Optimum Population Trust

OPTIMUM POPULATION TRUST

Population Growth – Impact on the Millennium Development Goals: Submission to the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health

The Millennium Development Goals were policy initiatives set in motion by the UN. Eight international development goals (MDGs) were launched in 2000, and the aim is that they should be achieved by 2015. The OPT’s submission is divided into two parts. Part A deals with the effects of population growth on environmental sustainability and other MDGs, part B with the effect of population growth on migration and vice versa.

A. Environmental sustainability and other MDGs

The OPT’s view is that there is an inevitable and demonstrable trade-off between population growth and the realisation of most, if not all, of the millennium development goals. There are a number of factors involved:

1. The demand for some of the basic commodities on which the MDGs rely – notably food and water – is elastic if population is growing. The capacity of the environment to supply these commodities is largely inelastic.

1. The capacity of the environment to supply these basic commodities is itself impaired by continuing population growth and the increased demand that goes with it. This is the case, for example, with soil erosion, over-abstraction of water, over-irrigation and salinisation of soil etc. As the UN’s MillenniumDevelopment Goals Report 2005 noted: “Progress has been made against hunger, but slow growth of agricultural output and expanding populations [italics added] have led to setbacks in some regions.”

3. Particularly in conditions of increasing resource scarcity, population growth may undermine economic growth, and therefore the capacity to realise many of the MDGs that are less directly dependent on the environment – for instance, those involving education and health. It thus maintains poverty in many parts of the world. It is difficult for a resource-poor country with rapid population growth to increase its economic 'cake', even if the cake is growing, because each slice is rapidly having to be divided between ever more individuals. An increase in population will wipe out gains faster than they can be made, whether in agriculture, education, literacy or healthcare. A recent Minister of Health in Morocco maintained that every year his country needed to build nine hospitals, 8,500 classrooms and 150,000 houses - and create 280,000 jobs - just to keep up with population growth. China’s (controversial) population policies have meant that there are now an estimated400 million fewer Chinese than there would otherwise would have been. According to Zhang Weiqing, of the National Population and Family Planning Commission,slower population growth has “effectively alleviated the imbalance between population and economic resources and tensions between population and the environment". Trade-offs between rapid population growth and development are visible in many African countries.

4. In some cases population growth creates conflict which has proved a potent ingredient in delaying progress towards the MDGs. This was the case in Rwanda in the 1990s where demographers warned repeatedly that rising population, causing diminishing access to land,was creating conditions ripe for violence. Many experts believe the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s was therefore a consequence of population growth (see Jared Diamond, Collapse, 2005) but population is also an ingredient in most resource-based conflicts – it is an integral part of the supply (resource) and demand(people) equation. Water conflicts, which it is widely predicted will escalate this century, directly affect MDGs and cannot be divorced from their population component. This is not least because the population (demand) component is in many cases the only one to have changed: the water (supply) component remains broadly the same. The United Nations issued a report to mark World Water Day 2002 which said that two in three people will face water shortages by 2025 if the world continues consuming water at the same rate. It warns of fierce competition for water supplies. The report blames mismanagement of water, population growth and changing weather patterns. Global water-use has at least doubled since 1960, in line with population increase. Again, the UN’s 2005 report on the MDGs noted: “In sub-Saharan Africa, where 42 per cent of the population is stillunserved, the obstacles to progress [on access to drinking water], which include conflict,political instability and low priority assigned to investmentsin water and sanitation, are especially dauntinggiven high population growth rates.” [italics added].

1. The fundamental trade-offs cited can be masked and modified by technologies but these often have a limited lifespan and limited effects: one of the lessons of recent years is that environmental or resource-use efficiencies tend to be “drowned out” by increases in quantitative demand. They also carry their own costs, both economic and environmental, which not only damage the “servicing” capacity of the environment but divert social and economic resources away from the realisation of the MDGs. The Green Revolution, for example, provided an increase in crop productivity at the expense of greater use of chemicals and water.Many comparable innovations have had the effect of rebalancing developing country economies away from basic need fulfilment and damaging the environment on which the people most dependent on theMDGs rely.

1. These factors apply globally and locally. Ecological footprint studies show that the planet is currently outstripping its biocapacity by 20 per cent ( WWF/UNEP, Living Planet Report, 2004) and that this ecological overshoot is set to grow with rising population and consumption. Population is singled out in the Living Planet Report as one of the factors responsible for this overshoot. The inequities of the global economy camouflage this global overshoot for those living in the developed world but in the developing world the effects are exposed to view, with huge impacts on poverty, hunger, water availability and so on. The uneven distribution of the causes and effects of climate change exacerbate such discrepancies, adding to the failure of local environments to support their local populations. So lack of progress against MDGs in the developing world reflect the failure of local biocapacity to match local population demands magnified by the failure of global biocapacity to meet global population demands. This global failure then acts via the distorting mechanism of the global economy to aggravate local biocapacity failures - by appropriating local resources. This is often the case, for example, with export cash crops and with fisheries. Cash crops appropriate local resources (water, land, energy) for foreign consumption, diverting them from the satisfaction of basic needs. Fisheries involve the appropriation by foreign fleets of local fishing stocks previously supplying direct local needs. In both cases the fundamental cause is ecological overshoot, caused by the mismatch between environmental carrying capacity and population.

