People are still popular on World Population Day

Its official, humans are as popular as ever and we still want to carry on reproducing ourselves and having families. Hardly a surprise there, you might say.
The current UK population projections show we are heading for almost a 40 per cent increase in numbers, from 61 to 85 million, over the next seven decades.
Just take a moment to imagine what another 24 million people would do to the daily commute or attempt to find a house in a nice quiet part of town in 2080. Then take a guess at what some other countries around the world might look like if we assume growth to be of a similar scale.
Assuming the world will solve such limiting critical factors as new pandemic disease, producing enough food to supply the increased population growth and managing to avoid catastrophic climate and environmental change (which is more than a big ask) then this is what our children have to look forward to in their old age, or what your grand children and great grand children will have to cope with.
In the latest You Gov opinion poll (published July 11, 2009 on World Population Day), commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust (an environmental charity, think-tank and campaign group), over 2000 people were asked to name what problems an increased population might cause. Among the multiple questions answered, 74 per cent highlighted transport congestion, 65 per cent said lack of affordable housing, 64 per cent thought damage to the natural environment, 53 per cent believed poorer quality of life, 50 per cent had food supply on their mind, 48 per cent turned to energy and water supply and bottom of the list was 47 per cent who identified climate change.
Back in the world of natural population growth, ecology rules – at least it does if you depend entirely upon nature for your food, shelter and environment. We humans have gone a stage further than nature in manufacturing our own food supply, building homes in all climate conditions and controlling our environment. We have been so successful at doing this that we have over populated the planet and what will curtail our over abundance now is simply running out of space, destroying or polluting our world so badly that we will become the cause of our own downfall.
Of course it is deeply engrained in our DNA to reproduce, and the evolutionary purpose of pleasurable sex is to encourage as much multiplication as possible. Whilst this is innate behaviour, it is hard to be scientific or intellectualise over deciding whether or not to have a second or third child. Such decisions – unless conceiving was unplanned – are more likely based on emotions and perhaps second on the practicalities of home and finance.
All life on earth has similarly evolved with the single self mission to survive and increase by successfully reproducing itself. The essence of a successful species is if it can increase its number to the point that it has multiple populations, able to withstand local losses caused by predation, food or shelter supply and to quickly enable losses to be overcome. Survival and expansion is the rule, but governing this are many factors, not least the predator – prey ratio.
Thankfully, as humans, we can largely forget about the impact of prey taking out our fellow citizens, but in the world of science fiction we could still prove to be a tasty morsel for those aliens with an insatiable appetite for live hominids!
Aside from the invasion of human gobbling extra-terrestrials, the real issue in population control, is can the Earth’s physical resources stretch to supplying all the needs that continual growth in numbers would demand. Many poor nations already prove how inadequate or ill prepared they are to feed their current population when drought or disease arrives. Current estimates also reveal one billion people on the planet are malnourished now and this will only increase as populations grow.
Mass conflicts and natural disasters also show us how difficult it is to give aid to evacuees but the impact of climate change and increased human numbers will bring even more severe disasters and human misery.
There is little disagreement and overwhelming support for the view that both the world and the UK are overpopulated. In the survey 72 per cent thought world population was too high, causing serious environmental problems, and 70 per cent took the same view of the UK. The survey results also revealed widespread agreement that population growth is responsible for a range of environmental and social ills.
At the bottom of the figures pile, four per cent thought population growth caused no problems.
When people were asked to take the environment into account when deciding family size, 34 per cent of couples thought it better to have no more than two children, eight per cent favoured having only one child and seven per cent said couples should consider having no children – a total of 49 per cent supporting two children or fewer. Thirteen per cent favoured a maximum of three children and 14 per cent said couples should have as many children as they liked.
As an environmentalist, concerned about the growing number of people who are disconnected from understanding the importance of the planet’s natural systems in supporting life on Earth, I am worried that 14 per cent seemingly think population increase has no connection with the environment. If we all accept responsibility that numbers cannot keep expanding then what should we be doing as a society or at a family level?
Roger Martin is chair of the Optimum Population Trust, and a Mendip resident who was previously CEO of the Somerset Wildlife Trust. He says: “The poll clearly demonstrates widespread concern about the environmental damage caused by population growth and widespread support for measures to limit it. The unequivocal nature of these findings makes the silence on population policy on the part of politicians and environmental groups even more astonishing. The political parties and the green movement need to realise that the public can sustain a mature debate on population. It’s time they started treating people like grown-ups.”
I rather feel the environmental lobby is much bolder than Mr Martin gives credit. The green movement, in my view, is certainly not afraid to speak out about the dangers posed by unregulated population growth, but I think the issue with smaller groups is that population growth has simply not been red flagged to the extent as, say, energy and food shortages – predicted to appear when climate change disasters stretch across Europe.
