The climate crisis

Further warming of our atmosphere is now impossible to avoid. The effects of that warming will depend on how high and how fast the temperature rises. Global warming changes weather patterns, causing severe weather events, heatwaves, droughts and floods.

Climate change is already shrinking glaciers and ice caps, altering the availability of fresh water. It contributes to ocean acidification, destroying coral reefs and other aquatic ecosystems. It makes places uninhabitable for some plants and animals, leading to extinctions and redistribution of species, threatening food production with alien pests and diseases.

For many people in the world, the impacts of climate change are already here: extreme weather events like the Australian bushfires and floods in Kenya devastate lives, while critical impacts on agriculture such as through soil degradation and unseasonal weather lead to unpredictable and unstable crop yields – especially dangerous for the poorest.

Its potential human cost is catastrophic. A rise in sea levels threatens hundreds of millions of people in coastal communities and cities across the globe. Food and water shortages and conflict over productive land will arise, while progress in global health could be rolled back by communicable diseases such as malaria reaching places they never existed before. Hundreds of millions of people are likely to be forced to migrate from their homes by 2050.

Climate change action

There are multiple drivers of the climate crisis, among which population is only one. Overwhelmingly, emissions are produced by people in the richest countries, and industrial development and consumption patterns in the Global North are primarily responsible for the crisis we are in today. Technological solutions, personal lifestyle changes, policies to end fossil fuel use and develop alternative energy and potentially fundamental changes to our economic sytems are all vital, especially as the timescale for preventing catastrophic climate change is so short – now less than a decade, according to the IPCC. 

Whatever other changes we make, however, their positive impacts will be reduced and may even be completely cancelled out by adding emissions from hundreds of millions of new people as our population increases.

According to 2020 research evaluating 44 countries, emissions arising as a result of population growth wiped out two-thirds of the reduction in emissions arising from greater energy efficiency between 1990 and 2019. Meanwhile, solutions such as reforestation may be more difficult to implement with more people needing food and land. In its landmark 2018 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change specifically identified high population growth as a “key impediment” to hitting the critical target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Reducing the number of people being born is not a panacea for climate change, but it cuts future carbon emissions, effectively, simply and permanently, and it boosts the effectiveness of other solutions.