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PEER REVIEWED ARTICLE
Confronting the United Nations’
pro-growth agenda: A call to reverse
ecological overshoot
Nandita Bajaj,1 Eileen Crist2 and Kirsten Stade3
Abstract
In this article, we enjoin the United Nations (UN) to forge a path out of our
plight of multiple environmental and social crises. With other analysts,
we identify ‘overshoot’ – the state in which humanity has substantially
outpaced Earth’s capacity to regenerate its natural systems and to
absorb our waste output – as the root cause of the existential threats
we face. This dangerous condition demands rethinking our relationship
with Earth and embarking on scaling down the human enterprise within
policy frameworks of equity and rights. We argue that when the UN fi rst
articulated its international unity and prosperity mission, it did so within
a ‘growth’ paradigm that treats Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants as
mere resources at humanity’s disposal. The 1994 Cairo Conference on
Population and Development reinforced this agenda, with its sharp turn
away from the earlier emphasis on population concerns and their link to
environmental protection. Today, it is clear that the UN’s foundational
goals of peace, human rights and sustainability fl ounder within a growth-
driven framework of human exceptionalism and nature domination. To
correct course and reverse our advanced state of ecological overshoot,
1 Population Balance, St Paul, Minnesota; Institute for Humane Education, Antioch University, New
England. Email: nandita.bajaj@populationbalance.org
2 Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Virginia Tech. Email: ecrist@vt.edu
3 Population Balance, St Paul, Minnesota. Email: kirsten.stade@populationbalance.org
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10.3197/JPS.63799977346495 Open Access – CC BY 4.0
© 2024 Authors
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we urge the UN to lead in contracting the large-scale variables of the
human enterprise – population, economy, technosphere – and to resist
co-optation by political, ideological and special interest pressures that
would derail this mandate.
Keywords: ecological overshoot, human exceptionalism, pronatalism, degrowth,
United Nations, human rights, ecological justice
Introduction
The United Nations (UN) was created in 1945 with the historic pledge to uphold
world peace and serve as an institutional setting for collaboration among all
nations. Eighty years later, we fi nd ourselves in the midst of multiple social and
ecological crises. These dire and mounting threats stem from our advanced
condition of overshoot, which describes our predicament wherein the growth of
the global economy has substantially outpaced the capacity of Earth’s natural
systems – marine, forest, grasslands, wetlands, freshwater, soils – to process
human waste output and regenerate their ecological wealth and biodiversity
(Rees, 2023).
The UN emerged from prevailing ideas at the time of its founding, including that
endless economic growth brings prosperity and wellbeing, that human ingenuity
can overcome all constraints to growth, and that nature and nonhumans exist as
‘resources’ to serve us (Kuhlemann, 2020). While these ideas have directly led
to the present-day cascading crises, the UN appears invested in their obsolete
framing even as circumstances are becoming more desperate.
Since the mid-twentieth century, the expansion of the human enterprise has
accelerated on a number of interconnected levels: growth of economic extraction,
production and trade; increased consumption and higher standards of living (for
some); increasing energy use; a growing global consumer population; enormous
growth of the food sector; relentless technological (including infrastructural)
sprawl; and exponential increase of the human population and the global
livestock population (Steffen et al., 2015; Rees, 2023). (The combined latter
populations now comprise 96 per cent of mammalian biomass [Bar-On et al.,
2018]). Meanwhile, a 2020 Science publication offered a sobering quantifi cation
of technospheric growth (Stokstad, 2020). While 120 years ago the mass of the
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CONFRONTING THE UNITED NATIONS’ PRO-GROWTH AGENDA
technosphere (the total amount of man-made stuff) was three per cent of Earth’s
biomass, by 2020 the technosphere exceeded the weight of all living beings. By
2040, the mass of human stuff is projected to grow to three times the planet’s
biomass. Briefl y put, the industrial technosphere, serving eight billion people
connected within a global capitalist system, is overtaking the planet.
What we have learned is that this explosion of growth, at breakneck speed,
is a recipe for climate breakdown, mass extinction and global toxifi cation,
destabilising all complex life and undermining humanity’s prospects for high-
quality living and even for survival (Ripple et al., 2017; DellaSala et al., 2018; Díaz
et al., 2019; Ceballos et al., 2020; Bradshaw et al., 2021; Rees, 2023).
In this article, we argue that the UN needs to reassess its growth-biased orientation
and extricate itself from the corporate and religious interests that are undermining
its professed goals of peace, prosperity and stability. We include a brief review
of the UN’s history, including its departure, under the infl uence of these interests,
from acknowledging and addressing the ecological harms of unmitigated
demographic and economic growth. We outline a path toward correcting our
advanced state of ecological overshoot, beginning with resurrecting leadership
on reducing the global population through rights-based approaches. In addition,
we urge the UN to acknowledge and part ways with its human-exceptionalist
approaches that treat nature and nonhuman beings as resources for human
exploitation, approaches that have ripped the fabric of Earth’s life-sustaining
biophysical systems. In addition to offering counsel on population reduction
strategies, we present current literature on pathways to contracting our economic
excesses with attention to equity and justice.
