Chang'e said,
Good evening and welcome to the Science Exchange RIOs in the heart of Adelaide.
Last month the world reached a significant milestone.
We passed a human population of 7 billion.
It was a significant moment to reflect on what effects large human populations have
on the planet and time to pause and ask if such a high number can be sustained within
the resources available to us.
But as with so many issues and questions that face us, the facts and the figures soon became
lost in a quagmire of unsupported opinion and political, social and religious polemics.
It's time to take a step back and take a closer look at the science behind the headlines.
Tonight will be the first in a series of events that we will conduct here at the RIOs and
broadcast live over the Internet to the world.
And to tackle the science hidden behind the hype of population matters, would you please
welcome Director of the Australian Population and Migration Research Centre at the University
of Adelaide, Dr Graham Hugo, Associate Director for the Applied Population Studies Programme,
School of Environment Flinders University, Dr Eudoi Sikia, and Research at the Institute
for Land, Water and Society at Charles Sturt University, Barney Foran.
Let's start at the very basics, Graham.
The mathematics behind population modelling, are they complicated?
Not so much.
Populations grow at a global level anyway by a simple number of births minus number
of deaths.
So, it's simply a matter of that interaction between mortality and fertility.
Of course, at a national level or at a regional level, migration is a very significant factor
in many places like Australia as well, but it really is simply births minus deaths.
So, anticipating future fertility and mortality change is really crucial in anticipating what
future population growth would be.
And you'd like to make a point that it's not exponential?
Certainly not.
One of the things which I think it's certainly alarming to think of a global population two
or three billion greater than what we've got today, given the pressures on the environment,
giving the challenges with respect to food and so on.
But I guess I've been in this game long enough to go back to the 1970s when the United Nations
was predicting that the globe's population would have to get to about 12 billion before
it would stabilise, and this was at the time of the earlicks books and so on.
The fact is that they're now saying 10 billion, and that really is a function of the fact
that we've seen an incredible decline in fertility, one which nobody predicted.
I was there in the 1970s, I was in a village in West Java study where women were having
six children on average.
That village now, women are having 2.5 children.
Things have changed dramatically.
The world's fertility has halved since the 1970s.
Now I guess what I'm saying is that I think there is room for optimism for actually stabilising
the globe's population growth at a lower figure, certainly a lower figure than the 12 billion.
The United Nations is saying 10 billion.
I'd hope that through concerted action we could bring it back to maybe 9 billion.
Now that's still a massive challenge, but I guess the point that I'd like to make is
that there are enormous behavioural changes which are occurring, which are shaping, shaping
not just fertility.
This has happened at a time where life expectancy across the globe has increased by 20 years.
It's been in spite of that increase in fertility, we've managed to reduce population growth,
but it's still 1.2% and that's still too high.
We still need to move towards a stable population as quickly as we possibly can.
Sir Udoy, birth rates, that's one factor that we have managed to manipulate.
What's been happening with birth rates and what effect has it had?
I would like to take a very optimistic view like what Koreans say.
It's not that terrifying, in fact, just to give you a message.
In numbers it looks very big, but we should remember that the world has done extremely
well, humanity has done extremely well now.
We have world fertility rate around 2.6 at the moment, global fertility which has come
down from around 6 and 7.
So the success is there and birth rate of course played a vital role in pulling down
the population which as Graham mentioned probably will stabilize hopefully by 9 billion, but
I think the world bank says it will be around 9.7 by 2075 and they are also predicting that
in fact after 2075 world will see a shrinking population if everything goes alright.
So it is quite optimistic that way.
So what's actually happened with birth rates specifically, are they coming down worldwide
or are they coming down in pockets?
Some countries have a higher decrease in birth rates than others.
No, it has come down worldwide.
In fact, in the developing countries if you see in Asia the reduction in birth rate, total
fertility in the last 50 years, the highest.
It came down by in the last 50 years by 55%, which is most of the developing countries
are there.
For this, the country, the dramatic decline in birth rate, countries like Iran, dramatic
decline in birth rate, in fact Iran has got almost a replacement level fertility.
