The IPCC’s latest report shows how quickly the population explosion would have to stop for the only hope in a climate emergency, the blue SSP1 scenario. In fact, this fertility decline should have been going on for a decade and Africa should have reached 3.2 by 2020 instead of the actual 4.3. Yet family planning is still not included in the IPCC’s recommendations. Is it so taboo among climate scientists? Or is it censorship? – Gyula I. Simonyi

Climate change is now unequivocally an emergency according to the latest report from the IPCC. Our only hope lies in extremely rapid abandonment of fossil fuels and reversal of forest loss. But these lifeline scenarios also assume birth rates plummet in high-fertility regions. Jane O’Sullivan offers a reality check.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released the first part of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6-WG1). United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called it a “code red for humanity.” Climate change has already degraded many of our planetary support systems and the urgency of decarbonising human activities is beyond dispute. All of the IPCC’s scenarios see global temperature rise exceeding 1.5^oC by 2040. If heating continues, planetary systems will cross “tipping points” which might escalate the heating uncontrollably: “hell on earth” according to an Oxford climatologist.

But hope is proffered that, if we halve emissions by 2030 and decarbonise completely by 2050, then global heating could be halted and eventually reversed. The report explores five scenarios, with our ray of hope dependent on the two with the lowest emissions.

The modelling for these scenarios uses the “shared socioeconomic pathways” (SSPs) that were developed in 2013 for use in AR5. The scenarios allow climate modellers to incorporate a wide range of socioeconomic variables in a consistent and relatively transparent way. But they have the problem of bundling different components, such as low global cooperation and high population growth, so that the effects of these factors can’t be explored individually.

In AR6, our lifeline scenarios are SSP1-1.9 and SSP1-2.6. These are both built on the SSP1 settings, and both reduce emissions rapidly, one achieving a radiative forcing of 1.9 W m^–2 in the year 2100, and the other 2.6. These forcings correspond to roughly 1.5^oC and 2^oC global heating, respectively (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Projected global heating under the five scenarios featured in the AR6-WG1 report. Shaded areas show the spread of uncertainty for SSP1-2.6 (blue) and SSP3-7.0 (pink).

The problem is, SSP1 assumes a pathway for global population that is very far from the one we’re on. Achieving something approximating it is conceivable, but it would require strong and explicit efforts to get birth rates down rapidly in all high-fertility countries. According to most projections, virtually all the population growth this century will be accounted for in Africa (elsewhere, modest growth in some countries will be off-set by modest shrinkage in others). SSP1 anticipates Africa would fall below two children per woman around 2042, and end the century averaging 1.3 children per woman (Figure 2). Such rapid fertility decrease is highly unlikely with current levels of inattention to the issue. Can we expect diverse and dispute-ridden Africa to emulate South Korea’s rapid demographic transition, when that country had a single, stable government, a high-profile national family planning program and a secular, culturally homogeneous population?

Most unrealistically, SSP1 assumes that this rapid transformation has been happening for a decade already, positing a fertility rate of 3.2 for Africa in 2020, where the latest data put it at 4.3 (and that might be optimistic, given that the impacts of the pandemic on family planning access and child marriage are yet to be measured).

Figure 2. Africa’s (a) total fertility rate (average number of births per woman) and (b) total population, under projections from the UN (World Population Prospects 2019) and the SSP1, SSP2 and SSP3 scenarios. (SSP5 is similar to SSP1, and SSP4 is similar to SSP2).

Even the “middle of the road” SSP2 scenario anticipates much lower population growth than does the United Nations. For Africa, SSP2 is similar to the UN’s low projection, which the UN considers unrealistic. (It is merely illustrative of the impact of having half-a-child fewer births per woman than the medium projection in all countries). Only SSP3 lies within the UN’s range of probable population outcomes. Climate modellers have found it impossible to contain global heating to less than 2^oC using SSP3. This is at least partly due to the expanded agricultural area needed to feed more people.

