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The continuous and increasing ineffectiveness of global institutions such as the UN stems in part from clinging to antiquated ideologies and in part from the use of primitive mental tools. The State of World Population 2004 report has examples of this, especially in the Population and Environment section. It is worth noting that this organization has been wrong repeatedly in its population projections and has repeatedly revised them. There's no shame in being wrong but it is instructive, revealing that their models are inadequate and their assumptions are false. They don't know what they are doing and this report should be discounted appropriately, but it's what we have to work with.
There is a link between environmental stress and population size but it isn't simple or obvious. People are not like wildebeests, locked into instinctual and relatively invariant behaviors by biology. Culture can mask the plasticity of humans, make them seem less creative and adaptable, but cultures evolve too, more like living things than machines. Unfortunately, the UNFPA is mired in steam age views of humans and societies and advocates manipulating them as if they were machines rather than living things. The UNFPA still clings to the disastrously wrong headed formulations that dominated Agenda 21, adopted by the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio in 1992.
Efforts to slow down population growth, to reduce poverty, to achieve economic progress, to improve environmental protection, and to reduce unsustainable consumption and production patterns are mutually reinforcing. Slower population growth has in many countries increased those countries’ ability to attack poverty, protect and repair the environment, and build the base for future sustainable development.This is a steam age version of a virtuous circle, quoted from the action plan of the International Conference on Population and Development and highlighted in the UNFPA report. It's an object-observer approach, a god's eye perspective of society that seeks to manipulate humans as if they were objects, parts of a simple machine that can be controlled. Worse, it's wrong. The closest it gets to correctness is in getting some things reversed.
Population growth is driven by fertility rates and mortality rates. When more people are born or fewer people die population increases. Prosperity is even more complex than population growth since it depends on many other factors including demographics, especially the average age of a population, but gender and education are just as important.
Environmental protection, like prosperity, is also more complex than population growth since it depends on many other factors including prosperity. A large but prosperous population, such as in Netherlands where population density is the highest in Europe, can be very protective of the environment. A comparatively smaller population that is impoverished will be far less protective. This isn't a moral or ethical issue, it's necessity.
The UNFPA confusions don't matter much to the narrow issue of population management. Offering technologies to undeveloped people that allow them more control over their fertility as well as improved health for the living are worthy acts. The problem is that UNFPA is wedded to the nonsensical ideas of Rio 92 which see the world in static terms and are addicted to linear projection. Their vision of progress is restricted to sacrifice; they seek to reduce population and reduce wealth to reduce strain on the environment.
Environmental stress is increasing, due to both “unsustainable consumption and production patterns” (including high resource consumption in wealthy countries and among better-off groups in all countries) and demographic factors such as rapid population growth, population distribution and migration...This is all complete nonsense. The I=PAT formulation is a childish confusion coupling static and linear thinking that is falsified any number of ways in any number of places. Environmental impact may rise, fall or be unaffected by any of the variables depending on particulars, but more importantly the impact isn't linear, doesn't continue with the same slope, and even changes direction. The classic example is Kuznets curves which show that impact increases, levels off, and reverses as population, prosperity and technology increase. But this isn't known to be inevitable, it depends on the views of society and how those views are affected by prosperity. No simple formulation, neither IPAT nor Kuznets, usefully describes or predicts futures.Numbers alone do not capture the impact of the interactions between human populations and the environment. The size and weight of the environmental footprint each person plants on Earth is determined by the ways people use resources, which affects the quantities they consume. For instance, a vegetarian who primarily uses a bicycle has a much smaller impact than someone who eats meat and drives a sport utility vehicle.
The ecological footprint of an average person in a high-income country is about six times bigger than that of someone in a low-income country, and many more times bigger than in the least-developed countries. The combined footprints of people in a region determine the prospects for saving or permanently losing the biological diversity found there.
Many economists and environmentalists use an equation that ties together population, consumption and technology to describe their relative impacts (I=PAT: Impact=Population x Affluence x Technology)...
A rapidly growing global consumer class, now around 1.7 billion people, accounts for the vast majority of meat eating, paper use, car driving, and energy use on the planet, as well as the resulting impact of these activities on its natural resources. This class is not limited to industrialized countries; as populations surge in developing countries and as the world economy becomes increasingly globalized, more and more people have the means to acquire a greater diversity of products and services than ever before...
Where population growth and high levels of consumption coincide, as they do in some industrial nations, the impact of growth is significant. For instance, even though the United States’ population is only a fourth as large as India’s, its environmental footprint is over three times bigger—it releases 15.7 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year compared with India’s 4.9 million tons.(4) Hence the impact of the current 3 million annual population increase in the United States is greater than that of India’s 16 million increase.
Environmental impact can continue to grow even as population growth levels off. In China, population growth has slowed dramatically, but consumption of oil and coal and the resulting pollution continues to rise. While the Chinese Government is promoting greater fuel efficiency for cars (see Box 6), it is not promoting increased use of public transportation, biking and walking, or efficient urban planning so people would not have to drive.
The idea of controlling humanity is broken, it can't work, and the focus on environmental footprints makes things worse rather than better. The fundamental false assumption of such thinking is that there is a finite supply of resources that are not evenly distributed. This leads to worries about overconsumption and redistribution, thus the assertion that "a vegetarian who primarily uses a bicycle has a much smaller impact than someone who eats meat and drives a sport utility vehicle." This is false since it depends entirely on the methods used to produce food and transportation. Producing field and row crops for consumption by vegetarians can be much more environmentally destructive than producing meat and milk. An SUV can be environmentally benign depending on how it is powered. Worse, this ignores the productivity of humans and the content of the products they consume, a crucial factor since the knowledge content of products is asymptotically approaching 100%.
Reducing environmental impact and reversing damage already done requires a large, affluent, technologically advanced human population. The primitive methods of our immature past were not benign and caused environmental devastation even with tiny populations. The idea of sustainability based on small populations that migrate from ruined places to new locations or locations abandoned long enough ago that they have recovered and are ready to exploit again is deranged, anti-humanist, and though it may take a long time ultimately doomed to failure. The idea of sustainability based on such low population numbers and low engagement with the world that migration isn't required since the environment can endure their predations is an even more bleakly anti-humanist vision. Neither idea is possible and both show a profound lack of comprehension about what humans are like.