Source: Masri L (2019) “Two is enough” Egypt tells poor families as population booms. The Star.

Preface. Nature is one of the top science journals, so it is a big deal that Nature finally acknowledged a growing population will wreak enormous havoc on the world, and that the best way to slow the human juggernaut of destruction is for women to be able to control their own bodies and lives.

Fewer people is the only way to slow down climate change, pollution, poverty,  depletion of  (rain)forests, topsoil, aquifers, housing shortages, low-paying jobs and unemployment, and so on. Can you even think of a single problem that would not be helped by fewer people?

Good news:

O’Grady S (2022) As climate change worsens, Egypt is begging families to have fewer kids. The Washington Post.   The Egyptian government sees large families as a grave threat— and has spent millions of dollars  to convince parents to have no more than two children, calling the population crisis a national security issue that has hindered progress on development goals. As the host of COP27, Egypt has vowed to champion African concerns, which include how rapid population growth may heighten countries’ vulnerability to climate change.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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John Bongaarts. February 24, 2016. Development: Slow down population growth. Nature #530.

Within a decade, women everywhere should have access to quality contraceptive services, argues John Bongaarts.

In 2100, our planet is expected to be home to 11.2 billion people. That’s a more than 50% increase on today’s 7.3 billion¹. This expansion of humanity is likely to be spread unevenly across the world. In the most developed regions, we expect declines (such as in Europe and east Asia) or little further growth (as in the Americas; see ‘Bulges, gaps and shifts’). Substantial further growth is anticipated in the least developed regions of south and west Asia (including in India and Pakistan) and north Africa (for example, in Egypt). By far the largest increase is projected in sub-Saharan Africa with a quadrupling of population — from just shy of 1 billion currently to 3.9 billion.

This potential addition of 4 billion people to the poorest regions of the globe is an obstacle to development that makes it difficult to be optimistic about their futures. Rapid population growth, with attendant consumption and waste, has pervasive adverse effects on societies and the world’s ecosystems (see ‘Four ways population rise takes its toll’). Many countries would be better off with lower population growth and birth rates. This is exemplified by the east Asian ‘tiger’ economies, including South Korea and Taiwan, that in recent decades have seen rapid increases in per capita incomes as birth rates declined. The boost to economic growth that follows a decline in fertility is referred to as the ‘demographic dividend’².

So, how can the population juggernaut be stopped, or at least slowed?

Family-planning programs are most effective where socio-economic conditions are improving. In particular, education of girls is a powerful brake on fertility. Educated women marry later, tend to want smaller families and are more capable of overcoming obstacles to their use of family planning. However, educated women must have access to contraception to act on their reproductive preferences. Family planning, education (of women and men) and socio-economic development are mutually reinforcing, and should be pursued together.

Evolution of support

Family-planning programs have been controversial, and support for them has fluctuated widely over the past half-century³. An initial surge of investment was made in the 1960s and early 1970s, as the UN and donor countries urged developing countries to address high fertility and rapid population growth. Several such countries accused the industrialized nations of making neo-colonial and imperialistic efforts to keep them weak and impoverished.

The Catholic Church, long opposed to artificial birth control and abortion, took an increasingly aggressive stance in opposition to government-sponsored family planning programs worldwide. And when Republicans have occupied the White House, US lawmakers have also generally been unsupportive of international family-planning programs — reducing funding and adding onerous restrictions.

Nonetheless, contraceptive use rose steadily in Asia and Latin America during the 1980s (see go.nature.com/r2oqrl). Then, in the 1990s, aid for family planning was diverted to fight the AIDS epidemic in Africa and elsewhere. Moreover, the fertility declines in Asia and Latin America led to optimism that population growth in Africa would soon slow.

Political and religious opponents were able to draw support for their views from a disagreement stirring in the academic literature: some economists argued that voluntary family-planning programs are ineffective⁸. Conventional economic theory considers parents as people who want to maximize utility, and, who — within their budget — choose the number of children that they have in the same way that they might choose how many televisions or bicycles to buy.

An obvious problem with this reasoning is that durable goods require an active purchase, whereas pregnancies occur unless an effort is made to avoid them. Furthermore, economic theories also typically assume that the cost (monetary, social and practical) of contraception is sufficiently low so as not to influence decision-making. From this academic perspective, the occurrence of unwanted pregnancies should be as rare as people having unwanted new televisions; thus family-planning schemes should not be given priority.