Confronting ecological overshoot
If the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the centuries of ‘progress’, wherein
material prosperity and technological advancement appeared within reach of all
humanity, the twenty-fi rst century and beyond are the time of reckoning with the
ignored externalities and consequences of this progress. Overshoot is the engine
of an anthropogenic mass extinction event that recent scientifi c reports warn is
accelerating (Steffen et al., 2015; Díaz et al., 2019; Ceballos et al., 2020; Rees,
2023). Overshoot also undermines nature’s capacity to mitigate climate change on
a double register: human-driven global heating releases carbon stored in Earth’s
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ecosystems and soils, while continued destructive incursions into ecosystems
weaken their capacity to absorb emissions (Steffen et al., 2018).
Alongside the perils of ecological drawdown and rapid climate change, overshoot
of industrial humanity is also driving environmental contamination from local to
global scales. Earth’s biosphere may be likened to a thin fi lm of life encompassing
the planet and extending a few kilometres into crust and atmosphere. This fi nite
envelope, within which all life exists in a relatively closed system, is increasingly
besieged by toxic substances like plastics, fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides,
heavy metals, industrial chemicals and pharmaceutical waste (DellaSala et al.,
2018). The mounting pollution and degradation of the biosphere are attenuating
the epidemiological environment of life, promoting conditions for infectious,
zoonotic and chronic disease to spread (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2013).
A further dangerous outgrowth of overshoot is its potential to fuel confl ict.
Overshoot induces growing scarcities, dislocation of populations, disruption of
supply chains, adverse harvest events and freshwater depletion and pollution
(Klare, 2014; Bradshaw et al., 2021).
In brief, overshoot is the underlying driver of climate breakdown, biodiversity
collapse, global toxifi cation and aggravation of social confl icts and war. This
predicament lowers the quality of life of present and future people, has a corrosive
infl uence on democratic institutions, presents opportunity for dangerous
demagogues and tyrants and reduces the capacity of young people to believe
in a bright future. The accelerating condition of overshoot – the outcome of too
many people having (or desiring) a high consumption standard of living, in a
polluted world of declining ‘resources’ – tends to foster divisive and fear-driven
socio-psychological states. Overshoot makes humanity far less conducive to the
noble inclinations of human nature, like sharing, collaborating and equitably
coexisting (Rieder, 2024).
It is clear that we must act as an international community, with meaningful
contributions from UN leadership, to confront the root cause of our plight
while there is still time to be proactive. The called-for programme of action is
audacious in scope but simple to articulate: there must be fewer of us, extracting,
producing and consuming less, and living far more equitably within the entire
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CONFRONTING THE UNITED NATIONS’ PRO-GROWTH AGENDA
community of life (Jackson and Jensen, 2022; Fletcher, et al., 2024). At our stage
of advanced overshoot, this programme of action is mandatory simply for survival
and prevention of unnecessary death and suffering. Importantly, it also lays the
groundwork for a world underpinned by a planetary reality where biodiversity and
its ecological gifts are restored to their abundances, complexity and resilience,
and there are enough sources of livelihood for all to enjoy a simple but high-
quality standard of living.
In sum, countermanding overshoot with the goal of fewer of us, consuming less,
with a commitment to equity, is about more than survival. It promises a redirection
of human history away from the modalities of conquest, colonisation, exploitation,
killing, confl ict, war between humans and what UN Secretary General Antonio
Guterres has called ‘our suicidal war on nature’ (UN, 2021b).
The UN’s early population efforts
Earlier in the UN’s history, the institution embraced the necessity of addressing
population and played a pivotal role in focusing international attention in
rights-based efforts to lower fertility. In the years following the UN’s creation,
demographic studies elucidated the realities of unprecedented population
growth that were undermining efforts at peacekeeping and instituting human
rights. In collaboration with the International Union for the Scientifi c Study of
Population (IUSSP), the UN convened its fi rst world population conferences in
1954 (Rome) and 1965 (Belgrade) to discuss solutions to challenges related to
population growth. What followed was an extraordinary period of international
investment in rights-based programmes, including education for women and girls
and publicly funded family planning programmes. These approaches brought
tremendous gains in lowered fertility, reduced poverty and enhanced autonomy
for women and girls (DeJong, 2000; Weisman, 2013; de Silva and Tenreyro, 2017;
Kuhlemann, 2020; Bongaarts and Hodgson, 2022).
The UN’s 1994 Cairo conference: population concerns abandoned
Yet in the population conferences held in the decades that followed, namely
1974 (Bucharest) and 1984 (Mexico City), this spirit of frankly acknowledging and
addressing population challenges began to shift (DeJong, 2000; Coole, 2021).