So most of the developing countries are doing extremely well in reduction of total fertility
rate.
Yes, in some African countries it is still very high in some pockets, some exceptional
things happening like East Timor, since it got independence in 2000, all of a sudden
birth rate went up, and two years back East Timor had world's highest fertility rate.
It was around 7.8.
That means women in East Timor, all of a sudden they were producing on a neighbor as eight
children.
And that was much more, it was around five when they got independence and it went up.
But it was a kind of short term because when East Timor got independence, they didn't have
a single doctor.
If a country was born without a doctor, the local doctor, there was no hospital, there's
no contraceptive available.
So because of that, the fertility really went up, but I think it's a short term and eventually
in East Timor also it is some sign that it will decline.
I think there is an issue.
It worries me that African fertility is still so high.
I mean it has come down as you guys suggest.
I think it's interesting that the United Nations has actually changed its projections
from thinking that the world's population would stabilise at 9 billion in the middle
of the century to about 10 billion towards the end of the century.
And I think part of that has been that the fertility isn't coming down as quickly as
we thought it would in Africa and in a few pockets around Asia.
And that to me is a bit of a concern.
And I think part of the concern is that I think we've taken our foot off the pedal
with respect to programs which tackle the fertility rate.
And the reality is that the things which bring down fertility are things like improving
women's education, improving reproductive health services, family planning programs,
there's a whole range of things which tackle poverty and which really attack the role and
position of women in society.
And I suspect that to some extent as a global community we've thought, okay, the fertility
thing is one.
We've got there.
We've achieved all we need to achieve.
We'll turn to look at other things.
And I think, you know, I worry that perhaps there isn't the expenditure and effort and
passion going into bringing down fertility in Africa as there was in Asia, say 20 or
30 years ago, and I'd really worry that that effort has been reduced.
And I think it is important to keep up the pressure to keep the fertility coming down.
Okay.
Now, Barney, the other factor is the death rate, which has also been coming.
Well, actually, the death rate is always 100 percent.
Everyone dies.
But people are living longer, and that has had an effect on population.
Can you talk to me a bit about death rate?
I guess we were wonderfully inventive, aren't we, that particularly, well, in both developed
and developing countries, we're finding a way to get rid of a whole lot of the ills
that used to kill us earlier, and of course, particularly in developed countries, we're
putting in a whole lot of ills that are making us sicker along the way.
So it's this challenge between birthing and dying, if you like, and we've extended it,
mainly through lifestyle changes and technological changes.
And so that means, and my demographic colleagues will say it a lot better than me, that we
have the rump of us oldies, you know, who, to some eyes in the political space, are saying
that this is the thing that's going to undo us the pure cost of looking after an aged
semi-majority.
It's those baby boomers, isn't it?
It's those bloody baby boomers, again, and yet, as Graham and Uday point out, you know,
this is part of our supreme technological advantage, that we're bringing one down, but we're
the buggered if we're going to get out of the way, you know, that's the thing.
So, you know, this is the race between two ends, if you like.
Can you describe for me the human population over the last thousand years or so, I mean,
we didn't even make the first billion people until 1800.
Yes, well, I guess this is what technological innovation has done to us, and I can't give
you the exact things of the second billion and so on, but the key thing, and I'm the
biophysical environmentalist around here, the key thing that changed the world, if you
like, from our biophysical perspective, is that in the 1920s, two very bright German scientists
worked out a way to fix nitrogen from the air, and this, the Haber-Bosch process, this
effectively decoupled humankind's fertility and birthing, if you like, from the biophysical
basis, it meant that nitrogen, which gives protein, which allows women to breed, effectively
we can get that out of the bag now, and without that invention, a guy called Vlach of Smilu's
big thinker in the global nitrogen cycle sees a Canadian, it sounds like it does, but he
suggested we wouldn't have got past three billion people globally without this invention
of bagged nitrogen, if you like, because it's a really hard job.
So that's...
Frank Chook manure, over 100 million hectares...
