Posted on by Robert Kyriakides

One of the most interesting and relatively unexplored possibilities that a changing climate will alter, is the relationship between climate change and population decline. Population is not declining; it is expanding so rapidly that most people are too embarrassed to talk about it.

Some of us think that there are too many people in the world. China has enacted a strict law limiting the size of families; it sees this as the lesser of two evils. Developing countries are encouraging contraception to limit population growth.

I asked a Pakistani official – about twenty five years ago – as to what he regarded as the greatest difficulty in making Pakistan a successful and developed nation. He replied (and his reply surprised me) that if Pakistan could limit its population growth, then it would become very prosperous. I have no doubt that he was right and that the same point applies to many other developing nations.

But the population has continued to grow. Apart from China no large nation has attempted to restrict population growth by law. In the United Kingdom – a small group of islands with very limited living space and containing amongst the world’s most densely population regions, the government is apparently very relaxed about another five or ten million people living here over the next ten years.

We are all too frightened to talk about restricting population growth; it seems to affect our religious sensibilities or our sensibilities about foreigners and racism. It is not the elephant in the room that we all ignore; it is the the rising flood that is up to our waists, but we carry on as though it was not there. With climate change there is no shortage of talk about it; howeer there is a distinct lack of action. Everyone is talking about the elephant, but no one makes an attempt to remove him from the room to a more suitable location. Of, if I use my flood analogy, we are all talking about the water rising without doing anything to stop it.

As a result today there are a couple of billion souls that are living in abject poverty. Many are doomed to starve to death. This is happening now, before the effects of climate change have really “kicked in” so as to speak. What will happen if climate change does have its expected effect upon the population of humans on this planet?

Although the trend of population growth has been consistently upwards and onwards, (the population of the world has nearly doubled in my lifetime) there have been times in the history of the world when population has significantly declined. Those declines have been usually they result of war or disease. Before the world was industrialised disease was harder to cure. When the world was first industrialised people became easier to kill, as a result of technological “advances”.

Climate change will affect population in many ways that are quite easy to imagine. For example, droughts will become more common and rainfall in equatorial zones will become less frequent. Then people who farm in Africa will be able to grow less food, and there will be less food for animals to eat. Farmers, who farm the paddy fields of the delta regions in South East Asia, will produce less rice. Less rice means less food.

Precisely how population growth will react to climate change depends upon whether human innovation will happen quickly enough to keep pace and if it does whether that innovation can be successfully transferred to the places that need it the most. Innovation – and in particular human technological innovation – is merely a development of human evolution. Instead of developing thicker bones of extra fingers in a response to a need our brains are now evolving not within our bodies but without them. We do not need to grow extra legs to travel quicker if we have invented motor cars and planes. We do not nned to evolve stronger if we have guns that can kill things that threaten us.

With all evolution – whether human, animal or plant, it is all about a race. The fastest wins the race. Will the evolution run faster than climate change? Or, as is perhaps more likely will the climate change too quickly for human evolution to keep pace with it?

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Filed under: climate change, global warming | Tagged: droughts, evolution of humanity through technology, population growth |