How women defused population bomb

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/28/opinion/pearce-population-fertility/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9

By Fred Pearce, Special to CNN
updated 3:03 PM EST, Fri October 28, 2011

Editor's note: Fred Pearce is a London-based environment journalist, who has reported from 67 countries in the past 25 years. His most recent book is "Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash," published in the US as "The Coming Population Crash."

(CNN) -- This week the world will reach 7 billion people. Understandably that raises concern about a soaring world population. But there is a good news story from the demographic data that is not often told. We -- or rather the poor women of the world -- are defusing the population bomb.

Women today are having half as many children as their mothers and grandmothers. The global average is now down to 2.5 children per woman, and it continues to fall.

This is not just a rich-world phenomenon. Much of Asia now has fertility rates below two, from Japan and Korea to China, with its one-child policy, through Taiwan, Vietnam, Burma, Singapore and much of southern India and parts of the Middle East. Behind the veil, the women of Iran have cut their fertility from eight to less than two in a generation.

The young people out on the streets demanding democracy during the Arab Spring are arguably far more politically active because they are not at home raising large families.

Falling fertility happens faster if countries get richer and if women are better educated. Similarly urbanization helps a lot. While even young children can be an economic asset on an African peasant farm, they are an economic liability in cities, where they require education before they can get a job. The teeming megacities of the poor world may look like symbols of overpopulation, but they are part of the solution, too.

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The reason, I believe, is very simple. Women are having smaller families because for the first time in history they can. In the 20th century, the world largely eradicated the diseases that used to kill off most children. Today, most kids get to grow up. Mothers no longer need to have five or six children to ensure the next generation. Two or three is enough, and that is what they are choosing to have.

There are holdouts, of course. In much of Africa, rural women still typically have five children or more. But if Africa follows Asia, then we can see an end to population growth. We are, I believe, likely to see "peak population" by about mid-century. Perhaps at around 9 billion people.

After that, on current trends of fertility falling to below replacement levels, we will see a falling world population.

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What does this mean for the environment? Well, peak population is good news, of course. But don't hang the flags. It is a pervasive myth that it is all those extra people that are wrecking the planet. That's no longer the case.

Rising consumption today is a far bigger threat to the environment than a rising head-count. And most of that extra consumption is still happening in rich countries that have long since given up growing their populations.

According to Stephen Pacala, the director of the Princeton Environmental Institute, the world's richest half billion people -- that's about 7 % of the global population -- are responsible for half the world's carbon dioxide emissions, the primary cause of man-made climate change. Meanwhile the poorest 50 % of the world are responsible for just 7 % of emissions. So there is no way halting population growth in the poor world today would have more than a very marginal effect on climate change.

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