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Contraception 85 (2012) 523 – 526
Editorial
Seven billion and 31 gigatons
This editorial is adapted from a previous work by the
author, “Seven Billion and 31 Gigatons: Making the
Population–Climate Connection,” the author's presentation
at Reproductive Health 2011, ARHP's annual clinical
conference, and “Policy Review: Thoughts on Addressing
Population and Climate Change in a Just and Ethical
Manner,” which appeared in Population and Environment
in 2009 and is cited throughout this editorial [1].
The United Nations announced last October that earth's
population had passed 7 billion, the largest number the planet
has ever seen [2]. Only 100 years ago, our planet held fewer
than 2 billion people. Global population has doubled in my
lifetime, from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 7 billion now. And we
are on track to add 2 billion more by the year 2050 [2]. That
is the equivalent of adding another China, United States,
Brazil and Nigeria in less than 40 years.
Media coverage of the 7-billion milestone was mostly
somber, with images of crowded cities, belching smokestacks, denuded forests, starving children, polluted rivers
and spreading deserts. Some looked at Japan and
countries in Europe with declining populations, but that
was also presented as bad news: aging people, strained
social safety nets, shuttered schools, a dwindling work
force — a “baby bust.”
One forward-looking message that came through clearly
in the discussions around 7 billion was that we must take
better care of the environment if our children and grandchildren are to have sustainable lives.
Indeed, while there may be disagreement about how to
deal with a growing global population (see the June 2011
Contraception editorial [3]), we do seem to be moving
toward a consensus that we really must do something about
the strange and scary weather, in the form of monumental
tornadoes, droughts, blizzards, extreme temperatures and
floods, that we, no matter where we live on the planet, are
facing. In other words, we must confront climate change.
Climate change is happening. And scientists agree that it
is generally caused by three factors: greenhouse gas
emissions, economic growth that fuels energy consumption
and population growth that fosters increased greenhouse gasemitting activities.
In posing strategies to mitigate climate change, efforts
have been geared primarily toward the first driver, specifi0010-7824/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.contraception.2012.03.001
cally, reducing energy consumption and developing technologies to reduce emissions.
The idea of restraints on the second contributing factor —
economic growth — is far from reasonable in a world where
one third of the world's population lives on less than $2 a day.
As to population growth, there has been relatively little
scientific attention, but increasing talk nonetheless, about
slowing such growth as a way to lessen the emissions
pumped into our shared atmosphere. If we can link slowing
population growth to mitigating climate change, the
argument goes, family planning, which helps to reduce
fertility rates and, in turn, slows population growth, will
come to be seen as an urgent matter of national and
environmental security. And then governments, including
that of the United States, will respond with increased
funding. But is this really a good idea?
Let's consider what we know.
More than 90% of the world's future population growth is
projected to take place in the developing world, where
countries are already struggling to provide their people with
food, water, health care, education and jobs [4].
We know that humanity pumped 31 gigatons of carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere in 2010, the largest amount ever
recorded [5]. To put that in context, a gigaton is one billion
tons or the equivalent to the weight of 50 million blue
whales. So each year, we are adding 1550 million blue
whales' worth of CO2 to our atmosphere, in addition to other
toxic gases.
We know that, over time, as population increases, so do
CO2 emissions. But as even scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's leading climate
body, acknowledge, while the trend lines run roughly in
parallel, the science is far from clear on the connection.
We also know that the need for family planning
worldwide is beyond question. Some 215 million women
in the developing world want, but do not have access to,
modern contraception, which leads to unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions, maternal and child mortality and
morbidity, reduced access to education and a whole range of
other negative consequences [6].
At the same time, however, I fear that linking family
planning to slowing climate change could endanger the
fragile consensus that we have achieved about population in
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Editorial / Contraception 85 (2012) 523–526
the past 18 years: that individual health and rights, including
reproductive health and rights, are what matters most in
fostering just and sustainable development. No matter what
our numbers are.
Let's step back in history for a moment.
Recognizing the vastly expanding global population,
governments around the world in the middle of the 20th
century began to implement population policies and programs that were geared toward controlling population size
and growth. These policies were often accompanied by topdown approaches, including the setting of demographic
targets and the institution of programs that actively and even
aggressively promoted contraceptive use. Women were
sometimes paid, incentivized or coerced to take on longterm contraceptives they might otherwise reject. Forced
sterilizations, coerced abortions and other restrictions on
reproductive freedom occurred not only in places like India
and China, but in the United States as well. Some of these
abuses still occur today.
In 1994, at the International Conference on Population
and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, Egypt, 179 governments
reached a historic agreement that rejected two centuries of
Malthusian thinking about population growth. Supported by
feminists, human rights activists and environmentalists, the
“Cairo Consensus” stated that a sustainable global population would come about not through targets and quotas, but
through education, health care and basic human rights. This
new rights-based approach included voluntary family
planning as part of a comprehensive package that also
included maternal and infant health care, prevention of
gender-based violence, and prevention and treatment of
sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS [7].
The governments at Cairo agreed that they had a
collective responsibility to promote what was, at the time,
a revolutionary idea: that all individuals had the right to
decide freely and responsibly the number and timing of their
children. They also agreed to distribute such benefits more
equitably among the world's many inhabitants.
Indeed, key to achieving the Cairo Consensus was a
promise of funding from industrialized countries for programs in the less-developed nations. But, while US family
planning assistance continues to be the world's highest, we
have not come close to the levels we promised at the ICPD.
Most other countries have not either.
Despite the knowledge that voluntary family planning
and comprehensive reproductive health care work to
improve the health of women and their children, keep girls
in school, enhance economic development and, yes, slow
population growth, governments, including that of the
United States, have been reluctant to provide the levels of
assistance that they promised and that the world needs.
