What do climate change, modern slavery, a microplastic crisis and a global pandemic have in common? — Overpopulation.

The topic of climate change has been growing in presence among scientists, mass media, international organizations and governments — and for very good reason. The situation is so dire it has already been declared a “climate emergency”. However in the midst of all the discussion there seems to be little to no mention of its main cause: overpopulation.

In fact, overpopulation seems to be left out of the discussion despite bringing about not just one but a whole collection of global emergencies, human rights violations and threats to humanity as a whole, of which climate change is just the tip of the melting iceberg.

Climate Change

We’ve all heard about the pressing issue of climate change and the current climate emergency. We’ve also heard the various radical solutions proposed to tackle the issue: “don’t drive cars”, “don’t fly”, “don’t eat meat”, even internet usage is being pointed out as an agent of climate change. And while any of these topics is effectively related with CO2-equivalent emissions and climate change, they all miss the point by a very wide margin. The main agent of the current climate emergency is not personal vehicles or airplanes and certainly not meat or the internet… it is overpopulation. By an enormous factor.

By such a great factor that current data shows that the decision of having one fewer child will save 58.6 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year: 24 times more than not driving any motor vehicle, 40 times more than switching to green energy and 71 times more than not eating any animal products.

Yet this urgent solution that is dozens of times more effective than the ones being repeated over and over by politicians, media and world organizations still seems to be taboo and absent from the conversation: the elephant in the room we’ve become adept at ignoring. We are looking at a boat that’s cracking from every direction and yet the only political discourse heard in the matter is “we should start considering patching the cracks with duct tape”

• Patching the cracks with duct tape

The main issue with ignoring overpopulation and suggesting other more radical measures is not only that these are less impactful by a wide margin. It is mostly that neither of these solutions is actually solving the problem: they’re just delaying it a few more years. Sure we could replace our cars with electric ones or even forego the car entirely, increasingly replace flights with travel via train, leave animal products out of the menu and adopt practices like hand-washing and drying. However even if we achieved that we’d just be giving ourselves a few more years until the climate emergency had to be tackled for good. None of the above solutions fixes the cracks in the ship. They merely patch it with duct-tape so it keeps afloat long enough for us to actually fix the cracks. And fixing the cracks means doing something about our dramatic population growth rate before it’s too late.

One of the most baffling matters in our approach to climate change is that we went straight into post-crisis measures without ever touching crisis-preventing measures. We readily accepted that climate change is going to win the fight and jumped straight at how to cope with its victory, rather than how to avoid it.

Post-crisis measures have two distinct features:

1. They recognize there’s an emergency and have their focus in effectively solving it.
2. They tend to be radical, often heavily influencing society and requiring widespread sacrifice.

One of the best examples of this is the current COVID-19 pandemic. We failed at containing the virus locally and effectively isolating it when it first spread (which would’ve been preventive measures) and we were left with an ongoing crisis that we had no chance but to take radical measures against. These measures have heavily influenced our lives, freedom, left many unemployed and in poverty, however they were still the reasonable choice compared to the crisis we would be facing had we not taken them.

Our approach to the topic of climate change skips the “prevention” phase entirely and jumps straight to radical post-crisis measures. Sure we can avoid using a car entirely. However that will turn the 30-minute commute to work into a 90-minute commute. That’s a total of 3 hours of commute added to your daily 8-hour shift. Possible? Yes. However for many of us also radical. We can also avoid a flight and use train instead for long distances. As long as we can afford paying 2 to 3 times more for the ticket and as long as we’re not at risk of losing a job if our journey takes 2 days instead of 4 hours. We can avoid animal products entirely, unless we have our body doesn’t react well to it, health conditions make it impossible or we simply cannot adapt as it happens to the vast majority of those who attempt it.

Sure each of these solutions is possible at least to some of us, at least one of these will be possible to most of us. However there is a solution that is possible to every single person, no matter their job, health or way of life: not having a child. And when we know this solution is 24 to 71 times more effective than the ones mentioned above, why are we completely ignoring it?

Unless we tackle the problem for what it is we’ll end up in an endless cycle of finding increasingly more causes for climate change and restrictions to “patch the cracks”. Currently we already talk about the role of cryptocurrency and Netflix in climate change. Every single activity or industry that produces emissions does so proportionally to its demand. And its demand is proportional to our population. No matter how many holes we patch (such as cars or airplanes), as long as our population grows so will the cracks on the ship. And we cannot patch them all.

Global pandemic or global wake-up call?

The comparison with the COVID-19 pandemic is unfortunately very on topic in this regard as this is yet another catastrophe brought forth by overpopulation. Currently we know that habitat destruction is connected not only to COVID-19 but also other outbreaks such as Ebola and that the current pandemic might just be the first of many.

