Abstract ~ In this paper, we enjoin the United Nations to forge a path out of our plight of multiple environmental and social crises. With other analysts, we identify “overshoot”–the state in which humanity has substantially outpaced Earth’s capacity to regenerate its natural systems and to absorb our waste output–as the root cause of the existential threats we face. This dangerous condition demands rethinking our relationship with Earth and embarking on scaling down the human enterprise within policy frameworks of equity and rights. We argue that when the UN first articulated its international unity and prosperity mission, it did so within a “growth” paradigm that treats Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants as mere resources at humanity’s disposal. The 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development reinforced this agenda, with its sharp turn away from the earlier emphasis on population concerns and their link to environmental protection. Today, it is clear that the UN’s foundational goals of peace, human rights, and sustainability flounder within a growth-driven framework of human exceptionalism and nature domination. To correct course and reverse our advanced state of ecological overshoot, we urge the UN to lead in contracting the large-scale variables of the human enterprise—population, economy, technosphere—and to resist co-optation by political, ideological, and special interest pressures that would derail this mandate.
Keywords ~ pronatalism, degrowth, ecological justice, human rights, United Nations, ecological overshoot, human exceptionalism
Introduction
The United Nations (UN) was created in 1945 with the pledge to uphold world peace and serve as an institutional setting for collaboration among all nations. It was forged from ideas that were prevalent at the time: that endless economic growth brings prosperity and wellbeing, that human ingenuity can overcome all constraints to growth, and that nature and nonhumans exist as “resources” to serve us.
Confronting ecological overshoot
Today, these ideas underpin our advanced condition of overshoot: where the growth of the global economy has outpaced the capacity of Earth’s natural systems to process waste and regenerate. With the UN’s enthusiastic backing, the human enterprise continues to accelerate - to the point where the global human and livestock populations now comprise 96 percent of mammalian biomass and the mass of the technosphere exceeded the weight of all living beings by 2020. Overshoot is a recipe for climate breakdown, mass extinction, and global toxification, destabilising all complex life and undermining humanity’s prospects for survival. It also has enormous potential to fuel conflict.
The UN’s abandonment of early population activity
Earlier in the UN’s history, the institution embraced the necessity of addressing population. Its first population conferences triggered extraordinary international investment in education for women and girls and publicly funded family planning programs, which brought tremendous gains in lowered fertility, reduced poverty and enhanced autonomy for women and girls.
Yet at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, feminist and social justice advocates, religious conservatives, and trade and economic interests united to delegitimize population concerns. Proponents of neoliberal economic ideology held that human population increase was necessary for economic growth, and that opening markets for trade would itself lower fertility. The presence of the Vatican and other conservative religious interests at Cairo, and their vociferous opposition to birth control and abortion, cemented the shift away from voluntary family planning policies and female empowerment. Feminists, concerned by instances of coercive “population control” efforts, also upheld this new population denialism.
The consequences have been devastating: since Cairo, international funding for family planning has plummeted and fertility declines in many countries have stalled or reversed. An enormous blind spot at Cairo was the enormous sway of pronatalism - the patriarchal, religious, nationalistic and economic pressures on women to bear children. Pronatalism emerged some 5,000 years ago with the rise of early states that depended on population expansion and seizure of resources to consolidate power, and remains a pervasive engine of population growth.
To this day, the role of population in ecological and human wellbeing remains a largely proscribed subject within the UN. The 2023 State of World Population (SWOP)report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), is glibly titled “8 Billion Lives, Infinite Possibilities,” and dismisses numerous studies by reputable scientists that draw conclusive links between growth in human numbers and climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, species extinctions, resource scarcity, conflict, poverty, food insecurity and more, labelling those studies ‘modern Malthusianism’ – a term popularised by the pro-growth and religious right movement of the 1980s. Instead, the report vaguely alludes to ‘reducing emissions’ and ‘increasing sustainable production and consumption’ as strategies to address climate change, while leaving virtually unacknowledged that climate change is but one existential threat out of many in our state of overshoot.
The report goes so far as to deny outright the relevance of population size, citing a statement from the Union of Concerned Scientists that, ‘A misplaced focus on population growth as a key driver of... climate change conflates a rise in emissions with an increase in people, rather than... an increase in cars, power plants, airplanes, industries, buildings’. The implication here is that the technology and infrastructures that produce climate-wrecking emissions are wielded solely by a consumer minority residing in wealthy, low-fertility countries. This view entirely discounts the global reality of a rising middle class that is responsible for all that technology and infrastructures – a global consumer class that is projected to reach five billion within this decade alone. The report’s view appears to assume that the billions of people living in poverty today will not seek to improve their standard of living and thus increase their share in ‘cars, power plants, airplanes, industries, buildings’. Meanwhile, the ignored science behind the UN-sponsored IPCC report conclusively shows that, ‘Globally, GDP per capita and population growth remained the strongest drivers of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the last decade’.