By the 1990s, the subject had become so contentious that the 1994 International
Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt culminated with
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an abrupt departure from acknowledging the role of population deceleration in
promoting ecological sustainability and human rights. Feminist and social justice
advocates, religious conservatives, and trade and economic interests united
to delegitimise population concerns brought forth by demographers, family
planning advocates and environmentalists at the Cairo conference (DeJong,
2000; Campbell and Bedford, 2009; Weisman, 2013; Kuhlemann, 2020; Coole,
2021; Bongaarts and Hodgson, 2022). A key factor in this ideological turn was the
ascension of the New Right in the United States, as the Reagan Administration
conjoined neoliberal economics and social-religious conservatism. Buttressed
by the conviction that human population increase was necessary for economic
growth, the powerful proponents of this emerging ideology rejected state-level
protectionist and welfare support, including for family planning initiatives that
they branded ‘neo-Malthusian’. In their formulation, opening markets for trade
would itself lower fertility as it propelled development, with no need for direct
investment in family planning (DeJong, 2000; Coole, 2021). Professed concern
for the vulnerable notwithstanding, the motive for shifting toward a free trade
emphasis was the drive by elites in both the developing and developed world
to exploit developing nations’ cheap resources (Shrivastava and Kothari, 2012;
Coole, 2021).
The presence of the Vatican and other conservative religious interests at Cairo, and
their vociferous opposition to birth control and abortion, cemented the shift away
from voluntary family planning policies and female empowerment as pathways to
reduced fertility rates, higher quality of life and nature protection (DeJong, 2000;
Coole, 2021; Bongaarts and Hodgson, 2022). Ultimately, due to the presence
of a constellation of interests that were for their own reasons hostile to family
planning, the Cairo conference became the death knell for an understanding that
a sustainable population and the elevation of human rights could be twin goals for
achieving reproductive and ecological justice. Feminists, concerned by instances
of ‘population control’ efforts that had included coercive measures, joined trade
and religious advocates in upholding this newfangled population denialism,
despite the fact that the vast majority of family planning initiatives over preceding
decades were voluntary and indisputably elevated women’s reproductive rights
and improved the quality of human life (Robinson and Ross, 2007; Weisman, 2013;
de Silva and Tenreyro, 2017; Coole, 2021; Bongaarts and Hodgson, 2022).
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The aftermath of the UN’s 1994 Cairo conference
The consequences have been devastating. In the decades since the 1994 Cairo
conference, international funding for family planning plummeted by 35 per cent,
and it continues to fall far short of the global unmet need for contraception
(Sinding, 2008; Grollman et al., 2018). The result has been the stalling, or even
reversal, of fertility declines in many countries experiencing rapid population
growth (Bongaarts and Hodgson, 2022).
What the reproductive-rights community, including many feminists, missed in this
historical moment was the enormous sway of pronatalism, a coercive population-
growth factor far more prevalent than any ‘population control’ measures
employed to lower fertility (Campbell and Bedford, 2009; Kuhlemann, 2020;
Coole, 2021; Bajaj and Stade, 2023). Pronatalism is a constellation of patriarchal,
religious, nationalistic and economic pressures on women to bear children,
precisely in order to strengthen those power structures. Pronatalism emerged
as institutionalised patriarchy came to prevail with the rise some 5,000 years ago
of early states and empires that depended on population expansion and seizure
of resources to consolidate power (Saini, 2023). It remains enormously pervasive
and oppressive in the lives of girls and women and continues to be the steadfast
engine of population growth.
With the ideological turn away from population concerns instigated three decades
ago, pronatalism has been allowed to thrive in the obfuscation spawned by a
superfi cial view of human and reproductive rights. The emergent discourse about
family planning privileged the ostensible ‘right of parents’ to procreate, overlooking
both the sociocultural coercive pressures on girls and women to bear children
and the rights of children to be born into social and ecological conditions that
are conducive to their wellbeing (Hedberg, 2020; Kuhlemann, 2020; Rieder, 2024).
Additionally, the abandonment of the population factor meant that its undeniable
relevance to safeguarding the natural world and future generations went missing
from the public domain and international policy (Kuhlemann, 2020; Coole, 2021).
UNFPA population denial today: 2023 State of World Population Report
To this day, the ties of population size and growth to ecological and human
wellbeing remain a largely proscribed subject within the UN, as refl ected in the
2023 State of World Population (SWOP) report by the United Nations Population
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Fund (UNFPA). The SWOP report demonstrates how the agency’s extreme
reluctance to address the population factor has resulted in messaging that
excludes the impact of demographic realities on women, girls, ecosystems and
vulnerable human communities. Its glib title, ‘8 Billion Lives, Infi nite Possibilities’,
suggests a strong disinclination for a nuanced discussion of the challenges posed
by population growth (UNFPA, 2023).
The report dismisses numerous studies by reputable scientists that draw
conclusive links between growth in human numbers and climate breakdown,
biodiversity loss, species extinctions, resource scarcity, confl ict, poverty, food
insecurity and more, labelling those studies ‘modern Malthusianism’ – a term
popularised by the pro-growth and religious right movement of the 1980s
(DeJong, 2000; Coole, 2021). Instead of conceding the obvious role of human
numbers in these compounding crises, and the environmental and social benefi ts
that would accrue from fewer people, the report vaguely alludes to ‘reducing
emissions’ and ‘increasing sustainable production and consumption’ as strategies
to address climate change, while leaving virtually unacknowledged that climate
change is but one existential threat out of many in our state of overshoot.