Whether by logging, farming, mining, road building or urbanization we are dramatically increasing contact between humans and local wildlife, rodents and other potential virus carriers. The bigger our population the more living space it requires, resulting in further disturbing of natural ecosystems and resulting contact between humans and local fauna.

In the case of COVID-19 however, the role of overpopulation didn’t end here. Not every viral outbreak ends up becoming a global pandemic. Fortunately most do not. There are two factors that led to COVID-19 growing from local epidemic to global pandemic:

1. The first is obviously that COVID-19 is a very contagious disease, even more so than Influenza.
2. The second one is that the outbreak originated in an urban area of the most populated country in the world. In the absence of quick and effective isolation measures as well as immediate closure of borders the odds of patients ending up across borders were inevitably very high.

China has a population of 1.4 billion and Wuhan has a population of roughly 11 million, about as many people as all of Belgium. The more overpopulated the world becomes, the harder it will be to isolate a virus before it escalates into pandemic stage. The spread happens much faster and the odds of a patient going across borders are much higher.

On top of that, when you add globalization to overpopulation you get mass tourism. Mass tourism has already been pointed out as a growing problem in terms of rent affordability, waste production, unamanageable crowds, environmental degradation and destruction of local life. However the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this issue even more. Milan was the first epicentre of the disease outside of China, and this is what Milan looked like before the pandemic.

The role of overpopulation in the rise of viruses such as COVID-19 has been discussed (even though not nearly as much as it should), however it is important to take into consideration the role of overpopulation in how easily these diseases go from a local epidemic to a global pandemic.

A plastic apocalypse

Another major threat to our health that we seem to be ignoring despite having reached the point of no return is that of microplastics. Plastic pollution is a topic that most of us are acquainted with, however one of its major consequences was not to discovered until more recently: microplastics and nanoplastics.

These are so widespread that plastic can already be found in the blood and urine of 97% of children. Some are already calling it the “plastic apocalypse” as microplastics have been found in the atmosphere (from cities to remote parts of the Pyrenees) and nanoplastics in the brains of fish, where they have been shown to affect behaviour.

Unfortunately plastic use, just like emissions, escalates proportionately with demand and therefore with our population number. With overpopulation increasing at an alarming rate, so does the demand for plastic, resulting in an ever-increasing crisis of plastic pollution and microplastic spread. While efforts have been made to contain it namely by recycling plastic, it has been shown that recycling alone will not compensate for the ever-increasing demand.

With our current population of nearly 7.9 billion people we already have 5 giant patches of garbage in the ocean, some of which several times bigger than entire countries. With nearly 10 billion expected 30 years from now a plastic apocalypse seems more of a certainty than a possibility.

Our everyday needs are already being provided for by slave labour.

Overpopulation has one inevitable symptom that will only get worse as our numbers increase: resources are simply not enough to meet demand. This is not only a matter of natural resources being consumed faster than the Earth can regenerate however. It is also a matter of resources not being mined, processed or assembled at a rate that can meet human demand. The last year saw a global shortage of semiconductors that crippled several industries from phones to vehicles. The shortage is predicted to last at least a year more and has even made some computer parts unavailable or sold at triple the usual price when available. Some retailers have resorted to having lotteries for the chance to buy PC parts instead of selling them directly. The shortage has been shown to have been caused by increased demand rather than decreased supply, with PCs and electronic components having all-time records for demand, even as far as a 200% increase for Chromebooks.

When it comes to resources not meeting our growing population’s demands however, the current semiconductor crisis is the very tiny tip of a massive iceberg. Resource production has been unable to meet demand for a long time, however it has been dodging that problem by the use of slave labour. Electronics are once again one of the major examples as they create demand for cobalt, a great deal of which is mined through slave labour, including that of children. Electronics are not the only area in which increasing demand has resulted in slave labour however: this practice can be seen in many of the products we consume on a daily basis, from chocolate to clothing accessories.

These examples only account for actual slave labour. The ethics behind the major companies that deliver goods to us on a daily basis, such as Amazon, also reveal sub-human working conditions including having to urinate in bottles and defecate in bags.

Resistance and Denialism

Despite all this knowledge, the topic of overpopulation is still a major taboo, being met with reactions that range from dismissal to outright denial and in the worst case, aggression.

No politician wants to delve into the topic as it more often than not ends up being a bad PR move that will lose you some voters. Claiming that you “care for the environment” and “will fight for the planet” is good PR, telling your voters to stop having children is bad PR. No matter which side of the political spectrum you’re in, it’s guaranteed to be a bad political move. Tell right-wing supporters to stop having children and they will claim it’s an attack on family values. Tell left-wing supporters to stop having children and they will claim it’s an attack on women’s reproductive rights. It’s a lose-lose scenario on the political stage.