So that's taking nitrogen out of the atmosphere, using it as fertilizer to grow more crops,
grow more...
To give adequate protein, well, it's just a protein level, basically, you know, it can
come through grains and through legumes, as well as meat and fish, but that decoupling
of humankind from nitrogen in the soil, if you like, which gives the protein, which eventually
we all eat and breed by, that was the key invention, if you like, that came before all
these things that allow us to live a bit older, longer.
Because when you actually look at the modelling, you know, it took us, by some estimate, 250,000
years to make the first billion people, it took us 12 to make the last billion.
I personally find that a little startling.
Well, the 20th century, in my view, was the demographic century, because we added 5 billion
people to the planet in that century.
Thank goodness it's not going to happen again.
We may add only a couple more billion before it stabilises, but that, you know, really
is one of the defining features of the 20th century, that that huge number of people,
you know, before that, we'd added less than 2 billion in the whole of our history, up
until the beginning of that century, and, you know, it really is an enormous statistic
in terms of our history.
We should also remember, if you go back 200 years back, if you see the demographic transition,
in fact, fertility didn't decline initially, it was dramatic decline of mortality.
It's a huge decline all of a sudden, and fertility took some time to decline.
So there was a gap between fertility and mortality.
Because of the big decline in mortality, it, in fact, contributed quite a lot to that rapid
increase in the population in the last 200 years.
When you talk about populations stabilising at 10 billion in the next 50 odd years, what
you're talking about is that the birth rate will come down so low that it will be consistent
with the death rate, so that we're introducing as many people as we're taking out of the
population.
Is that essentially it?
That's, I mean, the ideal situation, demographers talk about a stable population as being an
ideal end state for the, for any nation state or the globe.
And it's not just a factor of the number of people dying, being similar to the number
of people being born, but it's also having a balanced age structure.
So you've got a balance between your working age population and the dependent population.
And that's what I think that we'll be moving towards, not just internationally in terms
of the globe, but hopefully in Australia and in individual nation states as well, because
if you don't have that balance between your working and non-working population, it can
lead to all sorts of social and economic issues.
So I think there's a tendency in our discussions of population to concentrate only on numbers,
but the age structure is really, really critical in terms of the effective operating of society.
And in any case, I think that that move towards a stable population where it isn't growing
and you do have a good balance between your working and non-working population is really
the sort of thing that we should have as an objective in global as well as national population
policy in the longer term.
So Yudoi, Barney, is this the future that you both see as well, that populations will
stabilize about 10 billion?
I'm quite optimistic about it.
But I feel in the future, more and more, the migration will play a vital role in population
dynamics between developed and developing countries.
But that's not increasing or decreasing more populations.
That's just flirting them out.
Exactly.
What we are talking about, if we are talking about, Graham said about the population, age
structure, if you have to go for a balance of distribution of all populations, then
migration will play a vital role, especially, probably, from developing to developed countries.
And certainly, if you come down to nation states, one of which is Australia, the idea
of a stabilized population here is only one of about five or six things we've got to do
if we want to have something called a reasonably resilient society, one that's in tune with
its environment and its resources.
Globally, and for each nation state, we just have to hope, and we developed countries anyway,
we can at least start to manage towards that, whereas in developing countries, I guess it's
a lot harder.
There has been the comment made that we don't think enough about population.
We don't have a population policy.
This is more on a national level than an international level.
Is that a fair comment?
Or are we putting in effort commensurate with the issues and the challenges that it throws
up to us?
I don't think, I think too often we tend to think of population as being some sort of
static backdrop against which economic and social and other forces play out.
And the fact is that population is something which is influenced by policy.
And if we don't have an overall population policy which we should strive towards, then
we have lots of policies which indirectly influence population.
And I'm a believer in the fact that in Australia, what we, in Australia at least, is we need
to have a real vision of what our future population would be.
But having said that, I don't think a population policy should stand alone as a sort of independent
objective.
To me, a population policy should be something which works towards environmental sustainability,
prosperity.
It should be a means to get to the ends of these other goals.
