The overpopulation myth, debunked by a data scientist

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If you go back in human history, I'm sure the silver bullet of many environmental problems was just

there's just too many people. If we had less people, this problem would be solved

This particular overpopulation concern became really prominent in the 1960s and the 1970s

At the time, the big concern of the day was how we could produce enough food for a rapidly growing global population

This is really brought to the fore with the publication of the book The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich in 1968

I think there are many people of this same opinion today who still really strongly argue that the root of our environmental problems is that there are just too many people on Earth

So some of the really alarming proposals on how to tackle overpopulation

are, for example, adding sterilants to the water or food supply, offering responsibility prizes for families that chose not to have children

offering lotteries where you only get into the lottery if you're a couple that hasn't had children

removing financial support for families of a given size, or some of the most morbid, which is that

And especially for lower-income countries, not just this notion of forced or encouraged sterilisation, but also the withdrawal of food aid packages

There was often this framing of a triage system where some countries in the world might be redeemable and maybe we should help those countries to feed themselves

But some countries were past this point They could never be able to feed themselves and therefore we should withdraw any food aid I think there was two key things that the prominence of the population bomb or this overpopulation argument got wrong I think the first one is that they underestimated

the impact of the demographic transition. I think they assumed that the world population would

continue to grow exponentially and it hasn't. While the global population is still growing

In fact, it's growing at a much slower rate. Global population growth rates peaked decades ago and have halved since then

If we look at projections into the future, the UN, for example, expects that global population will peak

well before the end of the century and start to decline. The key thing that they underestimated here was the fall in global fertility rates

Now, this is the kind of average number of children that an average woman would have

Now, globally, in 1950, that was around five. So every woman would have, on average, five children

That has since fallen to 2.3 children per woman. And this is true across most countries in the world

I think the other key thing the proponents of this underestimated was the massive technological advancements we've seen in agriculture

The issue at the time was that we wondered how we would produce enough food for a growing population

but not only has global population growth slowed, we've also massively increased the amount of food we can produce

Crop yields across the world have doubled, tripled or quadrupled over the last 50 years

which means that the amount of food we produce per person has actually gone up, not down

despite the fact that we have billions of more people on earth

I think a key argument that people often say in terms of climate change

that there just far too many people And they often point to particular countries where fertility rates are still very high There are some countries for example across Africa where the average number of children per

woman is four or five. I think what's really key to highlight here is that in these countries where

fertility rates are very high, the incomes are low and per capita CO2 emissions are also very

very low, extremely low. That means that when you do the maths on this, you could actually add

billions of people at those very low incomes, it would have almost no impact on global CO2 emissions

I think the other issue that some people are now highlighting is the notion of underpopulation

Actually, population growth slows down too much and it creates particular problems

I think this won't be a problem for many countries in the world, but I think for some, especially richer countries

with ageing populations, you will start to see problems with particular demographics and particular balances

of different demographics. The key problem with ageing populations is that within a country

you want a large number of people in the kind of working age bracket

Those are the people that are propping up the economy and driving the economy forward

I think the problem that some countries will have with large ageing populations is that they won't have

a large enough group of people in the working age category. I think there is this comparison

that's often made by people that say that the problem is overpopulation, is that humans

are often compared to cancer. While it's true that we do have environmental impacts and

we do have large problems to solve, I think it's a very dire prediction that we don't

contribute anything to the world If your messaging is that the human in front of you is a cancer what you saying is that you don want them to be there and you think they should be removed If this is going to be the comparison we make on how to tackle environmental problems it

a really damaging messaging and just one that won't get us there

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