7. Ecological footprinting is one way of measuring overshoot. This shows, for example, that if the whole world lived at UK standards, we would require around two more planets to sustain the current population. The UK population , in other words, is “too big” for its current biocapacity; however, the ecological “overdraft” or debt thus created is experienced in the developing world. In that sense, the overpopulation of the UK, and the developed world generally, bears some responsibility for the lack of progress towards meeting the MDGs. Another way of measuring overshoot is to look at its planetary symptoms – climate change, overfishing, food and cropland limits, predicted energy (notably oil) shortages, loss of habitats, species and ecosystems. All these come under the broad heading of “environmental sustainability”, all impact disproportionately on those most reliant on the MDGs and all have a mismatch between carrying capacity and human population as possibly their most crucial ingredient. One of the lessons of history is that human populations have tended to expand up to their (usually inaccurately) perceived limits, which then render them vulnerable to unforeseen environmental or climate change. Many experts now predict that oil supplies will peak in the next few years and that one consequence will be, in the words of James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, “an enormous surplus population.” The nature of the global economy means that this, again, is likely toimpact most seriously on the poorest people and least developed countries.

1. Population restraint was acknowledged in the 1960s and 1970s as an essential tool in alleviating poverty, improving health and securing a better environment but since the 1980s it has become politically inadvisable or damaging to say this. Another way of putting this is to say it has become a victim of political correctness. There are many reasons for this but the net effect is that population has been subsumed into various other explanatory hypotheses – technologies, lifestyles, consumption patterns, urbanisation - and effectively become invisible. OPT believes this is intellectually dishonest and a disservice to development.

1. In practice, fortunately, many developing countries have recognised the link between population growth, sustainability and development. As the UN’s World Population Policies 2005 revealed, the number of countries with active population policies is increasing,particularly in Africa where 35 of 53 countries have enacted policies to lower the growth rate. Elsewhere, countries such as Iran have successfully carried out a population policy with the explicit goal of reducing family size. Contrary to popular belief, many countries have already set population limits or specific targets for reducing fertility and/or migration.

1. The evidence is that population restraint through good family planning services can have a huge effect on MDGs, including those involving child and maternal health. For example, it is estimated that over 200,000 women die each year giving birth to babies they did not want through lack of family planning services. And if birth planning services are supplied, they are taken up – examples includeThailand,Costa Rica, the State of Kerala in India. In Thailand, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, efforts to provide access to reproductive health care (part of a government programme covering population, environment and maternal and child health) have been highly successful. Thailand's total fertility rate declined from 6.36 children in the early 1960s to 2.0 in 2003 and its annual population growth rate has been reduced to 1.1% from considerably higher levels. So development alone is not the best contraceptive - a contraceptive is the best contraceptive. By offering contraception, the vicious circle of population growth and poverty can be broken, without coercion.

B. Migration: Population growth affects migration and migration affects population growth

International migration policies are formulated and put into practice primarily by nation states - and by regional groups of states such as the European Union. In framing their policies, however, nation states must abide by the international treaties and conventions to which they are signatories, and are thus influenced by the development of international policies proposed and effected by intergovernmental institutions such as the United Nations (UN). Other agencies such as International Organisation for Migration (IOM) are also influential in framing policy proposals.

1. OPT submits that the current approach by intergovernmental and international agencies to issues of migration, as a driver of population growth and vice versa, is too heavily weighted in favour of the advantages of migration. This has occurred largely because the environmental impacts of mass migration have been ignored.

The UN has acknowledged that international migration is likely to continue to grow and is an increasingly important issue. Arising from UN resolution 58/208 of 23 December 2003, and from the initiative to form a Global Commission on International Migration, a ‘high-level dialogue’ on international migration is scheduled for the 61st session of the UN General Assembly in September 2006. However, while the UN acknowledges that sovereign states must decide their own migration policies, and commits itself to addressing the root causes of forced emigration, environmental degradation is rarely mentioned in the context of population growth or migration. Analysis by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) focuses mainly on social or short-term economic issues – such as migration effects on labour markets - rather than long-term environmental ones.