Go on, then I'll put you on the spot.
Give me that number.
How many Australians should there be?
There is no number.
There is no number.
Can you give us an estimate or a range?
No, to me, this is the whole problem is that we tend to think in terms of silver bullets.
We think there is a magic number where everything will fall into place and everything will be
wonderful.
That's not the case.
Australia's got definite demographic issues in terms of the current age structure of the
population and the changing age structure of the population.
We've got issues about distribution of population.
And in addition to that, we've got the issue of the number of people.
We've got major environmental constraints.
And I believe in Australia there is no simple stop population growth or massively grow population.
I think what we should have is a policy which has some growth, limited growth, but sustainable
growth.
That might sound wishy-washy and in the middle of the road, but the fact is that it will
be disastrous for Australia to stop population growth tomorrow.
It will be disastrous for Australia to have massive uncontrolled population growth.
I was going to say, because the two figures that spring to mind is tin flannery says 12
million, Bishop Pearl says 400 million.
So that's a pretty large error estimate as to what the population ought to be.
You've got any feeling about this one by?
Very definitely.
I think I'd like to cast a bigger net though and say that from a biophysical point of view,
the globe is facing what we call global boundaries in how the whole systems work and we're currently
wringing our hands about the amount of carbon, et cetera, in the atmosphere, but there are
another nine apart from that of which biodiversity loss and water use and nitrogen cycle, phosphorus
cycle and so all of these, we are, well, my colleagues are correct in saying population
growth is not the only thing.
But if you say population growth and economic growth combined are consuming the earth, now
we can drill into that a bit more in a minute, but coming down to our fair share, if you
like, Australia's fair share, for we'd be biophysical scientists and thinking how we
get our carbon, our nitrogen, our land clearance, our water use, our healthy rivers.
We start to be able to get a Rubik's cube if you take the metaphor to vaguely get in
place around a stabilised population of 26 to 28 million people.
We can make things work there.
Now, I must say that tied into that is 40% of the economic consumption that we do these
days.
So back to 1970s levels, three day working week, you know, so on and so forth.
There are major changes that our stabilised population have to make if we want to live
within our fair share.
Which leads the discussion nicely into the area of the impact on the earth's resources
of the population.
And essentially, in my reading of the subject, there's two views and they seem to be held
by differing areas of science.
There's let's deal with the Malthusian view and this seems to be the doom and gloom scenario
which is a favourite of ecologists.
So I see them looking at populations on the planet, whether they be rodents, yeast or humans
and saying, if you outstrip your resource use or your resource supply, then, similarly,
you've just simply got a crash.
What's the problem with the Malthusian approach, Graham?
Well, for one thing, it doesn't represent Malthus, I mean Malthus, you know, if you read Malthus,
he suggested there were two ways in which you could get a balance between the resources
and population.
And one of them is the one that you just spoke about, which is the one which gets all of
the publicity, and that is you increase mortality.
You increase mortality until population growth comes into the rate of growth of food production.
The reality is he also talked about fertility reduction.
He did talk about family planning, even though he was a parson and he was riding in the late,
is it 18th century?
So he wasn't reading Bishop Pell's book?
No, he wasn't.
But you know, what he was talking about there is that we do have to bring down population
growth.
Now, you know, I don't argue with that, and to me, it is inconscionable to have a policy
to increase mortality.
You know, to me, that is just something which is not on the table at all, and the reality,
to me, the only way to go forward is to reduce fertility, to bring population growth down
through fertility reduction.
To me, that is the only thing which is on the table.
I don't have on the table at all, and refuse to even consider any policy, whether it be
direct or indirect, to increase mortality.
But the question is, are the resources there to support a population of 7 billion people?
Is there enough food?
Is there enough water?
Enough arable land?
You do it.
Do you want to comment?
I'm happy that you brought in this particular equation, today's equation.
I think we should not forget that in the population environment debate, one of the things we tend
to forget is the conjunction in the equation, which is very important.
If you bring conjunction into the debate, it shows that one baby born in the United States
is equivalent to around 30 babies born in Africa.