Needless to say, that is not how things work in the real world. Avoiding unintended pregnancies is difficult even for women who use relatively effective methods and as a result, tens of millions of such pregnancies occur each year. Happily, the accumulating evidence of plummeting birth rates in a few countries (such as Ethiopia and Rwanda) has now largely persuaded policymakers of the cost-effectiveness of these programs⁹. Religious and political opposition persists.

What now?

To reduce rapid population growth and high birth rates, it is essential to start with a clear objective: within a decade, women everywhere should have access to quality contraceptive services. Even in rural areas of poor countries, women should have the choice of multiple contraceptive methods — including not only pills, injectables and barrier methods, but also long-acting methods such as intrauterine devices and systems (IUDs and IUSs), implants and sterilization. Legal, safe abortion services should be made available. Other obstacles to contraceptive use, such as incorrect rumors about side effects and conservative social attitudes, should be addressed by the education of women and men, media campaigns and collaboration with community leaders.

These efforts can be led by governments but better results are obtained when services are distributed through multiple channels, including private commercial providers and non-governmental organizations. Importantly, coercion of any kind should be ruled out. Women and men have the right to decide freely on the number, timing and spacing of children, and on the means to achieve their reproductive goals.

Achieving these aims requires substantially more resources than are available now. Funds are needed to build and equip clinics, to train and pay providers and to subsidize the direct cost of methods and services that are out of the reach of too many poor people. Over the past decade, investments in the developing world have risen, especially after the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning, at which many donors and governments renewed or increased their commitments.

Still, only 1% of all overseas development assistance (ODA) is now allocated to family planning¹⁰. This amount is inadequate; in too many countries, programs remain weak and political commitment is lacking.

The proportion of ODA allocated to family planning should be raised to 2% and developing-countries governments should expand their funding by an equivalent proportion. Such a doubling of funding will be more than repaid by savings in other sectors such as education and health care in future years.

From the top

The final, crucial ingredient for success is political will and a commitment to family planning at the highest levels of national and international policy making. A fundamental reason for the low priority assigned to the issue is that it is considered a health and human-rights problem.

Hence, family planning is part of the health budgets of donors and the responsibility for family-planning programs is assigned to ministers of health throughout the developing world. Most poor countries are battling a range of diseases, and family planning is often not seen as a high health priority. From a broader development perspective, the low priority is nonsensical.

Several actions would remedy this situation. At the international level, development agencies and donors should hire more population experts (the World Bank, for example, employs thousands of economists but only a few demographers). These organizations write hundreds of reports on every dimension of development, yet only a fraction comment on population trends. Such reports should include a discussion of the role of demographic shifts in relevant sectors, of the development benefits of reduced birth rates and of the options available to change these trends.

At the national level, similar changes are needed. Typically, population trends are noted in government plans but are considered immutable and therefore of little interest. Ministries of finance or planning commissions often make detailed projections for specific sectors but rarely examine alternative population trajectories. They should. Economists at the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank, last year ranked family planning as one of the most cost-effective development interventions (see go.nature.com/fumoop).

Family planning must be reclassified as a development intervention (as well as being a health and human-rights intervention) to give it the high national and global priority it deserves. This would lead to a more cost-effective use of scarce development resources, and to more rapid growth in living standards in poor countries.

References

1. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2015. World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision. United Nations.
2. Bloom, D. E., et al. 2003. The Demographic Dividend.  RAND Corporation.
3. May, J. F. 2012. World Population Policies: Their Origin, Evolution, and Impact. Springer.
4. Singh, S., Darroch, J. E. & Ashford, L. S. Adding It Up: The Costs and Benefits of Investing in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Guttmacher Institute, 2014).
5. Cleland, J., et al. 1994. The Determinants of Reproductive Change in Bangladesh: Success in a Challenging Environment.  World Bank.
6. Abbasi-Shavazia, M. J. et al. 2006. Fertility decline in the Islamic republic of Iran: 1972–2000. Asian Pop. Stud. 2, 217–237.
7. Westoff, C. F., Popul. Dev. Rev. 38 (suppl. 1), 169–178 (2013).
8. Pritchett, L. 1994. Desired Fertility and the Impact of Population Policies. Popul. Dev. Rev. 20, 1–55
9. Bongaarts, J., et al. 2012. Family Planning Programs for the 21st Century: Rationale and Design Population Council).
10. Wexler, A. & Kates, J. 2015.  Donor Government Assistance for Family Planning in 2014.  Kaiser Family Foundation.