So, the IPCC report’s most hopeful global scenarios assume rapid fertility decreases in Africa and other high-fertility regions that are not happening and that would take much greater efforts to achieve. But the IPCC’s climate change commentary contains nothing at all to encourage greater investment and attention to extending family planning in under-served regions. It contains nothing to inform people in developed countries that having fewer children is a powerful way to reduce future emissions. We are left to assume, as the SSP scenarios do, that improvements in development and education, by themselves, will drive the rapid birth reductions needed.

That is a serious mistake. Where birth rates have fallen rapidly, they were invariably due to family planning efforts. While improved education and incomes can help reduce fertility, such improvements are rarely possible to sustain while population growth remains high. By allowing infrastructure and services to get ahead of the growing needs of the people, lower birth rates enable poverty reduction and better access to education more strongly than the reverse.

Let’s not exaggerate the implications. Changes to birth rates take time to affect the number of people present in a big way. Between now and 2050, when decarbonisation needs to happen, the contribution of any feasibly lower population pathway would be relatively small, perhaps 10%. (The ship has already sailed on earlier estimates that put it at 16%.) But the importance of population cumulates over time. The ability of nations to feed themselves, preserve their remaining biodiversity and live sustainably after 2050 will depend crucially on overall human numbers, the fewer the better. What we do about population in this decade might make the difference between having 12 billion or 7 billion people to sustain in 2100.

More immediately, their rate of population growth will have a very large impact on whether poor countries will have the resources to achieve “clean development”, to invest in education and to reverse deforestation. It not only affects how many people are exposed to climate disasters, but how well equipped they will be to cope with them. For them, population growth itself is a greater threat to the sufficiency of infrastructure and government stability, and a far greater threat to food, water and energy security, than is climate change.

The SSPs are right to link population outcomes with economic development, but assume causation in the wrong direction. They consequently neglect the important initiatives needed to reduce birth rates fast enough. This can be done with voluntary measures that empower women and families to achieve their goals, but it will not be done by pretending population growth is going to fix itself. If people’s future security depends on most of them choosing small families, they have a right to be told this. UN charters assert that people have a right to choose their family size freely and responsibly, but they can’t choose responsibly if the consequences of population growth are hidden from them, or are actively denied.

Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo loses sleep over how to keep Nigerians fed and “how to keep the keg of gunpowder of the large army of unemployed youth from exploding.” But many current leaders dream on that youthful, growing populations are a boon. The IPCC is not providing the wake-up call they need.

Source: The Overpopulation Project

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Forty-eight years ago I led an 18-month study at MIT on the causes and consequences of growth in population and material production on the planet earth through the year 2100. “If the present growth trends … continue unchanged” we concluded, “the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.”

To illustrate this conclusion, we published a set of 13 scenarios generated by World3, the computer model built by my team. In those scenarios major global indices, such as industrial output per capita, typically stopped growing and began to decline between 2015 and 2050.

The current epidemic does not prove we were right.

When climate scientists are asked if a particular storm proves their theory of climate change, they point out that a model of long-term continuous change can not predict, nor be corroborated by a short-term discrete event. There have always been catastrophic storms. But, the climatologists point out, increasingly frequent and violent storms are consistent with the climate change thesis.

World3 is a model of continuous interactions between population, resources, and capital over the long term. In the context of 200 years, the COVID-19 pandemic is a short-term, discrete event. There have always been plagues, but increasingly frequent and violent epidemics are consistent with the limits to growth thesis.

There are two main causative links.

First, the explosive growth of humanity’s population and economy has stressed natural ecosystems, lowering their capacity to self-regulate, and making breakdowns such as epidemics more likely. In the recent past global society has been confronted with MERS, Ebola, Zika, SARS, and H1N1 plus major outbreaks of measles and cholera. And now we have COVID-19.

Second, growth in consumption has forced us to use resources more efficiently. Efficiency is the ratio between the output we want and the inputs required to produce it. Common measures of efficiency are, for example, miles per gallon, years of expected lifespan per dollar of health care, or bushels of wheat per gallon of water. Raising the efficiency of a system permits one to use fewer inputs per unit of output. In itself, higher efficiency is typically good. However, raising efficiency inescapably lowers resilience.

