that:

"Human-induced GHG emissions are not cause by 'people' in general but by specific human activities by specific people or groups of people" (p.546)

So that rather than simply looking to population growth, we should focus on rapidly changing the consumption patterns of present and future generations. In the context of development policies, he thinks that too much investment is towards contraception awareness campaigns and not enough that challenges the 'over-consumption logic of global capitalism'; when ensuring adequate sexual and reproductive health services wouldn't even necessarily reduce emissions.

I completely understand his points about needed to alter society's obsession with consumption but my answer would be that dealing with high population growth is one (perhaps easier) place to start. It is no silver bullet but humans (consumers or not) clearly have an impact on their environment (which doesn't necessarily have to be through GHG emissions). This impact is obviously much more significant depending on e.g. their economic wealth as Satterthwaite points out, using the case of an Indian household with an income of 150,000 rupees (US$ 3, 125) contributing to emissions 10 times more than a household earning less than 3,000 rupees. 

Now the problem I have with his analysis is that yes, developed countries contribute massively to GHG emissions despite the fact they have low population growth, but they had large population growth in the past and these now large populations contribute to emissions. They have already completed the demographic transition and are economically wealthy and industrialised. His argument cruxes on his belief that most of the world's population will remain poor and so won't become consumers, but I disagree. Just in the last few decades East Asian countries have developed rapidly (and have had massive population growth) and are beginning to contribute more and more to GHG emissions, and other countries and parts of the world will follow. Incidentally these countries are also the ones where most of the world's population growth is taking place. So I'm not saying the population growth will directly increase emissions but rather that not only are these populations growing, but they are becoming consumers and it is this new, larger generation of consumers that will pose a problem for the environment.

source: World Bank

note: apologies for the presentation of the table, I wanted to make sure I could include his data but still make it legible!

Overpopulation is a Myth

So far I have only been focussing on one side of the overpopulation debate so here's a video from the other side.

I'll try to let you be the judge but I can't help making a few criticisms. It says we could all have a house and a yard and still fit into the state of Texas, but the point is not how many humans we can fit on the Earth's surface but the quality of life that would ensue and the consequences for the environment. Sure, the human population could continue to survive with massive population growth, we would still be able to exploit enough resources, but the world would look a very different place. Secondly, the video points out the low birth rates in Europe and Japan where they are the lowest in the world, but ignores the African continent and other Asian countries like India and China completely! These are not only the places with either massive or growing populations, but the places where growth in resource demands will be the highest! I'll stop myself here and let you make up your mind.

I'd be interested to know what people think about this and I will be exploring more of the academic literature fighting for the other side.

Source: http://overpopulationisamyth.com/