2. Migration needs to be viewed from anenvironmental perspective. While OPT acknowledges that migrants, at 1 in 35 of the world’s population (185-192 million of 6.5 billion in 2005, up from 175 million in 2000), have a far smaller impact on global ecosystems than the 34 of 35 who remain rooted in their country of origin, we submit that migration is an important factor in determining environmentally sustainable population levels, and therefore affects the MDG of long-term environmental sustainability. International migration affects the global environment if it exacerbates world population growth (see 3 below); and migrant living standards tend to rise to levels prevalent in their country of destination, in a way that increases their ecological footprint (4 below).

OPT submits also that the feedback effects of a deteriorating environment cause further pressures on populations to emigrate, and these pressures are likely to get worse. These include soil erosion, water depletion and climate change effects. The surface of Alaska is already fracturing. And as climate has changed in eastern Kenya, causing severe drought in 2006, many millions face famine. But the supply of fertile and underpopulated countries able and willing to absorb mass movements of displaced people is dwindling.

3. Mass international migration does little to slow population growth. Most analysts hold that migration reduces population growth rates: migrant birth rates usually fall as migrants move from developing countries to settle in developed countries. This is usually true, but:

Firstly, the usual definition of 'migrant' (a person living in a country which is not his/her country of birth) counts only a single generation. By doing so it understates the long-term impact of cumulative migration on population change.

Secondly, the underlying number of migrants at a given level of fertility must be taken into account, as well as their age. The impact on population growth in a receiving country of 100,000 women immigrants a year with a total fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman is clearly more significant than the impact of 1,000 younger women immigrants arriving each year with an average TFR per woman of 4.5 births.

Thirdly, although it is accepted that the birth rates of migrants from developing countries tend to fall when they move to more developed ones, this change is slow. Falling migrant birth rates do little to curb the world's population growth.

Fourthly, there is evidence that allowing access to contraception in countries with high population growth rates enables women and men to reduce family size just as rapidly as they would by moving to another country. Thailand and Iran, for example, have succeeded in rapidly reducing their domestic birth rates and slowing population growth without relying on mass emigration.

4. Mass international migration exacerbates environmental problems:

Firstly, migrants tend to move from poor regions to richer ones, raising their ecological footprint in doing so. Unless the richer countries of destination correspondingly reduce their ecological impact, the net effect will be to accelerate environmental damage. For example, fifty million Chinese who live outside China (including Taiwan), now earn an annual income equivalent to two-thirds of China's gross domestic product, with its domestic population at 1.3 billion. [World Migration Report 2005, IOM]. The ecological footprint of an inhabitant of Bangladesh (0.6global hectares per capita) will rise dramatically when he or she emigrates to the USA (9.5 global hectares per capita) [WWF Living Planet Report 2004].

Secondly, there are limits to the size of population that any individual country can environmentally sustain in the medium and long-term at any given per capita environmental impact. Increasing the numbers of those who create impacts, whether by natural increase or net immigration, negates improvements in tackling environmental problems.

Thirdly, excess immigration into countries which are already densely populated can cause substantial economic and environmental damage, the effects of which may not be seen until the resulting pressures on dwindling land and natural resources become intense. Projected population growth of more than 10 million in the UK by 2074 is equivalent to building 57 more towns the size of Luton - before taking into account household fragmentation. In the UK, births to immigrants accounted for 18.6 per cent of all births in England and Wales in 2003, and migration is expected to account for more than 80% of further UK population growth.

Fourthly, and most importantly, is the role played by international migration in masking global population and environment problems. When a ship is heading for the environmental rocks, the best policy is to steer it away - not to encourage everyone to escape to areas they perceive to be lifeboats, sink them and drown. If Calcutta were drowned by rising sea levels, for example, London and New York would be inundated soon after. Population size and growth cannot be ignored in framing environmental policy, and the migration component of population policy must be included. Given that migration is at least partly the result of damaged local life-support systems, it may in effect amount to a form of “scorched earth” policy - slash-and-burn on a global scale. The priority must surely be to prevent or cure environmental damage, and help people to remain in their homes and communities, not abandon damaged areas of the planet to their fate.

SUMMARY

Population growth and migration are together undermining attempts to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of environmental sustainability, and other related MDGs, by 2015. OPT believes it is better policy for all countries to work out what populations their environments may be able to sustain in the long term, with the best possible quality of life and without damaging the environmental prospects of other countries or the world as a whole. This requires population policies as well as fundamental changes in consumption patterns, yet allows for sustainable development and international migration flows which do not incur national population growth. Decrease in the populations of high-consuming countries can bring reductions in environmentally damaging consumption. Decrease in the populations of developing countries can enable green growth. And environmentally sustainable aid and trade between rich and poor countries can benefit all.