That is where we have to be very careful, like, is it the numbers or is it something
else in between?
That is where I feel that the future population debate should strongly bring in, rather than
the numbers, the conjunction into the equation, and see what I'm optimistic about is if I
think that we are going to have not more than 10 billion, this is kind of a stable population
we are going to have, then how will you do that to survive in the world, then where this
conjunction will play a vital role?
Like in Australia, we say that the statistic shows that every day we waste around 40 percent
of the food, so if you equate that 40 percent of the food that we are throwing in a bin,
if you equate to the population, that means we are throwing out the food for around 7
to 8 billion, sorry, million people, because we have around 23 million people here.
So that is where I think there are some kind of hope that that 10 billion population can
still survive very well, and it will quite a lot depend on the distribution liquid between
developing countries and developing countries.
And Barney, this is the point that's brought up by many people, is that it's not so much
the quantity of resources, it's the fact that they're poorly distributed, so that half
the world's population has access to less than 10 percent of the world's resources.
Is that a fair comment?
I think it is, and just to think of the food production thing which has started on, I think
I had a pinch I'm going to say, particularly if we concentrate on a more vegetarian diet,
bad if you like your steak, like me, and things like that, but a more vegetarian diet, I think
we can squeeze the 10 billion thing into place, but remember whenever a biophysical scientist
talks about this, he is seeing just about every earth system under extreme stress, and
while we are in a rainfall rich period, particularly in eastern Australia at the moment, it wasn't
long ago that we were in real strife on the eastern and the western, and I guess in south
Australia too, even south Australia.
So our earth system science tells us that these extremes are going to be more acute
and the lesser browns of this world from the Earthwatch Institute in the US talks about
the spread of grain, the days number of grain that we've got left in the world, and that's
the swing, excuse me, the swing market that Australia trades its wheat and grains in.
It's down sometimes to 40 or 50 days, which is perishly if the Indian monsoon fails or
something goes arse up in China, you know, these year by year, that's a scientific unit
to the arse up, that's right, but we're facing more, as we spread this population influence
to every corner of the globe, you know, and we complexify the food system and the energy
delivery system, a major, a major event within all that opens us to a more complex thing
to manage, you know, I was just reading something the other day of, you know, a US response
to famine in Sudan, you know, I was to put 100 choppers off helicopters and fly bags
of flour out there, now, you know, this couldn't happen in 10 places at once, you know, we
did the same in Haiti when things happened there where we're getting into these complexified
processes where particularly in the developing world, as my colleagues say, that many of
those systems there are pushed to the edge, and there is also know what we policy types
call these days is very little agency, very little capacity to stitch things together
even when everything's run on well, and so it's this number of people, the 7 to 10 billion
spread to the ends of the earth is a very complex system, and we actually have to simplify
and no one's talking about how to simplify our busy lives.
Well, let's then move to the other end of the scientific spectrum, which tends to be
more adhered to by physicists and engineers, and that tends to say that human ingenuity
has already overcome population problems in the past and will continue to do so into the
future.
A classic example is the Green Revolution of the 1960s averted most of the effects, if
not all of the effects that Paul Ehrlich was so worried about.
Do we have that much faith in human ingenuity, is human ingenuity going to save the day?
I'd have to jump in and say the Green Revolution averted a short term issue at the time, but
at the expense of really narrowing the range of crops and the species within those crops
that were grown, it was a high nitrogen fertilizer regime, a thing that required quite often
a lot of inputs like pesticides, and in so doing the stories I read or the papers I read
anyway talked about the number of other supplementary food plants and animals that were got rid
of in the system, and so again, I was talking about complexification before, but in this
situation we narrowed the response down to high nitrogen, high input, and quite often
high water, and now many of these areas are also starting to have water extraction problems
for example, and so it was a good short term, but every great technological innovation has
almost an equal and opposite reaction, perhaps one or two generations down the line.
I totally agree with Barney that to me this whole discussion of population tends to focus
on silver bullets, we're always looking for something which is bang, that's the answer.
