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The Journal of Population and Sustainability Vol. 8, No. 2

August 2024
The Journal of Population and Sustainability 8(2)

Authors:

Nandita Bajaj

Antioch University New England

Eileen Crist

Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

Kirsten Stade

Population Balance

Akosua Mawuse Amankwah

Kwame Nkrumah University Of Science and Technology

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ISSN 2398-5496

the journal of population

and sustainability

vol. 8, no. 2, August 2024

The Journal of Population and Sustainability

is published by White Horse Press and

generously supported by Population Matters

THE JOURNAL OF POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY vol 8, no. 2, August 2024

Editorial introduction: Population dynamics, economic growth and

planetary boundaries

DAVID SAMWAYS – EDITOR

Confronting the United Nations’ pro-growth agenda:

A call to reverse ecological overshoot

NANDITA BAJAJ, EILEEN CRIST AND KIRSTEN STADE

Evaluation of circular strategies and their effectiveness

in fashion SMEs in Ghana

AKOSUA MAWUSE AMANKWAH, EDWARD APPIAH,

CHARLES FRIMPONG AND AGUINALDO DOS SANTOS

Groundwater: sinking cities, urbanisation, global drying,

population growth

JOHN E. PATTISON AND PETER COOKE

A comparison of mortality transition in China and India,

1950–2021

AALOK CHAURASIA

The Journal of Population and Sustainability

Vol 8, No 2, 2024

Information

The Journal of Population and Sustainability (JP&S) is an open access interdisciplinary journal

published by The White Horse Press exploring all aspects of the relationship between human

numbers and environmental issues. The journal publishes both peer reviewed and invited

material. It is intended that the JP&S act as an interdisciplinary hub facilitating collaboration

and furthering the development of the ﬁ eld. While generously supported by environmental

charity Population Matters, the JP&S is entirely editorially independent and welcomes

contributions from scholars with a variety of perspectives on the role of population in

environmental problems. The views and opinions expressed by authors are their own and do

not necessarily reﬂ ect those of the editor, the editorial board or publisher.

www.whp-journals.co.uk/JPS

Editor: David Samways

Editorial Board:

Sunday Adedini (Wits University, South Africa & Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria)

Ugo Bardi (University of Florence, Italy)

Jeroen van den Bergh (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Aalok Ranjan Chaurasia, MLC Foundation and Shyam Institute

John Cleland (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK)

Diana Coole (Birkbeck, University of London, UK)

Sara Curran (University of Washington, USA)

Céline Delacroix, Senior Fellow Population Institute, FP/Earth Project Director,

Adjunct Professor University of Ottawa

Kerryn Higgs (University of Tasmania, Australia)

Theodore Lianos (Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece)

Graeme Maxton (Club of Rome, Switzerland)

Fred Naggs (Natural History Museum, UK)

Jane O’Sullivan (University of Queensland, Australia)

William E. Rees (University of British Columbia, Canada)

Bill Ryerson (Population Media Centre, USA)

Peter Slater (University of St Andrews, UK)

Submissions:

We invite contributions from the social sciences, humanities, environmental and natural

sciences including those concerned with family planning and reproductive health. We

also invite contributions from those working for NGOs with interests in population and

environmental issues. We are interested in publishing original research papers, reviews of

already published research, opinion pieces and book reviews.

For submission details please see our website: www.whp-journals.co.uk/JPS

Acknowledgements:

The editor would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their assistance.

Cover images:

Top: Bisa Junisa, Wikimedia Commons, CC B-SA 4.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Menuju_ke_laut.jpg.

Bottom: Woodleywonderworks, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/

File:Climate_march_in_dc_(38614151866).jpg

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ISSN 2398-5496

ContentsContents

Editorial introduction: Population dynamics, economic growth and

planetary boundaries 5

DAVID SAMWAYS – EDITOR

Confronting the United Nations’ pro-growth agenda:

