9.2 Billion Carbon Copies: The Impact of Demography on Climate Change

9.2 Billion Carbon Copies: The Impact of Demography on Climate Change

July 21, 2009 By Gib Clarke

As the number of contributing factors to (and potential solutions for) climate change grows, one—population growth—is conspicuously absent from most discussions. For obvious reasons: After finally prevailing over climate change “skeptics,” why would U.S. climate advocates court more controversy by adding population, and thus family planning and even abortion, to the mix?

Because it could be an important—perhaps significant—and definitely cheap part of solving the climate crisis, argued David Wheeler of the Center for Global Development (CGD) at an ambitious June 23rd event in the CGD series on “Demographics and Development.” Covering both climate change and population issues, he offered a compelling economic analysis of the effectiveness of family planning and female education programs at addressing climate change. Equally impressive was Wheeler’s engaging style, including graphics and animations that could make Gapminder guru Hans Rosling blush.

Describing Pacala and Socolow’s oft-cited “wedge” theory of stabilizing emissions, Wheeler pointed out that slowing population growth is rarely discussed, compared to the more popular—and more costly—wedges related to reduced deforestation, energy efficiency and conservation, renewable electricity and fuels, and carbon capture and storage.

Wheeler argued that slowing population growth has great potential for reduce emissions at a lower cost. As population increases, so do emissions. As a country develops, its per-capita emissions increase, so population increases in more developed countries are especially important. As the middle class in the BRIC and other large developing nations grows, this sizable group of “New Americans” (to use Thomas Friedman’s term) will contribute more and more emissions.

Two interventions will contribute the most to slowing population growth: family planning and female education, said Wheeler. According to his calculations, a $10 billion increase in female education in the developing world would lead to a change in population growth substantial enough to achieve one of the stabilization wedges. Wheeler found that family planning and female education are among the most cost-effective strategies, as evidenced by their placement on the far left side of slides 22 and 25.

Though an economist by training, Wheeler did not make only financial arguments: He emphasized throughout his presentation that family planning and female education are worthy and necessary programs in their own right. And he pointed out the most glaring injustice of climate change: While people in developed countries have the largest carbon footprints, people in developing countries will disproportionately suffer the impacts. (Suzanne Petroni makes similar points in her ECSP Report 13 article, “An Ethical Approach to Population and Climate Change.”)

Tim Wirth, the president of the UN Foundation and the Better World Fund, called for more political and financial support for this link. Funding for family planning has fallen and support for female education is not as high as it should be. Reaching the unmet need of the world’s women would cost about $20 billion, and the U.S. “share” is $1 billion, an amount that many U.S. family planning leaders are advocating.

As CGD’s Rachel Nugent noted in her introduction, demography and climate are classic cases of long-term issues: difficult to understand and address. It is ironic and important, she said, that two such long-term issues are simultaneously at critical moments. The work of David Wheeler on population and climate change, along with that of Leiwen Jiang of Population Action International and Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, may help us find an important and inexpensive piece of an elusive and otherwise expensive pie.

More data is needed to confirm these initial findings. However, the devil may not be in the details but in the debate: convincing weary and wary climate warriors to take on a bit more controversy.

Topics: climate change, economics, family planning, population
- http://cooltheearth.wordpress.com/ cooltheearth
  
  Population control is a good thing, of course, mainly in poor regions where fertility is high. I disagree, however, with the view that it should be promoted as a way to mitigate climate change.
  One more person in the US is not the same as one more person in India, for instance. And one more person in a rich family in the US is not the same as one more person in a poor family. The individual carbon footprint varies largely across regions, so the calculations we have to make are not as easy as "-x people born = -y% emissions".
  Furthermore, the "Population Bomb" argument can take catastrophic dimensions. When James Lovelock, for instance, argues that there should be only 500 million people on Earth, I think: who is going to decide who survives? What are we talking about here? Genocide? I'm dramatizing, of course, and I know that the author of the text above doesn't defend such a cruel solution. What I want to emphasize is that the population control argument, when applied to the least developed countries, ends up placing the responsibility for global warming on the "least guilty" (the poorest) and can even lead to racist theories.
  Ricardo Coelho
- http://www.blogger.com/profile/18337694112852162181 Geoff Dabelko
  
  In light of Ricardo's comment, it is worth remembering that discussion population (I would discard population control as a term abandoned by those in the field after the Cairo conference in 1994) encompasses both developed and developing countries. This new piece from Global Environmental Change for example illustrates the interesting scientific questions that should not be neglected because of poor past policies regarding populations in developing countries. Entitled "Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals," the abstract reads as follows:
  
  Much attention has been paid to the ways that people’s home energy use, travel, food choices and other routine activities affect their emissions of carbon dioxide and, ultimately, their contributions to global warming. However, the reproductive choices of an individual are rarely incorporated into calculations of his personal impact on the environment. Here we estimate the extra emissions of fossil carbon dioxide that an average individual causes when he or she chooses to have children. The summed emissions of a person’s descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him, may far exceed the lifetime emissions produced by the original parent. Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions. A person’s reproductive choices must be considered along with his day-to-day activities when assessing his ultimate impact on the global environment.
- http://www.populationaction.org/Index.shtml Jeff Locke and Clive Mutunga
  
  To Gib’s point that the “devil may not be in the details but in the debate” around climate change and population, it seems that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton agrees. In India this week, Secretary Clinton said she found it an “incredibly important” point and that it is “odd to talk about climate change and what we must to do to stop and prevent the ill effects without talking about population and family planning.” The Secretary also said siloed discussions result in “talking about these things in very separate and often unconnected ways.” Some might add that this is unhelpful to both the debates and solutions around climate change and family planning/reproductive health (RH/FP).
  
  At Population Action International (PAI), we’ve embarked on a multi-year program of research, advocacy, and strategic communications to demonstrate the critical relationships among population, gender, and climate change. Gib kindly referenced Dr. Leiwen Jang’s work at PAI, where he has spearheaded efforts in furthering our understanding of the influence of population on greenhouse gas emissions, demonstrating how demographic variables relate to climate change vulnerability, and working to expand the concept of climate change resilience by highlighting critical gender, fertility, and reproductive health dimensions.
  
  In a three part research series that explores the role of population dynamics in climate change mitigation and adaptation, PAI has begun to bridge the dialogues around climate change and FP/RH. The first working paper demonstrates that strong evidence exists that shows that demographic change is closely associated with greenhouse gas emissions, and that population dynamics which incorporate demographic trends (including fertility, population growth, urbanization, migration from environmentally depleted areas, and growing population density in marginal and vulnerable areas) will play a key role in attempts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The second piece demonstrates how population growth is not adequately accounted for in the emissions scenarios produced by the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
  
  PAI has also pioneered research to investigate how population and RH/FP are addressed as part of developing countries’ adaptation agenda. A forthcoming paper reviews 41 National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) prepared by Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to identify priority urgent and immediate adaptation actions for funding through the UNFCCC. While most of the LDCs in their NAPAs recognize the importance of population in climate change adaptation, they rarely consider FP/RH as part of their adaptation strategies, even though most of these countries have populations which are projected to at least double by 2050.
  
  As the debate moves forward, policies that address population, including access to RH/FP and female education should be increasingly recognized as potential solutions to climate change.

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