Perhaps the feeling among some is that population numbers will physically be reduced anyway when the impending scenarios of critical sea level rise, land loss and the lack of food supply strike hard. Economic losses across the world will mean that aid and rescue missions will simply break down. The other factor is that climate change forecasts and the seemingly unstoppable use of fossil fuels until they run out (up to 2050 onwards) creates so many dangerous scenarios and catastrophes that population growth – like expansion of house building, urban growth and loss of vital global green habitats – will be the lesser of the evils.
The more delicate question, for the moment, is how society should stop people having more children than a country can sustain, or else should Western governments start reducing the expectation that medical interventions will always prolong life into old age. If this seems shocking to you or inconceivable then we need a debate about what people will accept as the best way to curtail or even reduce population growth.
Increasingly there is a view that people who deliberately self abuse through drink, smoking or morbid obesity, cannot expect the NHS to spend limited resources in saving them from premature death. In future, will we see increasing emphasis on self help and responsibility for personal health leading to better life saving care when needed? Will financial support or benefits only cover families with one or two children? Could society ever reach the point that sterilisation is introduced after the second child?
Education and increased awareness about the hardships and deaths caused by unsustainable human numbers has to be the first attempt at voluntarily limiting numbers. A fully adequate contraception and education service in the poorest countries and local initiatives to persuade a change in trends also has to be part of the global plan.
The most popular measure of dealing with population growth, according to the You Gov survey was a reduction in immigration, favoured by 69 per cent, followed by the right to work after retirement age (63 per cent), better family planning to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies (62 per cent) and limitations on the offer of flats to young single mothers (48 per cent).
An argument in favour of population growth in that younger people are needed to support the retired is reduced if people can work for as long as they feel able and capable. Older people remain more useful to society by not then becoming an economic drain that needs more working people to support them.
The UK population has been moderating, since the baby boom of post war Britain in the 1950s. Some science has even shown how men’s fertility has declined as increased female hormones are found in drinking water. However, with prosperity comes an economic ability to sustain a larger family and this influence has driven up the birth rate, but may well now decline in the next decade.
Among the other statistics which the OPT gave, it is comforting to discover that nearly half the public believes couples should limit themselves to two children or fewer to reduce human impact on the environment, A majority of those questioned would welcome a significantly smaller UK population than at present; and almost as many said their quality of life would improve if their area had fewer people.
Nearly nine-tenths of those who expressed an opinion supported a lower UK population than at present. In the South West there were 57 per cent who favoured only having two children or fewer.
In China the population growth is limited (one child policy) by government decree, which has perhaps prevented over 400 million more mouths to feed over 25 years. India too has its policies, but has the second largest world population (1/6th of the world’s pop.) at around 1.17 billion (July 2009) with 45 per cent malnourished. Their growth of 19 million a year, according to India’s government, is falling as education measures are more successful.
Current world population stands at around 6.8 billion, rising by about 80 million per year. The United Nations’ medium estimate is by 2050 there will be 9.2 billion, and that’s with a 40 per cent reduced fertility rate.
If intelligence is something we think we are good at, I fear we might have to go back to school on this one – because who can say we are intelligent beings when we are on the verge of collapsing the whole Earth biosphere through our industrial activities (global warming), unsustainable growth in human numbers and neglect – as a higher species – to thoroughly consider our role as protector of all other life forms on Earth.
It has always seemed to me incredible that we still can’t solve conflict without killing each other, or even legally killing mass numbers of humans through armed conflict or wars. I can’t think of any other species that, en mass, attack their own kind because they have different ways of expression or some other behaviour differences. In nature it doesn’t happen. So why have we become so divorced that we happily threaten and battle with our own kind? Over population might be one answer as studies on wild and captive animals has shown that high density and inadequate living space can lead to murder and even cannibalism. Is this why we are prone to attack our fellow citizens, given enough provocation? The recent television programme about battery versus free range chickens gave enough insight into why birds behave the way they do when life is bad. Is this a lesson we can learn from?
Whilst we think we are ‘intelligent’ Homo sapiens, I wonder how intelligent we really are in regarding our fellow human race members. We have some critical issues to solve in the next few decades with climate change, dwindling natural resources and massive habitat loss through man’s destructive behaviour and increasing numbers being top of the list.
If these can’t be solved then the impacts they will have on earth will be serious and most probably lead to dramatic changes in human life being able to sustain itself at anything like the numbers we have today. The debate about population size has to include quality of life and whether we can offer medical care and ease suffering if numbers are so large we simply don’t have even the basics to go round.
Paul Lund
NOTES: Figures are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2131 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between May 22 and May 26 2009. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all adults nationally (aged 18+).
Full results can be viewed at: www.optimumpopulation.org/submissions/YouGov11Jul09.xls
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: See www.optimumpopulation.org or telephone 020 8123 9116 or 07976 370221.