A study by researchers in Canada and Sweden that sought to average and rank the impacts of various individual actions on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been making the rounds on the Internet lately (link to PDF), notably for its headline finding that the single biggest action that one can take to reduce your personal carbon footprint is to have fewer children (average ~60 tCO2 equivalent avoided per year). After that, the biggest actions one can take are to live car free (2.5 tCO2e/year avoided), or avoid one transatlantic flight (1.5 tC02e/year avoided). Common “sustainable” actions like upgrading lightbulbs and recycling don’t make much of an impact, according to the analysis (see the figure taken from the study below for more). Does that mean that having children is incompatible with support for environmentalism and sustainability? I would argue that it doesn’t, for a number of reasons that range from issues with this particular analysis to considering how we should think about climate change and demographics more generally. Figure 1 A comparison of the emissions reductions from various individual actions. The height of the bar represents the mean of all studies identified in developed nations, while black lines indicate mean values for selected countries or regions (identified by ISO codes) where data were available from specific studies. We have classified actions as high (green), moderate (blue), and low (yellow) impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Note the break in the y-axis. Recently, demographers found that the fertility rate in the United States is already at an all-time low, largely because young women (15-24) are having fewer babies, and this is not offset by increases seen in fertility rates for women over the age of 30. A similar pattern exists throughout the rich world, with fertility rates generally lower in Europe and East Asia, and below replacement rate in many rich countries. However, in the United States and much of Europe, immigration offsets low fertility rates and means that these countries’ populations are still growing. None the less, there is a looming demographic crisis globally. The United Nations projects that the global population will increase from about 7.4 billion in 2015 to 11.1 billion by 2100, with no overall decline in sight. Virtually all of that increase occurs in low- and middle-income countries whose populations between 2015 and 2100 increase from 642 million to 2.5 billion and 5.6 billion to 7.4 billion, respectively. One striking projection to put things in perspective is that by 2047, Nigeria will have a larger population than the United States, with the former growing from 181 million in 2015 to 387 million in 2047 and the United States growing from 320 million to 385 million in that time. While those outside of rich countries have a far, far lower environmental impact (more on this below), such a population increase would no doubt be an ecological disaster with strained water resources, difficulties in producing food, loss of biodiversity and habitat loss. Of course, the areas that will see the largest population growth will also see disproportionately large impacts from climate change. All of this suggests that global society needs to think seriously about reducing population growth, and rich countries should certainly stop subsidizing people for having children. However, campaigns that seek to guilt rich people into having fewer children voluntarily would likely be ineffective and inefficient. First, let’s think about what such mass choice would actually look like. Let’s assume that a lot of people are persuaded by this argument and stop having children, with some perhaps adopting instead. Let’s also assume that this process is non-coercive (we’re not going with the one-child policy here). Such a decision would have to be made literally hundreds of millions of times in order to have a serious impact. I’m more skeptical that this, or any other voluntary action, can occur on such a scale. Additionally, the very framework of simply comparing a decision not to have a child with other voluntary actions seems somewhat flawed. If we are comparing actions we can take to reduce emissions, of course the best thing we could do to reduce our impact is to simply not exist – the result from the study is trivial in that sense. By not having a child, you are not, for instance, adding a car to the road or having another passenger on all of those transatlantic flights. Further, as David Roberts at Vox points out, the budgeting behind comparing decisions about childbirth to those surrounding recycling are a bit strange. While I can be held responsible for my decision to recycle or not, am I somehow held responsible for the emissions of children that I decide to have or not? Are my parents ultimately responsible for my emissions? Are their parents responsible for their emissions? If my children are responsible for their own emissions, then it may not be fair to stick me with their carbon footprint. If I am responsible for their emissions, then why can’t I blame my actions on my parents, in turn? Further, while I can pat myself on the back for making the decision to recycle and eat a mostly plant-based diet, should I credit myself each year for not having another child? Another issue with the study is that the avoided emissions calculated are average for rich countries; note that the actual country levels vary significantly in the chart above. Within a country like the United States, the rich have a much larger carbon footprint than the poor. Does that somehow make a poor person’s decision to have children more morally acceptable than a rich person’s? Ultimately, however, such a focus on decreasing the fertility of an already low-fertility group like the wealthy seems misplaced. Evidence suggests that there is ample room for population reductions that can be completely non-coercive, and other, coordinated actions that can help solve the global climate problem. The Drawdown Project, which seeks to rank climate solutions by efficiency, notes that combined actions of encouraging family planning and educating girls in poor countries can lead to greater emission reductions globally than any other single class of action such as the widespread deployment of onshore wind turbines, having people switch to plant-based diets, reducing deforestation, or building massive solar farms. Specifically, the family planning and girls’ education policies recommended would reduce global emissions by 119.2 gigatons of CO2 equivalent. In the framework of the other study, that’s like 2 billion chosen avoided births, though, admittedly, these avoided births would occur in countries where per-capita emissions are low. Still, this is a massive scale, and such programs are incredibly inexpensive, making them a very efficient way to reduce emissions. Importantly, too, they are a non-coercive way to reduce population growth where it would be greatest. Even in the United States, the CDC found that 13.4% of pregnancies between 2011 and 2015 were said by mothers to be unwanted. More fully addressing family planning needs in the US, then, could even make an impact without convincing people to forego having their own children. One should note, however, that now our discussion has moved away from individual choices and towards policies and institutional actions. In the courses that I teach on environmental issues in economics, I have often encountered students with a zeal for encouraging voluntary actions to reduce environmental damage. But a fundamental message of economics is that, especially with a global problem like climate change, voluntary actions will never be enough. The fundamental problem is that greenhouse gas emissions are not appropriately priced and/or regulated. It is simply an impossible problem to solve without institutions (I should note that Roberts also points this out in the aforementioned article). Overpopulation is also a global problem. It is clear that many people around the world have children that they do not wish to have, or they would make different choices about children if their economic situations were improved. Perhaps the best and most efficient use of our time and energy in combatting climate change and ecological problems caused by overpopulation, then, is to rally in support of candidates and policies who want to do something about this and to push for broader acceptance and support within the population of climate change and overpopulation as serious issues. The policies and political will that will be needed to seriously solve these problems are, I think, typically underestimated (look here for a nice quick article on the kind of actions we are looking at to have a decent shot at avoiding disastrous levels of global warming). I largely view the preferences of most people to have children or not to be relatively fixed and not worth the effort that it would take to change minds on the scale needed for serious change. I am also wary of any campaign that tries to explain to women the appropriate thing to do with their bodies. But the notion that someone isn’t a serious environmentalist because they wish to have children seems wrong (and judging someone harshly for deciding not to have children for environmental reasons also seems wrong!). I, for one, will gladly support policies that will reshape the economy and reduce emissions on a per-capita basis by much more than any choice I could make to not have children. After all, preserving nature as much as possible for my offspring and all members of future generations is a large part of my motivation for the work that I do.
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AuthorEconomist. Professor. Environmentalist. Archives
July 2017
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