Resilience is the capacity to experience an interruption in the supply of a required input without suffering a serious, permanent decline in the desired output.

Humanity lives on a finite planet that started with a fixed amount of each resource input. To support population and economic growth, consumption of the planet’s finite resources has increased. As a result, the resources have been continuously depleted and deteriorated. The fertility of agricultural land, the concentration of mineral ores, the quality of surface waters, and the populations of marine fish are among thousands of indicators that show the long-term average quality of resources is declining.

Producing ever greater output from ever diminishing inputs has forced production to become more and more efficient. However, even enormous technological advance has not altered the fact that consumption deteriorates resources. It has merely reduced the rate of deterioration by reducing the rate at which we use resources to produce each unit of what we want.

The tradeoff between efficiency and resilience is confronted by every sector of society.

Car companies have shifted to just-in-time manufacturing. That reduces the cost per car of maintaining inventories but forces entire car factories to shut down when the single, highly-efficient factory producing a part they continuously need is interrupted. Agricultural production has shifted to large mono crop plantations for food, timber, and fiber. That reduces the cost of labor and capital per ton of output but increases crops’ susceptibility to a single pest or a disruption in normal weather patterns.

The incentive to raise efficiency has been spurred by the fact that those who can produce and sell the same output with less input generally make greater profits. As a result, over the past century, there has been wholesale abandonment of resilient systems in favor of efficient systems – larger scale, less diversity, lower redundancy.

The profit motive has been a major force shaping America’s health care system. There has been a relentless effort reduce personnel levels, eliminate “unnecessary” stocks of supplies, and shift drug production overseas —all to reduce costs i.e., make the system more efficient.

Many have profited by optimizing the health system to be extremely efficient in its use of inputs. Now we all are paying the costs for the resultant loss of resilience. COVID-19 has shown how quickly interrupting some inputs, such as masks, can cause drastic declines in essential outputs, such as the quality of health care.

Slowing growth in population and in consumption of materials and energy will not eliminate the problem. But it would reduce the pressure to increase efficiency and leave more possibility for increasing resilience.

About Dennis Meadows
Dennis Meadows is emeritus professor of systems policy and social science research at the University of New Hampshire, where he was also director of the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research. In 2009 he received the Japan Prize for his contributions to world peace and sustainable development. And the 2019 award from the German Foundation for the Promotion of Culture. He has authored ten books and numerous educational games, which have been translated into more than 15 languages for use around the world. He earned his Ph.D. in Management from MIT, where he previously served on the faculty, and has received four honorary doctorates for his contributions to environmental education.

Source: Chelsea Green Publishing

The post Limits to Growth and the COVID-19 epidemic appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

As the United States’ leading grassroots organization seeking to stabilize global population through education about population challenges and advocacy supporting U.S. investment in voluntary domestic and international family planning programs, Population Connection will launch a project aimed at illuminating the link between empowering women and girls and addressing climate change while mitigating its harmful effects on the world’s most vulnerable populations.

A generous pool of donors, led by James R. Bennett of Arkansas, has stepped forward to provide initial funding for this project. Major activities will include a speakers series; outreach on campuses and through digital media; and the addition of new, downloadable college-level materials available to those interested in the links between population growth, reproductive health, social justice, and environmental challenges—with a particular focus on climate change.

Growing Populations, Growing Carbon Footprints

Global warming poses unprecedented threats to humanity. Little has been done to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions despite 40 years of scientists’ warnings, with C0₂ emissions soaring from just over 10 gigatons per year in 1979 to nearly 35 gigatons per year today. While wealthy nations must account for historical emissions and the highest current per capita emissions, research indicates that slower future population growth “could reduce global emissions by 40% or more in the long-term.”

As people in low-income countries achieve improvements in standards of living, those countries’ carbon footprints will grow—both from a necessary rise in per capita emissions and from population growth.

