The Environment Site Interview with Ms Val Stevens, chair of the Optimum Population Trust – Friday 29th February 2008
1. Re UK and self-sufficiency.
Val Stevens: In the UK we have got used to the idea that we can buy anything we couldn't provide ourselves with, from abroad. There would always be somewhere which had a surplus - of food, timber, fibres, minerals. Globalisation has meant that every country (almost) swaps goods with other countries. Except that there are some goods you can't swap - except very expensively - like water. And increasingly, countries don't have surpluses.
So, the idea of working out a country's theoretical carrying capacity has been developed and set out every two years in the WWF Living Planet Report. The total ‘footprint’ of a population can be calculated – the current average standard of living (consumption) multiplied by the population. And the total biocapacity of that country can be estimated. Then you can say either that the current number of people can easily be supported by the resources of this land, or - no, that number of people need the ‘ghost’ acres of other countries to support this standard of living. If other lands can’t go on supplying the needs of others, then that country faces the question whether their numbers should decline to be in balance with what their country can supply sustainably. Or whether stringent rationing should come in to reduce consumption.
Now, it is believed, the 6.7 billion people on Earth are using up a great deal - say 20 - 30% more of the earth's resources than can be sustainably supplied each year. We are in 'overshoot'. If we want the poor of the world to have a better standard of living, we are in even worse overshoot. There are no empty spaces in the world where people can go and be supported. Wherever they go they will be part of the overshoot.
So, each country ought to have a theoretical idea of getting their population in balance with their sustainable resources, rather than thinking that 'somewhere else' can supply the deficit. And don't we want some habitat left for non-human creatures?
The UK currently needs the 'global hectares' of many other countries to support its population: for cropland it needs 25% from elsewhere, for grazing land it needs 100% more, and for timber it needs 140% more biocapacity. The ecologically productive extra land needed for energy from renewables and biomass and for CO2 absorption, is off-scale – but we could be 60% more efficient in energy use if we made massive changes.
2 How to achieve population reduction humanely.
Val Stevens: Many developed countries already have low birth-rates at below long-term replacement. So, left to themselves (and when the bulge of deferred deaths - people living longer - has passed through) these populations would gradually decline. Unfortunately, leaders panic and the cry goes up that the nation will become extinct! Or there won't be enough workers to support pensions. Then all kinds of incentives to baby-making are rushed into place. The environmental limits never get mentioned.
In poor countries the key is making reproductive health services widely available to women, ensuring basic education and empowerment of girls and women. Then they vote with their feet and have fewer babies. It also needs some government programme - maybe posters saying two is best, or TV soaps that show the advantages of smaller families. Round the world there is a vast unmet need and desire for help in avoiding pregnancies. Until that is met, everywhere, there is no need to bring in laws to limit births.
3. Encouraging more births?
Val Stevens: Actually, Italy doesn't have a reducing population; it has a very low fertility rate (children per woman) so its population could fall, but the space is filled up with people coming in from other countries (net inward migration). This is happening in several countries that could be starting to reduce. The space just fills up, so there is no benefit to the environment. Governments encourage births because of wanting a large workforce to pay taxes, and wanting continuous economic growth which requires endless demand for homes, cars, roads washing machines. Population decline is seen as a threat to all of this. So governments will even PAY women to have children. In Australia you get $4,000 dollars per child! (And they have a huge water crisis!)
4. Population reduction and pensions.
Val Stevens: It's probably true that we have to accept a later pensionable age, because people are living so much longer. Only 30 years ago pension funds relied on a great many of their members dying after 3 or 4 years retirement.
On the other hand, children are a great drain on the exchequer: whether for schooling, or health care, for further education possibly until they are in their twenties now, and for family benefit and income support payments. Many young people are not contributing through income tax until late teens or mid twenties. So, when we talk of 'dependency ratios' it's not a help if you greatly boost the group of young dependents in order to one day pay for the support of the old-age dependents.
Maybe we will all have to think of retirement in a different way.