The report goes so far as to deny outright the relevance of population size,
citing a statement from the Union of Concerned Scientists that, ‘A misplaced
focus on population growth as a key driver of… climate change confl ates a rise
in emissions with an increase in people, rather than… an increase in cars, power
plants, airplanes, industries, buildings’ (UCS, 2022 as cited in UNFPA, 2023). The
implication here is that the technology and infrastructures that produce climate-
wrecking emissions are wielded solely by a consumer minority residing in wealthy,
low-fertility countries. This view entirely discounts the global reality of a rising
middle class that is responsible for all that technology and infrastructures – a
global consumer class that is projected to reach fi ve billion within this decade
alone (Kharas, 2017). The report’s view appears to assume that the billions of
people living in poverty today will not seek to improve their standard of living and
thus increase their share in ‘cars, power plants, airplanes, industries, buildings’
(see Rees, 2023). Meanwhile, the ignored science behind the UN-sponsored IPCC
report conclusively shows that, ‘Globally, GDP per capita and population growth
remained the strongest drivers of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in
the last decade’ (IPCC, 2022a, emphasis added).
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SWOP 2023 ignores pronatalist pressures
UNFPA’s refusal to consider the population factor is based on its contention that
to do so places responsibility for the climate and other global crises on women
and girls, thus ‘weaponizing … women’s rights to contraception and education’.
What the report elides, however, is that these very rights are violated by pronatalist
pressures worldwide: women and girls regularly face domestic violence, sexual
abuse, divorce, economic marginalisation and social ostracism as a result of their
inability or refusal to have the number of children dictated by high-fertility societal
norms (Dasgupta and Dasgupta, 2017; Ikeke, 2021; Ullah et al., 2021; Bajaj, 2023;
Pirnia et al., 2023).
Pronatalist pressures are only worsening, with numerous countries spreading
alarmist rhetoric about ‘human population collapse’ to justify policies ranging
from baby bonuses and legally reduced marital age, to restricting abortion and
contraception, and even subsidising the multi-billion dollar assisted reproductive
technologies industry (Bajaj and Stade, 2023; Fassbender et al., 2023). As admitted
in the report, these pronatalist policies and narratives often include ethnocentric,
anti-immigration and nationalist rhetoric that advance elitist, political and
economic agendas as well as religious and racist ones (UN DESA, 2021; UNFPA,
2023). These rising pronatalist trends constitute an enormous regression of hard-
won human rights. Taking concrete steps to oppose them should be a priority for
the UN and other bodies concerned with strengthening reproductive rights. Yet
UNFPA gives only passing attention to these emergent trends, prioritising their
insistence that population size and growth bear no relevance to nature protection
or human rights and wellbeing (Bajaj, 2023).
Ironically, realistic acknowledgment of how demographic trends fuel major social
and ecological challenges would in no way interfere with the UNFPA’s stated
priority of strengthening female rights and autonomy. Across the world, in country
after country, once women achieve the education, empowerment and means
to plan their families, fertility declines. This trend is so strikingly uniform across
religious, cultural and political contexts that it has revealed women’s ‘latent desire’
for lower fertility – a general preference that surfaces forthrightly once conditions
for women’s authentic choices align (Robinson and Ross, 2007; Campbell and
Bedford, 2009; Weisman, 2013; Engelman, 2016; Bongaarts and Hodgson, 2022;
Speidel and O’Sullivan, 2023). Providing the means for women to control their
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fertility, while also providing science-based information about how procreation
relates to climate, biodiversity, clean water and other environmental concerns,
will support women to realise their latent desire for fewer, well-cared-for children
and also support their decision, if they so choose, to remain childfree. Such a
shift toward female empowerment would correct for millennia of patriarchal
pronatalism that has pressured women to be breeding machines.
The assumption that women should be spared accurate information about
population impacts – lest they plan their families based on a comprehensive
picture of the consequences not only for themselves but for present and
future societies, for children and for the planet – is condescending (Hedberg,
2020; Rieder, 2024). The report repeatedly invokes the 1994 Cairo Conference
Programme of Action, which lists as a core principle that all people have ‘the basic
right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children
and to have the information, education and means to do so’ (UN, 1994). Yet a
comprehensive picture regarding the impacts of reproductive decisions on the
prospective parents themselves, as well as on the children, society and planet, is
precisely what would enable reproductive decisions to be ‘free and responsible’.
The SWOP report assumes that only would-be parents have ‘rights’, that they
make decisions in a sociocultural and ecological vacuum, that the coercion of girls
and women to procreate is irrelevant, and that ecological impacts of reproductive
decision-making at local and global scales are discountable.
Refusal to admit the enormous implications of population size and growth
suggests that the UNFPA espouses the pronatalist forces it turns a blind eye to
(Bajaj, 2023). Despite passing mention of the infl uence of pronatalist pressures, the
report assumes motherhood to be women’s desired ‘natural’ path, and reinforces
this assumption with examples of remorseful women foregoing motherhood
because of the climate crisis, or through selected studies highlighting involuntary
childlessness due to infertility or other circumstances.
