Population explosion might be an implosion
It’s an old story — the planet is overrun with people, polluting and overstraining its resources. People just won’t stop reproducing — so much that a population clock speeds along at an alarming rate. Today it’s nearly 7.7 billion.
Yes, but ...
Using current rates, by 2050 there will be more than 9 billion of us. By 2100, 11 billion could push society into scary scenarios of competitive scarcities. That’s all based on data accepted as reliable and reported by nations all over the world, compiled and computed by the United Nations.
What if they’re wrong?
While those underlying statistics are solid, the way they’re used to predict the future is being seriously questioned in a new book, “Empty Planet.” Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker paint a drastically different picture of man’s future — one professional demographers who’ve been discussing the same issue seem to agree with.
“In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline,” the authors wrote. “Once that decline begins, it will never end.”
Jorgen Randers, a Norwegian professor who once predicted a global overpopulation catastrophe, has changed his tune. He says the world population will peak at 8 billion around 2040 before it declines. Demographers at Vienna’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis similarly predict it will stabilize by mid-century, then shrink.
So what’s missing from the incessant growth-predicting scenario? Choices, or more specifically, shifting women’s choices.
After examining the underlying data, then the factors considered in predicting growth, the authors found what they called a fundamental flaw in the UN model:
The increasing education of women wasn’t factored in. Nor was increasing urbanization, which tends to correlate with smaller families.
More and more, the world’s poorest women from India to South America and beyond are getting more access to education, better work prospects, and more control over their own lives and families.
In an interview with Wired Magazine, Ibbitson and Bricker said that in addition to expanded education, the speed of urbanization is also slowing population growth.
“The UN forecasting model inputs three things: fertility rates, migration rates, and death rates,” Bricker told Wired. “It doesn’t take into account the expansion of education for females or the speed of urbanization (which are in some ways linked).
“But when I went and interviewed [demographer] Wolfgang Lutz in Vienna ... all he was doing was adding one new variable to the forecast — the level of improvement in female education. And he comes up with a much lower number for global population in 2100, somewhere between 8 billion and 9 billion.”
Perhaps the most important human reproductive factor is the mind.
“We polled 26 countries asking women how many kids they want, and no matter where you go the answer tends to be around two,” said Ibbitson. “The external forces that used to dictate people having bigger families are disappearing everywhere.”
Why — other than pollution and scarcity — does it matter which prediction is right?
Planning. On local, national, and global scales, governments and groups charged with thinking about the future need reliable information to deal with future economies, resource allocation, transportation and infrastructure, and other spending decisions. How much or how little growth we face — and average ages of populations — can make a big a difference in what we need, and how to address it.
For more information see Population.un.org/wpp and search “population projections” at Iiasa.ac.at.
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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Contact her at Sholeh@cdapress.com.