Now ingenuity, we just leave it up to ingenuity, we'll be able to fix it.
The thing is we're dealing with very, very complex interrelated issues.
Stopping population growth solves the whole problem, it doesn't because as we saw consumption
levels are really, really crucial, but also the way in which we use the environment in
unsustainable ways, and the Green Revolution, many aspects of that were like that as well,
and you go back to Paul Ehrlich's formula, that it's population growth, it's consumption,
and it's the way in which we use the environment.
We've got to have policies which look at all these things together, and don't expect
there'll be silver bullet single answers, whether it's increasing food production on
a temporary basis or stopping population growth.
It is a very, very complex system, and it's really having policies at a national and an
international level which look at this complexity as a whole, and deal with that complexity which
I think is very, very important.
What do those policies look like then?
Well, I mean if we're going to start enumerating them, they are carbon related policies, their
policies bring fertility down as quickly as we can with fertility control, but with reproductive
health programs.
So, scratch the baby bonus?
Well, I mean, the baby bonus makes no impact whatsoever on fertility in Australia.
I don't think there's any evidence at all to show that that has had any influence on
fertility in Australia.
It's a political measure, I'd suggest, but I mean, each nation's demography is different
to the global demography which needs a different approach, but again, I'd say in Australia,
we need, I think one of the big problems we've had in Australia is that we haven't had a
discussion.
We've had a debate where one group of people say, stop population growth altogether.
We've had another group of people who say, grow population as fast as we possibly could,
and they talk past each other.
The reality is we need economics, we need science to get together, to come up with real
policies and programs which can actually give us some growth within a sustainable framework.
Now, that's a big ask, but it's not happening at the moment because there just is no interaction
between the different groups, they're talking past each other.
I can't help thinking that adding science and economics would only lead to a new religion,
but it would be an interesting experiment to lead to.
You know, in the developing world, what sort of policy does it look like to deal with population
in the total sense, not just bringing down birth rates, but what do we talk about consumption
in the developing world?
I think the population dynamics in developing countries is quite amazing, and the policy
is very difficult because it's so culturally sensitive, the whole fertility issues, reproductive
rights and all.
But what I can tell that in developing countries, around 25% of the pregnancy is unintended.
So there's a huge scope there, if we have a right policy, still there's a big scope
to reduce the fertility rate because in demography we call it unmet need.
So 25% of the pregnancy is unintended pregnancy, so there's a big lack of access to contraception,
and also sometimes it's cultural.
Some of the societies are highly patriarchal, where women's autonomy, women's empowerment
is very, very low, and this is also one of the causes why in East Timor the fertility
was very high.
But also we need to have a very holistic approach to the population policies, I think
Graham mentioned about it.
It's not easy, it's not just numbers.
It is culturally sensitive, it is also related to the employment opportunities and also other
broader issues like the food, like you did mention about the green revolution.
I'm not skeptical about the technology, but sometimes, like if I go back to India's example,
in fact, green revolution led to a high unemployment rate in India.
And some people say that it is one of the cause, the green revolution led to a high
unemployment rate in the state of Punjab from where you came as a security guard of Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi, who finally killed her, and because he was frustrated to see
so many unemployed youths in his field.
So it's very complex, it is not that very easy going, kind of okay, technology is improving
more food, it will solve the conflict in the society.
And especially in developing countries, we have to be very careful in going for a more
holistic kind of population policy.
In some of the tribal pockets in India now, there is a revival going on because they feel
minority compared to other majority groups and they started somehow not believing in
family planning.
My PhD work is one of the tribal community in North East India, where they said, no,
we don't want family planning anymore because we are minority, we are treated by the migrants
from other countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, and they are grabbing our land.
So we want to be strong, culturally also there are some norms that we, they said, no family
planning officer can enter our villages, we are not going to believe in family planning,
we want numbers.
That is populate or parish in the Punjab.
Something, something exactly.
So it's complex, so it is not that very easy and straightforward.
But my message is the key thing is for developing country is women's empowerment, it's the
key issue.