We agree that experiences of missed motherhood, and a sense of grief that
may accompany them, need to be acknowledged. Absent from the report,
however, is appreciation of the extent to which such experiences are shaped
by oppressive forces, which stigmatise those facing infertility and insist on
biological motherhood as the expected, default path (Greil et al., 2011; Ullah
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CONFRONTING THE UNITED NATIONS’ PRO-GROWTH AGENDA
et al., 2021; Pirnia et al., 2023). The report even casts a favourable light on state
subsidisation of the fertility industry, while sweeping under the rug the ways in
which this industry exploits socially constructed fears of childlessness, causes
psychological and physical harms through aggressive interventions, and further
entrenches biological-motherhood-is-destiny notions of womanhood (Tsigdinos,
2021; Turkmendag, 2022; Fassbender et al., 2023).
While extensively canvassing historic examples of forced sterilisation to control
populations, the report makes no mention of the well-documented diffi culties
women face in obtaining voluntary sterilisation due to pronatalist medical
institutions and state policies (Lalonde, 2018; Hintz and Brown, 2019). Instead
of choosing to promote the predatory fertility industry, the report might have
included discussion of people leading fulfi lling lives as single and childfree adults,
as well as within adoptive families or families created with nonhuman kin. Given
the extent to which such choices are stigmatised within most cultures, normalising
diverse family choices and hitherto nonconventional alternatives makes ethical
and prudential sense (Neal and Neal, 2022; Bajaj and Stade, 2023). The report also
missed a precious opportunity to elevate parenthood through adoption, which is
a mindful choice for creating or enlarging families, especially given that millions
of children worldwide are estimated to live in settings vulnerable to violence,
abuse, neglect and exploitation, and are in need of loving homes (UNICEF, 2017;
Hedberg, 2020; Rieder, 2024).
SWOP 2023 ignores the rights of children
Indeed, the most glaring oversight of a report devoted to reproduction matters
was the omission of any mention, let alone discussion, of the rights of children to
be born into conditions that support their material, psychological and spiritual
wellbeing. This omission was especially reprehensible given recent reports that
warn of the dangers to children’s rights posed by population growth and climate
change. A 2023 report by UNICEF and the World Bank notes that a combination
of rapid population growth and limited social protection measures have led to
a steep increase in the global numbers of extremely poor children, especially in
Africa and South Asia where nearly ninety per cent of the world’s children caught
in extreme poverty reside (Salmeron Gomez et al., 2023). Yet another report
warned that almost half of the world’s 2.2 billion children are at risk of experiencing
‘extremely dire’ conditions from the climate crisis and pollution (UNICEF, 2021).
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The convergence of poverty, rapid population growth and unjust cultural norms
also fosters high rates of child marriage: Recent data from UNICEF indicate that
more than 700 million women alive today were married before the age of eighteen,
of whom 250 million were married before the age of fi fteen (UNICEF, 2014). The
practice of child marriage perpetrates the sexual abuse of girls and stunts their
life prospects, while contributing to the spiral of population growth, poverty and
high rates of morbidity, and stunting and early mortality among children born to
these girls (Wodon et al., 2017). The relationship between population growth,
high fertility and the violation of children’s rights is especially stark in patriarchal
societies. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, due to population growth alone, a
doubling in the number of child brides is projected by 2050 (UNICEF, 2014). Sub-
Saharan Africa also has the highest prevalence and largest number of children in
labour, representing over half of the 160 million total – another iniquitous trend
projected to rise in lockstep with population growth over the coming decades
(ILO and UNICEF, 2021).
Across the world, high fertility is directly jeopardising food security, the welfare
of children and other vulnerable populations and ecological sustainability. The
eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) endorsed by the majority of UN
states in 2000 failed to achieve full realisation largely due to the refusal to address
the population factor: Progress toward reducing child mortality, improving
maternal health and securing universal access to voluntary family planning stalled
or worsened as the global population grew by approximately another billion
(Starbird et al., 2016). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), signed by the
global community in 2015 as an update to the MDGs and, like their precursor,
based on the oxymoron of ‘sustainable economic growth’, missed the opportunity
to adopt a meaningful commitment to correct this oversight. Today, the SDGs are
also off track to reduce poverty and hunger, improve wellbeing and protect the
environment (Kopnina, 2020a; UN, 2023).
As noted in UNFPA’s own 2022 report, there is an unplanned pregnancy crisis,
with half of all pregnancies, totalling 121 million each year globally, unintended
(UNFPA, 2022). Other research shows that at least 270 million women globally
have an unmet need for contraception due to patriarchal and religious barriers
(Kantorová et al., 2020). Yet these crises are barely acknowledged in the report. At
this historic juncture, this represents a fateful oversight. Instead of unpacking the
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CONFRONTING THE UNITED NATIONS’ PRO-GROWTH AGENDA
pronatalist pressures that thwart the realisation of human and nonhuman rights, and
promoting a comprehensive ethic of reproductive responsibility to planet, children
and future generations, the report offers the following hollow generalisation:
Support the fertility preferences and aspirations of people: understand
whether people in all income categories, at all ages and in all social
groups are having the number of children they want. If the answer is
no, reproductive rights are compromised (UNFPA, 2023).