Advocates have tried many arguments to get the United
States to meet its commitments, but support has been slow to
come. So why not add to the political arsenal the argument
that climate change cannot be resolved without increased
investments in family planning?
Setting aside the fact that the politics and partisanship
around these issues have become so extreme in the United
States that any logical argument is likely doomed to fail, let
me raise a few other concerns.
First, articulating a close and direct relationship between
population growth and greenhouse gas emissions may lead
countries which are under pressure to reduce their emissions
to what they think is a “simple” solution: reducing their rates
of population growth. And if done without regard for
individual rights, such policies could turn coercive and prove
devastating to human rights and well-being, all in the name
of environmental stewardship. China has already made this
connection. At a UN conference on climate change, China
announced that its one-child policy had reduced the
country's CO2 emissions by 1.3 billion tons by preventing
300 million births from occurring [8].
Second, making this argument may open the door for
individuals in the industrialized world to blame population
growth in the developing world for the problem of climate
change. But that would be wrong. The United States contains
4% of the world's population but produces 18% of all
greenhouse gas emissions [9]. As the footprints here show,
that is 13 to 25 times the emissions of the typical Indian,
Indonesian, Yemeni or Nigerian and 73 times that of the
average Bangladeshi [10] (Fig. 1).
But what about future population growth, since 95% of it
will take place in the developing world?
While we worry for the environment over the growth of
countries in the global South, the US population itself is
expected to grow by 80 million people in the next 40 years
[11]. While this is far fewer people than India will add to the
Fig. 1. Total emissions of CO2 (millions of metric tons), 2009, figure based
on data from Energy Information Administration [1].
Editorial / Contraception 85 (2012) 523–526
planet, it is roughly the same amount as Nigeria expects to
contribute, more than Pakistan and more than twice as much
as either Bangladesh or Indonesia [12].
Unless our consumption and production patterns change
dramatically, the United States is expected in the year 2030
to produce more CO2 than the Middle East, Africa and Latin
America combined. Only China's emissions will exceed
ours. In other words, the United States will long continue to
be the world's greatest or second greatest emitter of
greenhouse gases, even as our share of the world's
population declines (Fig. 2) [1].
Given that the US population increase will continue to
have significantly disproportionate negative impacts on
the climate, we could not ethically consider engaging in a
debate about the need to slow population growth in the
rest of the world without addressing our own growth rates
and emissions production first. I would argue that it
would be quite unethical to transfer responsibility to the
planet's poorest people for a problem that the United
States has been and will continue to be a primary
contributor [1].
So what can we do?
We can make the argument that generating support
among the American public and policymakers for government-supported voluntary family planning — at home and
abroad — is, in itself, a worthy and important task.
Voluntary family planning is something that is desired by
many women and for which sufficient funding and policies
do not currently exist, despite government commitments.
Further, as the ICPD affirmed, family planning should not
be supported in isolation, but must be enveloped in
comprehensive policies of health and sustainable development. Enhancing social development, as well as promoting
gender equity and enabling individual responsibility, can
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contribute to the outcomes we all want: improved quality of
life and a healthy planet that can be sustained for generations
to come.
These more comprehensive policies start with and focus
on the individual, but they also require the commitment of
the global community. For the United States, this means that
we must understand our obligation, as the world's wealthiest
nation, to help others around the world to achieve at least a
reasonable minimum quality of life. If we meet this
obligation, we will not only assist in improving the health
and well-being of millions, but we will also, ultimately,
contribute to slowing unnecessary population growth and the
impacts that it has on the environment [1].
We must also emphasize first and foremost the responsibility that we in the United States have to lessen the
damage that we ourselves are doing to the global
environment. As I have written before, “if we take seriously
a duty to leave a healthy planet for future generations, and if
we wish to be a credible voice for solving the challenge of
climate change, we must prioritize reducing our own
country's production of emissions [1].”
And, finally, if we are to engage in a discussion of the
connections between population growth and climate change,
we must first acknowledge that slower population growth
would likely play only a limited role in solving the climate
change problem. And, we should start at home. We simply
cannot claim that the United States has a right to grow as
large and extravagant as we like while talking about
unsustainable growth in other countries, especially those
that, by comparison, put mere bits of greenhouse gases into
our shared environment.
We must not allow any renewed debate about the impacts of
global population growth to disrupt the hard-earned global
consensus around government-supported family planning.
Fig. 2. Future emissions — 2030 (millions of metric tons of CO2), figure based on data from Energy Information Administration [1].
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Population policies must prioritize freedom and must be made
with individuals at the core because, in the end, it is individuals
— not abstract millions — with whom we share the planet.
Suzanne Petroni
Public Health Institute
1901 L Street, NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036, USA
E-mail address: [email protected]
References
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climate change in a just and ethical manner. Popul Environ
2009;30:275–89.
[2] United Nations Population Fund. State of the world population 2011.
New York: UNFPA; 2011. Available from http://www.unfpa.org/swp/.
[3] Petroni S, Shields W. International reproductive health still worth the
investment. Contraception 2011;83:491–4.
[4] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
Population Division. World population prospects: the 2010 revision,
highlights and advance tables; 2011. Available from http://esa.un.org/
wpp/Documentation/pdf/WPP2010_Highlights.pdf.
[5] Harvey F. Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink. The
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environment/2011/may/29/carbon-emissions-nuclearpower.
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http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/populatin/icpd.htm.
[8] Doyle A. China says one-child policy helps protect climate. Reuters.
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[9] Energy Information Administration (EIA). International energy
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[10] Energy Information Administration (EIA). International energy
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[11] Passel J, Cohn D. U.S. population projections: 2005–2050. Per
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[12] U.S. Bureau of the Census. International data base; 2011. Available
from http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/
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