I think one of the big ones I was going to throw in there talking about holism and talking
about the globe is, to some extent, constraining world trade, that at the moment as it impacts
particularly on developing countries, it's always a race to the bottom, you know, out
there on the edge of that rainforest are logs that no one's looking at, they can go down
the river and, you know, in through all the develop world production chains and systems
of certification for many things like forests and fish and so on are not working well.
And so one of the Graham talks about, you know, looking at all the policy leaves at
once and pulling them in tandem rather than one at a time, so, you know, thinking that
we in the first world can access every production zone of the world through globalised trade
while paying those countries, you know, what's called a market price, which is bugger all,
you know, the-
That's another scientific answer.
That's right.
And these are part of the big dynamics which, and I'm a scientist, you know, which we are
starting to battle now with our world models and so we do holism very hard to get it near
policy though.
With the developing world, one issue that kept coming up in the population discussions
over the last month or so was with the rise of the middle class in India, the middle class
in China, they're going to start consuming vast amounts of resources.
And is that a fair worry?
I think it's a very fair worry.
It's very true.
I mean, with that kind of India, especially in India and China, which is around 35 to
40% of the world population, if somehow they started consuming like what we used to have
or what we have in developed countries, Parkipita conjunction, it goes up to the level what
we have in Australia or probably in the US, that's going to be a big disaster, you know,
there's a huge population.
I do not have a very clear answer to that, but this is happening and that's going to
create a big threat to the whole population environment debate, I mean, how we are going
to address it.
And there is a big increase in the middle class consuming more and more because the
Parkipita income is increasing among the middle class, I appreciate it.
But surely the key issue is that people in developed countries have to reduce their consumption.
I mean, to me, any suggestion that people who are currently consuming very, very little
shouldn't aspire to achieve a reasonable amount while we're over-consuming to such a high
extent in the more developed countries, I think there's no equity or fairness in that.
And I think to some extent the average levels of consumption in many less developed countries
have to come up.
They don't have to be reduced, they have to come up because people are not consuming
enough to lead reasonable lives.
And so to me, it's the height of hypocrisy for developed countries to preach to people
in less developed countries to consume less.
To me, I just can't see that that's a strategy.
But what we should be looking at globally is more sustainable modes of life, both in
developed and in less developed countries.
Yes, and like it is the affluent of the world, and we're just noting that there are now big
affluent classes in China and India.
And so when we talk about these global things like a global carbon tax, they have to hit
the ones in India, China, Australia, US, and all of the EU equally.
And I guess that's what these hugely nasty sets of interactions at global conferences
try to do.
So it is the rich and the consumers, whatever country they are in, that are the ones that
are consuming the earth.
We're coming close to the end of the first half, and I'd just like to close off this
part of the discussion with, I think if I could summarise your position, it would be
be concerned but not alarmed about world population.
Would that be fair, Graham, or are they simplifying it so much?
I think that's fair, because I think there's a real danger of saying this is the end of
the life as we know it and so on, and that's not the case.
It is something that can be coped with, but not without major changes, not without major
reactions, not without major responses in terms of not just in relation to bringing down population
growth as fast as we possibly can, but the way in which we consume, the way in which we
use the environment.
All of that's part of the one problem.
And if it takes crisis for us to move in that direction, well, we've got crisis.
Would we be concerned but not alarmed?
My message is be concerned and be alarmed about over-consumption, and if we can solve
that problem, I think we have a hope, definitely.
I would say put population growth and economic growth in the same sentence, because they're
the things happy to be less concerned about the population growth issue, but the economic
growth issue and all of that is entrained in there, they've got to be in the one ball
of wax in the one sentence.
Ladies and gentlemen, we've had a fascinating discussion here.
I hope you've been following online, and we will be taking short intermission of about
20 minutes, and when we come back, we have a panel from the media, and we'll be talking
to them about how the media has portrayed the discussion on population and what they
think of the presentation that we've heard tonight.
But before we go to intermission, can I please get a big round of applause for the three guests
on stage, Ryan, Udoi and Barney.