A call to reverse ecological overshoot 15

NANDITA BAJAJ, EILEEN CRIST AND KIRSTEN STADE

Evaluation of circular strategies and their effectiveness

in fashion SMEs in Ghana 45

AKOSUA MAWUSE AMANKWAH, EDWARD APPIAH,

CHARLES FRIMPONG AND AGUINALDO DOS SANTOS

Groundwater: sinking cities, urbanisation, global drying,

population growth 77

JOHN E. PATTISON AND PETER COOKE

A comparison of mortality transition in China and India,

1950–2021 105

AALOK CHAURASIA

EDITORIAL

Population dynamics, economic growth

and planetary boundaries

David Samways

While this journal is principally concerned with the population dimension of

environmental sustainability, it is impossible to understand the role of demographic

factors in environmental impact in isolation from their relationships to wider social

and economic structures. At the broadest level of analysis, the IPAT equation

is a useful heuristic device for capturing how population size (P), the per capita

level of afﬂ uence or consumption (A), and the resource intensity of the technical

means of production (T) affects environmental impact (I). Thus, the growth of the

human enterprise in the industrial era can be crudely framed as the outcome of

the use of fossil fuel technologies, the growth in human numbers and the growth

in per capita material consumption. However, it is clear that the historical growth

of human environmental impact has signiﬁ cantly outstripped population growth

in comparison to the massive expansion of the global economy – in other words,

consumption growth has been the greatest culprit (Steffen et al., 2015). Importantly,

further disaggregation shows that the vast majority of the historical growth in

consumption has been concentrated in the Global North (Steffen et al., 2015).

Yet despite this, while growing consumption remains the most signiﬁ cant factor,

population growth continues to be a signiﬁ cant indirect driver of all impacts

(Brondízio et al., 2019; Almond et al. 2022; IPCC, 2023). In respect of greenhouse

gas emissions, economic growth accounted for around two thirds of their growth

with population growth accounting for the rest. And while technical improvements

and alternatives to fossil fuels have reduced the resource intensity of production,

it has been shown that emissions due to population growth alone eclipsed more

than 75 per cent of these savings (Chaurasia, 2020).

10.3197/JPS.63799977346496 Open Access – CC BY 4.0

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

All forecasts predict the global population to grow well into the middle of this

century (Lutz et al. 2018; Volsett et al. 2020; UN 2022). Viewed in the context of

the multiple measures showing the transgression of sustainability (Steffen 2021;

Lin et al 2018), this indicates that the prospects of providing good welfare for all

within planetary boundaries to be dependent on signiﬁ cant global and regional

changes in economic and social systems in addition to the necessary technical

changes (O’Neill et al. 2018; Callegari and Stoknes 2023).

Despite the warnings of the scientiﬁ c community, economic growth remains the

global orthodoxy – a fact reﬂ ected in the centrality of economic growth in the

manifestos of the major political parties in the recent UK general election, and

common to political discourses in all rich, high consumption, countries. Nonetheless,

with more than sixty per cent of the global population living on less than $101 a day

and the majority of these people living in developing countries (Roser, 2021), it is

clear that meeting their welfare needs will require their national economies to grow.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aspire to square the

need for economic development on a ﬁ nite planet, but as Nandita Bajaj, Eileen

Crist and Kirsten Stade argue in this issue, the UN fails to fully acknowledge the

full extent of the environmental crisis wrought by the present and growing size of

the human enterprise. Bajaj, Crist and Stade contend that, as a pivotal agent of

post-war international governance and development, the project of the United

Nations was and continues to be framed in a growth paradigm. Summarising

the ecological overshoot2 consequent on the massive expansion of the human

enterprise, Bajaj et al. identify growth in population, the economy and the

technosphere as the major factors in the environmental crisis. All three factors

can be understood as having a quantitative or population dimension in terms

of the growth in the population of economic consumers3 and populations of all

associated human ‘stuff’ including livestock, infrastructure, buildings, mechanical

and electronic devices etc. Bajaj and colleagues argue that, at its founding, the

UN reﬂ ected the prevailing notions of human exceptionalism which saw nature

merely as a resource employed in the pursuit of endless economic growth and

1 International-$ at 2011 prices.

2 The exceeding of the capacity of natural systems to absorb and process the waste generated by

human activity.

3 Economic consumption here understood as qualitatively distinct from simple economic subsistence.

POPULATION DYNAMICS, ECONOMIC GROWTH AND PLANETARY BOUNDARIES

prosperity. What boundaries were considered to exist could be overcome through

human intelligence and technology.

