Veronika Wild

-Image generated by Microsoft Bing AI As we've seen in the previous post, many countries have successfully reduced their birthrates in recent years and that should be a cause for celebration. The earth will most certainly be better for it – less resource and energy use, less water demand, less pollution, lower emissions, less encroachment on the land needed by other species.  According to one report in the Scientific American, we have already lost an estimated of 50% of our wildlife and transformed between 70 – 95% of the land and ecosystems , many of which are necessary for our own survival, so why are economists and others are wringing their hands instead? See for example, the rather nicely produced video called “The Myth of Overpopulation” below which considers reducing birthrates unnecessary.  It's a bit long but you might want to have a quick look at it before I start criticising it and debunking a few myths myself. Assuming for a moment that its predictions for t...

-Image generated by Bing AI According to the UN, every reduction in family size improves prospects for children, their families and the future . Every second family having just one child less means one billion fewer people by 2050 and 3.5 billion fewer people on the planet by the end of the century which will considerably reduce the impact on our already strained environment, though this also depends on how much they consume. An African child for example, has been estimated to consume twenty times less than a European or American child given differences in consumption, energy use and overall lifestyle. Although the negative stories about India and China’s efforts to stem population growth have dominated the headlines, many countries have quietly reduced theirs without trauma or coercion . They include Thailand, Costa Rica, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Colombia and South Korea. South Korea for example, which had a had a birthrate of 5.99 children per mother [called Total Fertility Rate (T...

-Image generated by Microsoft Bing AI  Below is the World Population Clock – it shows the number of people being born every minute. Although birth rates are slowing the global population is still growing at the rate of 80 million people per year. We'll come to why this matters in a moment, but let's first take a look at how we got here. How we got here As you can see from the following graph, until the Industrial Revolution in the C18 th populations remained small and static – under 1 billion globally, since the beginning of agriculture and were constantly kept in check by war, famine and disease.  Many children died at birth or in infancy and many mothers died in childbirth which meant not only that fewer children reached reproductive age, but that although many women did indeed have large numbers of children, others did not live long enough to do so.   With improvements in technology, medicine, diet, sanitation and income, people lived longer and popula...