This reflects on the political actions seen even among those which are most outspoken about the environment and climate change. Taxes are implemented as a deterrent for every activity that creates emissions: carbon taxes, energy taxes, air travel taxes, even meat taxes have been suggested. Having children however, which is by far the greatest contributor to emissions, will not warrant you a tax — it will warrant you benefits. Regardless of how “green” the responsible parties claim to be.

Proponents of this “benefits, not taxes” approach claim that ensuring the child is provided for is always of the utmost priority, however that theory has several flaws. The first being that the majority of child benefits are not spent in child goods and services but rather in ‘adult goods’. Anyone truly interested in “ensuring children are provided for” would do so more effectively by investing in education, school meals and healthcare programs than straight up payment per child. Instead, the latter happens.

The second flaw is that it effectively encourages couples to have children. It becomes less about caring for existing children than it is about encouraging further ones. Which is exactly the last thing we should be doing like now if we’re to have any hopes of avoiding a climate catastrophe.

The third flaw is the very concept of “ensuring children will be provided for”. If a parent or family has no means of providing for a child then they should absolutely not have children. Being dependent on government benefits to raise a child is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. The moment these benefits are reduced or unavailable reality sets in. The moment unforeseen expenses arise reality sets in. This practice only encourages families that cannot provide for a child to have one, which once again is the last thing we should be doing. Again here more reasonable alternatives are plentiful. If we want to avoid children growing up in poverty we can invest in sexual education and free contraception for families in need. By doing so we diminish both the suffering of children and our impact in the environment.

Other common deflections to this topic are that “we need children to pay the pensions from the previous generation” and that “this is a problem of developing countries, not ours”. Both are inherently flawed.

The first one is once again the mentality of “patching the cracks” rather than fixing them. If our solution for pensions resulting from the very high amount of children previous generations had is “more children” then we’re just doomed to repeat the process indefinitely until the point when it will be too late to tackle overpopulation. “Having more children” to delay the issue one more generation is not a solution, it’s a ponzi scheme. One which is inevitably bound to collapse. The time to act is not a generation from now, not tomorrow, it’s yesterday. As David Attenborough put it, “Either we limit our population growth, or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now”.

The second argument is even more flawed in the sense that it completely ignores current data. While Asia has seen by far the greatest rise in population, European population has risen from 300 million in 1900 to 746 million today. And this was in the century in which Europe was the epicentre of two World Wars. The idea that overpopulation is a foreign problem to the Western world is not just flawed, it is outright false.

Another current argument is that advocating against overpopulation is “anti-human” or that it’s “advocating for mass extermination”. This is the most ridiculous among all of the above and in fact the opposite scenario is true. “Mass extermination” is what will happen if we don’t stop having children at the current rate. Not by human means, but by natural means. To prioritize the lives of living humans above the birth of those that do not yet exist is the most pro-human approach. To claim the opposite is akin to claiming that you’re “pro-life” while only caring about the “life” of unborn humans.

The light at the end of the tunnel

When it comes to overpopulation, the tunnel is long and dark. However there is light at the end of it. Knowing the greatest problem humanity is facing means that solving it is a possibility.

A single cause creating most of humanity’s pressing issues also means that a single solution can solve most of humanity’s pressing issues. In the XX Century the conversation about the environment was dominated by three words: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: the three Rs. Right now the solution for climate change, a plastic apocalypse and many other pressing issues also rests on three words: Dont. Have. Children.

Want to stop climate change? Don’t. Have. Children. Want to stop nanoplastics from populating our brains? Don’t. Have. Children. Want to stop slavery? Don’t. Have. Children. Want to stop further pandemics? Don’t. Have. Children. Want to solve water shortage? Don’t. Have. Children. Want to stop the rise of authoritarianism? Don’t. Have. Children. Isaac Asimov warned us about this one. Want to stop deforestation, extinctions and rampant urbanization? Don’t. Have. Children.

The good news is: Despite being far more effective, this solution is much simpler than all the previously proposed ones. Some people need a car. Some people need to fly. Some people need meat. Some people can’t hand-wash their clothes. Some people can’t afford a long-distance train or boat ticket. On the other hand, nobody needs to have a child. And not having children is not something you cannot afford. On the other hand, having children is something many cannot afford.

The solution is easy, all we have to do is break the taboo. Add the topic of overpopulation to political speech. Stop giving out benefits per child. Have world organizations such as the United Nations be forthright on the causes of climate change and other issues, and the impact of each factor on these. We’re not past the point of no return yet. If we do something about population growth now, we ensure the survival of humanity in the future. If we don’t, then the children we do have will curse us for bringing them into the reality they are going to live.