Nearly half of the world’s pregnancies are unintended, and 214 million women in the developing world want to prevent pregnancy but aren’t using modern contraceptives. To lessen the impacts of global population growth on carbon emissions and biodiversity loss, we must implement human rights-based policies to extend family planning and reproductive health care to people worldwide—including in the high-emitting United States, where 45% of pregnancies are unintended.

Now is the time to ensure voluntary family planning options for all, and to provide universal education for girls. Together, these interventions to ensure the full autonomy of girls and women could have a greater impact on carbon emissions than any other, single tactic.

Population Connection draws the links between global population growth and the countless environmental challenges facing us—we educate people of all ages and motivate them to take action. We’ve made steady progress over the past 50 years, educating young people on population concepts and advocating for expanded access to voluntary family planning programs for people everywhere. Nearly 100 countries have achieved replacement rate fertility since our founding in 1968—up from four countries at that time.

But we must accelerate our progress to solve the climate crisis.

Population Connection’s campaign will bring population stabilization into the public discourse about climate change mitigation and adaptation, adding momentum to achieve a dramatic increase in access to family planning and reproductive health care programs for people around the world. In this way, we can lessen the impacts of global population growth on C0₂ emissions and biodiversity loss, while increasing vulnerable populations’ capacity for climate change adaptation and resilience. For more information on this project, please contact Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) Specialist Hannah Evans.

Shauna Scherer, Vice President for Marketing and Development

The post EFFECTS OF POPULATION GROWTH ON CLIMATE CHANGE appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

Russia is perhaps the life on earth – and thus the last refuge of humanity: is the only large area that is not yet overloaded and has a dwindling human population.		Russia is perhaps the life on earth – and thus the last refuge of humanity
Carbon quotas should not be confused with carbon credits. A quota is a free political atmospheric pollution (emissions) permit, of which there are fewer and fewer every year.		Should we get a heat stroke or starve instead?
Statement on cuts in UK contribution to UNFPA		Family planning aid cut betrays women and undermines Prime Minister’s climate change claims
		Saving Us From Ourselves
		An open access, peer reviewed, interdisciplinary journal exploring all aspects of the relationship between human numbers and environmental issues.
Having Kids is an international human rights organization dedicated to improving family planning systems worldwide with a simple idea:		Open Letter to Joe Biden’s Administration: The Most Effective 3 Changes for 2021
A new study highlights the importance of ensuring universal access to modern reproductive healthcare to achieving the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.		Reproductive Healthcare: The Missing Link
Hats off to Paul Hawken, the environmentalist behind Project Drawdown. Three years ago, he published a best-selling book, ‘Drawdown: the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming’.		Drawdown: a review of the Review
Carbon offsetting is a widespread tool in efforts to achieve net zero emissions.		Oxford launches new principles for credible carbon offsetting
Among women wanting to avoid a pregnancy in LMICs, unmet need is much higher for adolescents than for all women aged 15–49 (43% vs. 24%).		Investing in Adolescents’ Sexual and Reproductive Health in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Where has the highest rate of male sterilisation? How many people in sub-Saharan Africa are on the pill? Explore a world of contraception data.		Contraception and family planning around the world – interactive
Short birth intervals are associated with chronic malnutrition, which contributes to about 50% of all child deaths. Additionally, one woman a minute dies from pregnancy, childbirth or unsafe abortion.		Return of the Population Growth Factor
YaleGlobal Online		Addressing Population Challenge Is Not Impossible
Chinese Journal of Population Resources and Environment		Discussing why population growth is still ignored or denied
State avoided spending nearly $70 million to care for babies of low-income teens, study says.		Taboo breaking makes health system better and cheaper
(Ecological Overshoot Day: live as you wish to, just help those who lack contraceptives!)		July 29 is Earth-Overshrinking Day, not „Overconsumption Day”
Towards Prosperity		Why voluntary Family Planning programs are the investment?
Sustainability		What is sustainability, actually?
Family Planning for Climate Protection		Investing in Family Planning is the most efficient and most potent Climate Protection Strategy
Scientists warn about Climate Emergency and the swelling population		More than 11.000 scientists issue a warning about Climate Emergency, and address six key areas for critical changes, including addressing the planet’s swelling human population
The issue of Population in the Environmental Movement		How the issue of (over)population first galvanized the environmental movement into a global political force, then slowly became a taboo, rendering all other environmental efforts futile
The 2019 Nairobi Statement		The 2019 Nairobi Statement – The road to Zero unmet need for family planning information and services and Zero preventable maternal deaths
Global Population Control		It is a tragic measure of how far the world has changed – and the infinite capacity of modern man for taking offence – that there are no two subjects that can get you more swiftly into political trouble than motherhood and apple pie.
Boris Johnson: Global overpopulation is the real issue		The last time I tentatively suggested that there was something to be said in favour of apple pie, I caused a frenzy of hatred in the healthy-eating lobby.