This statement not only ignores the rights of children to be born into a safe and
caring world, it also naïvely overlooks the fact that expressed ‘preferences’ for
numbers of children are socioculturally shaped, if not determined, and often
rehearsing dominant patriarchal norms (Campbell and Bedford, 2009; Dasgupta
and Dasgupta, 2017).
SWOP 2023 prioritises economic growth over human wellbeing
Despite the report’s professed concern for the inalienable right of women ‘to
have the number of children they want’, the humanity of the women doing the
reproducing sometimes appears secondary to the reproductive function as
such. While the report repeatedly denounces overpopulation discussions that
‘transform… wombs into legitimate sites for climate policy’, it has none of the
same misgivings about rhetoric that sees wombs as engines of economic growth.
The neoliberal wording of such statements as, ‘Higher levels of human capital can
offset environmental impacts while improving productivity and economic growth’
frames human beings as system inputs, while whitewashing the devastating
impacts of growth on nature, on children and on a human future worth living.
The priority that UNFPA places on economic growth is evident in the report’s
outdated assumption that such growth will automatically advance reproductive
autonomy as well as fertility decline. This theory of demographic transition, as it is
known, has been largely superseded (Robinson and Ross, 2007; Campbell et al.,
2013; Bongaarts and Hodgson, 2022). A recent data analysis of 136 developing
countries shows that falling fertility rates between 1970 and 2000 had little or
no association with changes to national economies, whether measured by GDP
or household consumption (Götmark and Andersson, 2022). Rather, falling
fertility rates were a direct response to voluntary family planning programmes
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that provided sexuality education, normalised contraceptive use and offered
accessible and affordable services – regardless of whether economies grew,
stagnated or declined. Yet the SWOP report makes no direct acknowledgement
of the indispensable role family planning programmes play in the transition to
lower fertility norms.
Dismissal of the population-environment connection is common to
UN agencies
UNFPA is not the only UN agency that promotes confl icting messages on the
connection between the human population and planetary health. While the
2022 IPCC climate-change mitigation report confi rmed that population increase
and economic growth are the main drivers of today’s burgeoning emissions
(IPCC, 2022a), those results were censored and removed from the Summary for
Policymakers distributed to media outlets (IPCC, 2022b). What remained were
only weak claims about the potential role of ‘low-emission technologies’ to
mitigate climate change (IPCC, 2022b). Similarly, the latest UN Conference on
Trade and Development report counsels developing countries to ‘embrace green
tech revolution or risk falling behind’ (UNCTAD, 2023). This is disconcerting in
light of recent studies that have demonstrated that reliance on so-called green
technologies to reduce emissions while maintaining economic growth will not only
be ineffective in countering climate breakdown, but will add more devastating
impacts to our predicament (Rees, 2023).
Building these technologies at the scale needed to power current levels of
economic development for a planet of eight billion, and growing, would itself
require a massive ramp-up in fossil fuel consumption, as well as infrastructural
buildout that destroys habitats and biodiversity. ‘Green’ technologies also demand
mining for minerals found largely in the Global South, driving deforestation,
toxifi cation of soil and groundwater, poisoning of air, killing of wildlife, human
displacement due to water scarcity and exploitative labour practices including of
children (Jackson and Jensen, 2022; Kara, 2023; Ketcham, 2023). This new wave of
industrial extractivism is already rapacious, but it must expand to accommodate
continued population and economic growth: its next frontier is the deep seabed,
the last ecosystem not yet assaulted by industrialism and which harbours rich and
largely unknown biodiversity (Heffernan, 2019).
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CONFRONTING THE UNITED NATIONS’ PRO-GROWTH AGENDA
The ‘clean energy transition’ is poised to drive staggering assaults on a natural
world already in the throes of a mass extinction. Yet that transition is excused and
even celebrated with arguments that we must provide for an oversized and growing
human population whose inevitability is seldom questioned. The same unquestioned
commitment to growth underlies the UN’s reluctance to consider reining in the most
environmentally destructive aspect of humanity: the food system (Campbell et al.,
2017; Crist, 2019; Benton et al., 2021). The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO)’s 2006 report ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’ exposed the signifi cant contribution
of greenhouse gases from animal agriculture, with the sector found to account for
eighteen per cent of emissions (Steinfeld et al., 2006; Neslen, 2023). The report called
for signifi cantly reducing the scale of industrial animal agriculture to curb emissions.
But former offi cials at the FAO have disclosed that they received such intense
backlash from the major meat-producing countries that FAO’s senior leadership
was forced to water down their scientifi c fi ndings in subsequent publications
(Neslen, 2023): the 2013 report identifi ed the livestock sector as responsible for
fourteen per cent of all climate emissions, while the 2023 model ratcheted the
number down to eleven per cent. In the meantime, independent studies have
found that livestock emissions could be as high as twenty per cent or even 28 per
cent of the total (Twine, 2021; Xu et al., 2021). FAO data are a prime source for
IPCC’s climate modelling, which is clearly compromised by the interests of industrial
animal agriculture and a UN body that refuses to challenge them (Neslen, 2023).