SWOP 2023 ignores pronatalist pressures
UNFPA’s refusal to consider the population factor is based on its contention that to do so places responsibility for the climate and other global crises on women and girls, thus ‘weaponizing ... women’s rights to contraception and education’. What the report elides, however, is that these very rights are violated by pronatalist pressures worldwide: women and girls regularly face domestic violence, sexual abuse, divorce, economic marginalisation and social ostracism as a result of their inability or refusal to have the number of children dictated by high-fertility societal norms. Pronatalist pressures are only worsening, with numerous countries spreading alarmist rhetoric about ‘human population collapse’ to justify policies ranging from baby bonuses and legally reduced marital age, to restricting abortion and contraception, and even subsidising the multi-billion dollar assisted reproductive technologies industry.
Research shows that across the world, in country after country, once women achieve the education, empowerment and means to plan their families, fertility declines. Providing the means for women to control their fertility, while also providing science-based information about how procreation relates to climate, biodiversity, clean water and other environmental concerns, will support women to realise their latent desire for fewer, well-cared-for children and also support their decision, if they so choose, to remain childfree. Such a shift toward female empowerment would correct for millennia of patriarchal pronatalism that has pressured women to be breeding machines.
SWOP 2023 ignores the rights of children
Indeed, the most glaring oversight of a report devoted to reproduction matters was the omission of any mention, let alone discussion, of the rights of children to be born into conditions that support their material, psychological and spiritual wellbeing. This omission was especially reprehensible given recent reports that warn of the dangers to children’s rights posed by population growth and climate change. A combination of rapid population growth and limited social protection measures have led to a steep increase in the global numbers of extremely poor children, especially in Africa and South Asia where nearly ninety per cent of the world’s children caught in extreme poverty reside. Almost half of the world’s 2.2 billion children are at risk of experiencing ‘extremely dire’ conditions from the climate crisis and pollution. More than 700 million women alive today were married before the age of eighteen. The relationship between population growth, high fertility and the violation of children’s rights is especially stark in patriarchal societies. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, due to population growth alone, a doubling in the number of child brides is projected by 2050. Sub-Saharan Africa also has the highest prevalence and largest number of children in labour – another iniquitous trend projected to rise in lockstep with population growth over the coming decades. Yet these crises are barely acknowledged in the report. At this historic juncture, this represents a fateful oversight.
Dismissal of the population-environment connection is common to UN agencies
UNFPA is not the only UN agency that promotes conflicting messages on the connection between the human population and planetary health. While the 2022 IPCC climate-change mitigation report confirmed that population increase and economic growth are the main drivers of today’s burgeoning emissions, those results were censored and removed from the Summary for Policymakers. The latest UN Conference on Trade and Development report counsels developing countries to “embrace green tech revolution or risk falling behind,” which is disconcerting in light of recent studies showing that reliance on so-called green technologies to reduce emissions while maintaining economic growth will only add more devastating impacts.
The UN’s unquestioned commitment to growth underlies both its refusal to question the “clean energy transition” and its reluctance to consider reining in the enormously destructive food system. While the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2006 report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” exposed the significant contribution of greenhouse gases from animal agriculture, intense backlash from meat-producing countries caused FAO’s senior leadership to water down scientific findings in subsequent publications.
A call for the UN to embrace and implement a new ethic of degrowth and justice
We must abandon the growth paradigm and shrink the variables that underpin overshoot: lower our global population; reduce our economic activity; and contain the technosphere.
A. Reduce population
Decades of research show that providing affordable and accessible family planning and contraceptive services to all, along with education and empowerment of women and liberation of girls from child marriage, are the fundamental human rights through which fertility declines. Across the world, once women achieve the education, empowerment and means to plan their families, fertility declines - revealing women’s “latent desire” for lower fertility.
Lowering the population hinges on instituting these rights and confronting the forces of pronatalism. Reproductive norm-shifting programs such as radio shows are key to combating pronatalism, as they pave the way for both reproductive liberation and reproductive responsibility.
B. Reduce economic activity
The complexity of economic-driven impact demands a multipronged approach: reduce the workweek; eliminate the production of luxury, throwaway and planned obsolescence commodities; reduce global trade; shrink the materials- and energy- intensive global military sector; revamp the financial system away from debt and credit; and transform how we grow food and make dietary choices to vastly reduce or eliminate the devastating impacts of industrial animal agriculture.
Conclusion
It is clear that the UN needs to reassess its growth-biased orientation and extricate itself from the corporate and religious interests that are undermining its professed goals of peace, prosperity and stability. We must act as an international community, with meaningful contributions from UN leadership, to confront the root cause of our plight while there is still time to be proactive. The called-for program of action is audacious in scope but simple to articulate: there must be fewer of us, extracting, producing and consuming less, and living far more equitably within the entire community of life. At our stage of advanced overshoot, this program of action is mandatory simply for survival and prevention of unnecessary death and suffering. It also lays the groundwork for a world where biodiversity and its ecological gifts are restored to their abundances, complexity, and resilience, and there are enough sources of livelihood for all to enjoy a simple but high-quality standard of living.
In sum, countermanding overshoot with the goal of fewer of us, consuming less, with a commitment to equity is about more than survival. It promises a redirection of human history away from the modalities of conquest, colonisation, exploitation, killing, conflict, and war between humans.
LINK TO THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE WITH REFERENCES
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Nandita Bajaj ~ Population Balance, St Paul, Minnesota; and Institute for Humane Education, Antioch University, New England, USA.
Eileen Crist ~ Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Virginia Tech, Virginia, USA.
Kirsten Stade ~ Population Balance, St Paul, Minnesota, USA.
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