The post Basics appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

1. You have suerely heard it a lot to consume less, because the Earth is overburdened. Well, who thinks that the overshoot is caused by too high individual consumption (and refers to Overshoot Day as „overconsumption day” for this reason), doesn’t understand ecology!

2. The ecological footprint of the average person is the same as it was in 1970.[1] Moreover, there are positive changes behind this unchanging average: the ecological footprint of the well-off countries is decreasing, and that of the poor countries is increasing, which allows for a higher quality of life.[2]

3. If the ecological footprint of the average person hasn’t increased, then why do we overburden the Earth by 170% now, which only started in 1970? Has the Earth shrunk by 40% in half a century? In a way, it has…

4. Before anyone would think about some cosmic catastrophe, let’s be clear: the „per capita Earth” has shrunk by 40%. And the reason is that human population has more than doubled since 1970.[3]

5. Today, there is only 1.63 gha biocapacity for a person, which is little more than half of the average global per capita ecological footprint.[4] Moreover, there is less and less each year due to the ongoing population explosion.

The eco-dictators (if there would be such) who don’t care about population could only end the global ecological overshoot by forcing everyone into global destitution.

6. Those who hope that the scientific-technological development will solve everything, will be gravely disappointed: in half a century, all science and technology could achieve was that th per capita biocapacity of Earth only decreased by 40% and not more.[5] (They couldn’t stop its decline, and are far from turning it into growth, even by relying on nonrenewable resources)

7. Humanity overburdens the Earth, today at a level of 170%. This means that we have used up its yields by July 29. In other words, from this day till the end of the year, we will use up the natural capital that has bee accumulating over millions of years. This is why the forests, soils and wildlife is disappearing, freshwater is dwindling, the climate is going nuts, and poison and filth floods the waters and the lands.

8. If everyone on Earth lived like the Hungarians, for example, then the humanity would have come out of the ecological crisis by the turn of the century. If everyone followed the consumption and reproductive pattersns of the Hungarians since the very beginning of the calculation of ecological footprint (1961), then there would only be about 3 billion people on Earth, which wouldn’t be overburdened by everyone living in decent prosperity.[6]

9. So the ecological crisis is caused by overpopulation, which is worsening with the ongoing population expkosion: every year, the human population of Earth increases by 80 million. It’s not that people consume too much individually, it’s just that the „per capita Earth” is shrinking below the level of global destitution.

10. Why is there a population explosion? Well, it’s not like anyone wanted it, it’s just a taboo, so misconceptions are rampant in this topic. Almost half of the pregnancies are unintended by the couples.[7][8] Every day, 100.000 children are born whom their parents didn’t want. At least 214 million fertile wives would desperately want to use contraception, but they don’t have the rights, knowledge and means to it.[7]

11. The UN has alredy declared contraception a human right back in 1968,[9] and on the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo, 179 countries signed a Programme of Action. It was supposed to be completed in 20 years, but unfortunately it wasn’t, so it was extended.[10] This was translated to Hungarian by the BOCS Foundation, which is the Hungarian member of the Inspire European NGO alliance since 2006. The ICPD+25 world conference to renew the Programme of Action will be held in Nairobi.[11]

12. Moreover, the goal of securing universal access to contraception to all was also among the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 5.B) The UN General Assembly declared in 2005 that „an unmet need for family planning undermines achievement of several other goals”.[12]

13. In 2015, the UN declared 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, where universal access to contraception is featured in the topic of health, and of women’s equality as well (SDG 3.7 and 5.6). Because even if there was no ecological crisis, overpopopulation, poverty, violence, so even in an ideal world, it is the right of every child to be conceived to prepared parents, as a result of a responsible decision.