5. Increasingly life expectancy
Val Stevens: I feel like screaming when I hear the crazy notions of keeping people alive until they are 130 or whatever. If, for the sake of the natural environment and the great diversity of species on the planet, we conclude that the human population must level off at some number that is ecologically sustainable, then having millions of lives extended and extended means having very many fewer children. No more births than deaths.
What I call 'the medical project' - to keep us all alive whatever we're suffering, and not let us die of anything, is madness.
Having said that - the shocking death-rates in poor countries, often of children and young adults, must be addressed; but so as not to make the poverty worse, saving many people from premature death
must be accompanied by avoiding too many of them being born in the first place.
6. What do we go for – limiting individual consumption or limiting the number of consumers?
Val Stevens: OPT always says we must do both. The main environmental organizations try to assure us that hugely reducing the consumption per person in developed countries, through clever technology and altered lifestyles, will allow poor countries to greatly increase their per person consumption to a fair level – and all of this will take the pressure off the environment. Yet the planet is under huge stress now with 6.7 billion; what will it be like if we accept as inevitable 2 – 3 billion more consumers?
With birth-rates declining in most countries we can see that, given the means and the choice, most women will opt to have fewer children. We cannot see a similar pattern of people opting to greatly reduce their consumption. But anyway, the latter is a political problem that must be grasped, while the efforts to provide birth-control wherever it is wanted must be hugely stepped up.
7. A country with a good population policy?
Val Stevens: There are countries like Bangladesh which has made great efforts – government promoting in every way the advantages of smaller families, and making contraception available in the simplest way, even condoms at every corner shop.
We may not think much of Iran in other ways, but it has made huge strides on population policy. It succeeded in halving its total fertility rate in just eight years, from family size of 5.2 children to 2.6 in 1996, after a census and a decision to seriously reduce the country’s rapid population growth. A network of ‘health houses’ was set up to ensure a good supply of contraceptives, and Islamic scholars removed any perceived religious obstacles to the use of birth-control methods. Maternal mortality fell from 237 per hundred thousand maternities in 1974 to 37 in 1996; infant mortality fell from 104 per thousand deliveries, to 26 in the same period. This was a voluntary ‘two-child-policy’ leading to a reduction in fertility as rapid as that in China, but without any coercion. Women benefited and, so did children, and so did the country’s economic health.
In the UK we would like to see a population policy aimed at gradually stabilizing and then reducing the population to what is ecologically sustainable. It might include the following: the phasing out of payments which support the rearing of more than two or three children; more support given to girls (education , work opportunities, grants possibly) to avoid teenage pregnancy; and measures to ensure that inward migration is no more than outward migration.
8. People leaving the UK
Val Stevens: It’s difficult to know why so many people want to leave the UK. Perhaps because it feels so over-crowded?
Whatever the reason for leaving, over the last five or six years there have been many more people
coming in to the UK than leaving it. The government figures have been showing a net gain of population of nearly quarter of a million each year from this trend. (This is added to natural increase – births minus deaths – to give the total increase each year.) Even with 6 million leaving, some projections are for our population to increase from the present 60 million to 71 million in 2031.
One way of balancing the UK population would be to persuade many more people to leave and reside elsewhere. But some desirable countries like Australia have pretty strict entry rules. In any case a human being is a consumer wherever he or she lives and is impacting on the planet’s ecology; and if you went to Australia you would exert a very large impact!
9. Factor Four efficiencies.
Val Stevens: I read Amory Lovins’s book ‘Factor Four’ with great interest. He urges us to use the latest technologies to cut waste of resources, to increase efficiencies of production and use, to recycle and re-use. Population–denying environmentalists extol Lovins’s work as demonstrating that human numbers don’t matter, because technology can hugely lesson each individual’s impact. However, Lovins himself says: even if we
do all he recommends (and who rates the chances!) over the next two decades, that would only give us a breathing space to get population under control and non growing, and would only then start to bring any benefit to the environment. So, to repeat, we have to do both: everything possible to reduce each ‘footprint’, and everything possible - humanely - to halt the increase in ‘feet’.
10. Will we ever colonise other planets?
Val Stevens: Heavens, I should hope not. Make a mess of them too?
Thanks Val, some very interesting answers.
Interview with Val Stevens Transcript
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