COPENHAGEN — If you scan the most recent drafts of the climate agreement that delegates here are trying to complete, you’ll have a hard time finding the word population. I’m quite sure it’s not there. (Please let me know if you find it.) This is politically unsurprising, given how discussions of population growth inflame those fearing control measures, those with religious concerns about contraception and sometimes those seeing underpopulation where others see a problem. (There are other interesting reactions when the intersection of climate and population is explored.)
The importance of population size in gauging emissions trends was raised by Chinese officials here, who noted that their one-child policies reduced births by 400 million and emissions of carbon dioxide by some 18 million tons a year. In the first week of the meeting, Zhao Baige, vice minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said the policies had some mixed consequences, with the country now aging and facing a paucity of girls. “I’m not saying that what we have done is 100 percent right, but I’m sure we are going in the right direction and now 1.3 billion people have benefited,” she said.
Overall, it’s clear that in a world heading toward +/- 9 billion people seeking decent lives, both numbers and habits matter enormously. In my recent chat with Ed Miliband, the lead British climate official here, I mentioned my piece from awhile ago examining how even a best-case scenario for emissions of carbon dioxide in a world with that many people leads to an enormous buildup of the gas. In that post, I’d picked 10 tons per person per year — Europe’s current emissions level — as the middle ground. Suppose the United States saw emissions drop to 10 and developing countries, with emissions typically 1 to 5 tons a year, rose to that level. You’d have 90 billion tons a year of carbon dioxide produced (emissions are now well over 30 billion tons a year).
With Mr. Miliband, I mused on a world achieving Europe’s planned 2020 target of 6 tons per person per year (which is also where China’s emissions are projected to be around then). At 9 billion people, that’s 54 billion tons a year.
If you want to examine how trends in population, agriculture, climate and vulnerability interlace, Population Action International has created an interactive, interlaced set of maps allowing anyone to examine trends in numbers, agricultural production, temperature and resilience.
Sub-Saharan Africa, unsurprisingly, is a hot spot for vulnerability driven substantially by rising numbers of people. But it’s also a region where forecasts of impacts from global warming remain somewhat equivocal. So if population is poised to double in a region that is already regularly beset by epic droughts and devastating floods, and if building greenhouse gases are likely, but not certain, to exacerbate that pattern, how can population be excluded from any discussion of ways to limit exposure to climate risks?