Permitting political and special interest interference within the UN, especially in
today’s state of emergency, demonstrates compromised institutional integrity,
or even uncritical support of destructive industries. In a world in overshoot, the
continued pursuit of growth is a perilous path, which perpetuates the neocolonial
exploitation of disempowered people and nonhuman nature via syphoning
resources from Global South to Global North and downgrading Earth’s biodiversity
and ecological wealth (Langan, 2018; Kopnina, 2020b; UN, 2021a). Given the UN’s
infl uence on global policymakers and the public, it must lead the way out of this
terminal self-destruction and toward an ethic of living equitably within ecological
boundaries (Jackson and Jensen, 2022). We urge the UN to face the reality that
growth at the interconnected levels of human numbers, economic activity and
technosphere is imperilling the biophysical integrity of Earth as well as human
survival and quality of life.
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POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024
A call for the UN to embrace and implement a new ethic of degrowth
and justice
Humanity’s recent historical experience has revealed that unrelenting population
and economic growth have devastated nature, depleted resources, fuelled
intra-human and human-wildlife confl ict and undermined humanity’s tenure as
conditions deteriorate. We must abandon the growth paradigm and willingly
shrink the large-scale variables that underpin overshoot: lower our global
population by means of policies that elevate human rights and responsibilities;
reduce our economic activity within frameworks of equity, meaningful work and
peace; and contain the technosphere from overtaking the face of the Earth.
Reduce population
Decades of research show that providing affordable and accessible family planning
and contraceptive services to all, along with education and empowerment of
women and liberation of girls from child marriage, are the fundamental human
rights through which fertility declines. Lowering the population hinges on instituting
these rights (Robinson and Ross, 2007; Bongaarts and Hodgson, 2022; Speidel and
O’Sullivan, 2023). Concurrently, we need to confront the sociocultural forces of
pronatalism that have held women (and men) captive to the idea that biological
procreation is obligatory and that motherhood is destiny (Campbell and Bedford,
2009; Kuhlemann, 2020; Bajaj and Stade, 2023). Reproductive norm-shifting
programmes such as radio shows, soap operas and other cultural initiatives are key
components of this overarching approach to combating pronatalism (Ryerson et al.,
2022). This approach aims for reproductive liberation, where procreating becomes
an authentic decision, choosing to be childfree will be an equally acceptable option
and alternative ways of creating family – including adoption – are embraced. This
freedom also opens the door to reproductive responsibility: promoting procreative
choices that consider the individual rights and wellbeing not only of the parents, but
also of the children to be born, human beings already in existence and nonhuman
creatures within the entire web of life (Hedberg, 2020; Rieder, 2024).
The goal of a smaller human population is not about ‘social engineering’ or
‘population control’. On the contrary, it is about understanding that there must
be fewer of us so that the fundamental needs of human life – most especially
food, but also freshwater, housing, basic commodities, energy and infrastructures
– cease to devastate land and seas. Today, humanity demands half of Earth’s
31
CONFRONTING THE UNITED NATIONS’ PRO-GROWTH AGENDA
ice-free surface to make food while industrial fi shing has devastated marine life
abundances and habitats (Fletcher et al., 2024). How can UN agencies, and other
constituencies, rationally claim that these life-shattering metrics have nothing to
do with human numbers?
Reduce economic activity
Redressing how economic activity fuels overshoot is more complex, given
economies’ fundamental dependence on both biophysical reality and social
structure. The complexity of economic-driven impact demands redirection on several
economic variables simultaneously (Spash, 2024). We argue for a multipronged
approach: reduce the workweek; eliminate the production of luxury, throwaway
and planned obsolescence commodities; reduce global trade; shrink the materials-
and energy-intensive global military sector; revamp the fi nancial system away
from debt and credit; and transform how we grow food and make dietary choices.
As an overarching mandate, we need to reduce industrial extraction, production,
trade and consumption. Lowering our numbers will facilitate such economic
downscaling but other interventions are equally imperative. Leading ecological
economists have emphasised the importance of shortening the workweek for
both ecological sustainability and human wellbeing (Dietz and O’Neill, 2013;
Hickel, 2020). A shorter workweek translates into lowered extraction, as well as
reduced production and lower energy consumption. Shortening the workweek
also allows for work-sharing, redressing unemployment.
Working less supports human wellbeing by allowing people to switch from doing
too much to being more spaciously: devoting more time to non-consumptive
(or less consumptive) activities like cultivating friendships, tending gardens,
exercising, engaging in volunteer work and apprenticeships, and pursuing
hobbies and spiritual interests. Such activities are less impactful on nature and
enable human beings to explore the meaning of being alive. Cutting back the
workweek will create a far less destructive economy, while fostering a civilisation
that values self-realisation for all people.