14. Numerous examples prove that access to contraception leads to exceptionally fast reductions in birthrates. Globally, there is a huge umnet need for contraception, both in the developing, and developed countries.[7][8] Wherever women can have a word in ther fate, birthrates are low, even if they cannot study. And educated women plan even less children.[13]

15. So what’s the key to move the Ecological Overshoot day back to the end of the year? Compassion! To have mercy on those who lack contraception!

The reason is because the ecological crisis is caused by a humanitarian catastrophe: that the without the rights to-, knowledge about, and means of contraception, in every second, 3 women cry out desperately that „I’m pregnant!”.

16. This might be the only point where the interests of the poor and the rich are the same. Offer your help for the sake of yourself, for the sake of the poor, and most importantly, for the sake of the children to be born, whom would otherwise be dragged out to Earth before their time, in a forced march, unprepared, as an accident, or for thousands of other reasons.

17. According to the esimates of the UN’s Population Program, the sum needed for the solution can be collected even if only every 30th person helps those lacking contraception by 10 euros (spending it on programs making it available). Can you convince at least one of 30 of your friends? Who break the taboo of population as Climate Heroes, don’t just shave off a few percents of the ecological footprints by insignificant greening, but 100% of it. Because by continuously preventing an unintended pregnancy, they prevent a lifetime’s worth of ecological footprint (moreover, potentially multiple lifetimes’ worth of it).

18. The beneficial effects of sum that makes contraception available are 120 times more potent than conventional charity.[14] It is the most effective humanitarian aid, the most effective form of climate-, and environmental protection,[15] the key of getting out of poverty,[16] that of womens’s equality, the healthy development of children, and of peace and security.

19. The more unintended pregnancies we can prevent, the less people will suffer less; less people will be subject to destructive heat waves, starvation, epidemics and the increasing risk of wars, and the severity of these calamities will be lighter as well. Contraception is the best way to mitigate the climate crisis, and also the key to adapting to the worsening conditions.

20. Let’s push back the date of Ecological Overshoot Day to the end of the year! One of the points of the Global Footprint Network’s MoveTheDate campaign serves this goal as well. Join the Climate Heroes, carbon offset your lifestile using QFPC™, with which you can also help the hundreds of millions of women who lack contraception.

Live as you wish to, just break the taboo with compassion! Preventing a lifetime’s worth of ecological burden, you can float as an angel, not weighing down on the Earth. https://bocs.cf/

[1] https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/
[2] http://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/sustainableDevelopment?cn=all&type=BCpc,EFCpc&yr=2016
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.pop.totl
[4] http://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/
[5] http://footprintnetwork.org/
[6] https://climenews.com/a-wwf-vakon-hibaztatja-a-magyarokat
[7] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adding-it-up-contraception-mnh-2017
[8] https://www.contraceptioninfo.eu/node/71
[9] http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/rights/
[10] https://www.unfpa.org/publications/international-conference-population-and-development-programme-action
[11] https://www.unfpa.org/press/nairobi-summit-advance-icpd-programme-action
[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/l12kristof.html
[13] http://en.unesco.org/gem-report/sites/gem-report/files/girls-factsheet-en.pdf
[14] http://res.cloudinary.com/bocs/raw/upload/v1557231981/population_assessment_-_kohler_behrman_0_dumwz7.pdf (6.o)
[15] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
[16] https://afrika.bocs.eu

Gyula I. Simonyi

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