Another indispensable component of downscaling is to end the production of
luxury, throwaway and rapid-obsolescence products. For example, the fact that
mining is still carried out for the mass production of jewellery is something that
32
POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024
should deeply dismay us. The fact that cars, cell phones, personal computers
and so on are ceaselessly produced as ‘new models’ should repel us. Even as
we eliminate superfl uous commodities and make products more durable, we
need to transition from an extraction economy to a recycling economy. And since
we know that recycling consumes energy, we must simultaneously work toward
conserving and sharing goods.
Economic activity related to the global military establishment must be greatly
curtailed. The military industry devours inordinate amounts of energy and materials.
It demands extravagant funding, which if redirected to social programmes and
nature protection would advance human and planetary wellbeing (Klein, 2019).
This unprecedented historical moment must also spur humanity to recognise the
insanity of taking militarism for granted and the sanity of transitioning to a fully
demilitarised global civilisation (Crist et al., 2024).
The debt-based global capitalist economy interconnecting billions of consumers
(with more billions in the wings) is the most powerful accelerator of overshoot,
lacking any built-in mechanism to break its destructive spiral. The fi nancial system
– so Byzantine in its workings that no one fully understands it – hinges on the
mechanism of credit, debt and the device of the credit card to ‘abolish poverty’
and produce middle class populations indentured, through debt, to working for
the system (Lazzarato, 2012). Financial capitalism produces a fake form of wealth
with real purchasing power, bankrolling the expansion of the technosphere at all
levels (from building highways to buying personal computers) at the expense of
nature’s integrity, at the cost of continuous waste streams and with the bill-due
constantly pushed into the future. How to revamp the global capitalist fi nancial
system is admittedly diffi cult to imagine within the current economic status quo.
However, this should not stop us from recognising that, as the main engine of
economic growth augmented enormously by the growing global middle class, it
is driving the desolation of Earth.
As a last point on shrinking economic activity, we must focus on the industrial food
system, which is delivering lethal blows to biodiversity, contributing heftily to global
heating and planet-wide pollution and undermining human health (Campbell et al.,
2017; Crist, 2019; Benton et al., 2021). The most harmful component of the industrial
food system is animal agriculture, which continues to spread in tandem with the
33
CONFRONTING THE UNITED NATIONS’ PRO-GROWTH AGENDA
growing global middle class and the relentless pressures of animal-food industry
interests. Beyond its high ecological costs and human disease consequences,
industrial animal agriculture egregiously violates the basics of ethical treatment of
animals. We offer a plea for an ambitious UN global initiative advocating mostly
plant-based eating, which could help spur reduction of the global livestock
population. This turn would free large swathes of land for ecological restoration
and rewilding, deliver better health outcomes for people and reduce the violent
exploitation of animals. We also need to rethink food consumption more broadly,
substantially reducing processed and packaged foods and the trading of foods.
From the shallow call ‘to feed the world’, we are invited to shift to a new sensibility
of ‘nourishing humanity’: eating more locally, more plant-based and clean food
produced with minimal industrial inputs (Benton et al., 2021; Crist et al., 2021).
Reduce and restrain the technosphere
Humanity must fi nd a way to restrain the sprawl of industrial material culture,
including infrastructures. Reducing the global population and economic activity
will take us a long way in the direction of containing the technosphere and
allowing expansive natural ecosystems and abundant wild plants and animals to
revive (Crist et al., 2021). However, deliberately choosing to limit the reach of
the technosphere, including human suburban and exurban settlements, aviation,
roads, pipelines and other infrastructures, is a crucial aspect for moving toward an
ecological civilisation (Laurance, 2018).
Conclusion
A commitment to downscaling the human factor on demographic, economic
and technosphere fronts is imperative for transitioning to a simple, equitable
and high-quality material and spiritual life for all humanity within an ecologically
restored planet of biophysical abundance. Such a transition can be effected by
means of honouring fundamental human rights, including the rights of children
and future generations. A commitment to downscaling recognises the essential
role of animals and ecologies for human physical, mental and spiritual wellness,
as well as their inherent right to dignity and suffi cient habitat and resources
to thrive. Acknowledging that Earth is our sacrosanct home – not a stage for
human development, resource or spaceship – lays the groundwork for promoting
protected natural areas, ecological restoration, rewilding projects, agroecological
farming, urban green spaces and strong legal frameworks to halt and reverse the
34
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defaunation of land and seas. We appeal to the UN to enlarge our understanding
of justice to include all lifeforms, wild and domestic, and the care of their habitats
and homes (Kimmerer, 2013).
The dynamic stability and vitality of Earth’s ecosystems and all its inhabitants
demand a major reorientation of the human imagination to respond soberly
to mounting social and ecological crises. We must face the truth by grounding
ourselves in humility, relinquishing planetary domination, shrinking human
presence and activities, and spurring into action to reinstate kin-centric relations
with the planet and its entire community of life. To move beyond the failed
approaches of our current politics requires us to abandon the incessant pursuit
of growth, and to embrace a sense of our shared humanity embedded within the
larger web of life. We urge the UN to help lead the way.
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