However, as Bajaj et al. relate, the UN’s position on human population growth did

not entirely concur with this exceptionalist ideology. Prior to the 1970s, the UN

embraced concern about population growth being a fetter to development and

possibly outpacing food production (Bongaarts and Hodgson, 2022) and pursued

active rights-based policies which had a signiﬁ cant impact on lowering fertility.

Yet, by the 1990s, the UN, under the inﬂ uence of a somewhat unlikely sounding

coalition of stakeholders including feminists, human rights advocates, religious

conservatives and neoliberal economists, radically shifted its position, sidelining

the concerns of demographers, family planning advocates and environmentalists.

According to Bajaj et al. the UN’s 1994 Cairo population 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’. International funding for family planning plummeted and regressive

pronatalism thrived resulting in the stalling or reversal of fertility declines in

countries experiencing high population growth.

Despite the clear evidence of environmental overshoot and of economic and

population growth as indirect drivers, Bajaj et al argue that the United Nations

remains resolutely wedded to a growthist agenda and largely denies the

connection between population growth and environmental harm. Interrogating

the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) 2023 State of the World Population

report, Bajaj et al. ﬁ nd insufﬁ cient attention paid to pronatalist pressures combined

with attempts to repudiate respected scientiﬁ c work (such as that from the UN

sponsored IPCC) which connects population growth with the environmental crisis.

Indeed, the authors ﬁ nd that the UN in general is in a state of denial regarding

population growth and pins its hopes on so called ‘green economic growth’ to

achieve its developmental and security objectives.

Bajaj, Crist and Stade conclude that, in order to address the environmental

crisis, the UN must break with its current ideological paradigm and lead the way

in reducing the size and scale of the human enterprise. This can be achieved

principally through rights-based population reduction and scaling back the

global economy by focussing on welfare rather than economic growth. In turn

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

this will help reduce the size of the technosphere, allowing ecosystems and other

species to revive.

The question of sustainable economic development is considered at a more

granular level in our next article by Akosua Mawuse Amankwah, Edward

Appiah, Charles Frimpong and Aguinaldo dos Santos. The UN’s SDG 12 calls for

reductions in production and consumption and Amankwah et al. note that circular

economic strategies, following principles of reduce, reuse and recycle, could be

employed to achieve this goal in the developing Ghanaian fashion industry whilst

also meeting the needs of a growing and more afﬂ uent population.

Ghana’s population currently stands at around thirty million and is expected to

grow signiﬁ cantly this century. Importantly, like most developing countries, Ghana

is rapidly urbanising with nearly half of all urbanisation over the last decade

occurring in the two major economic regions of Greater Accra and Ashanti.

Ghana’s population structure has also shifted as the dominance of children under

the age of fourteen has given way to a youth-bulge of 14–35 year-olds. Along

with these quantitative demographic shifts, the authors point to the growth of

the urban middle-class as contributing to a boom in Ghana’s fashion industry.

However, the clothing industry is associated with a number of environmental

problems at both ends of a garment’s life-cycle.

In this context Amankwah and colleagues investigate the potential for the up-

take of circular economic strategies amongst owner-designers of small and

medium-sized clothing manufacturers. They ﬁ nd that, although some businesses

are already and unknowingly employing circular economic strategies, producers

are understandably focused on the economics of their enterprises rather than

environmental sustainability and other factors. Owners cite cost, time, labour as

well as consumer attitude and behaviour as barriers to shifting to circular strategies.

However, Amankwah et al. argue that, with the right government policies aimed

at creating awareness and encouraging adoption and implementation, circular

strategies could be effective in making the clothing industry in Ghana more

sustainable in the face of increasing demand.

As Baja et al. note in their survey of ecological overshoot, one of the major

challenges facing a growing population is that of freshwater availability. Unlike

POPULATION DYNAMICS, ECONOMIC GROWTH AND PLANETARY BOUNDARIES

many other resources essential to our civilisation, water is entirely renewable –

in practical terms the amount of water on the planet does not change. It is the

spatial and temporal availability along with changes in the quality of water that is

at the core of the water problem. In the scientiﬁ c literature, along with changing

consumption (usually associated with changing practices linked to increasing

afﬂ uence), population growth is universally recognised as a major factor in the

anthropogenic disruption of the water cycle and a challenge going forward.

However, it is also the case that over the last century demand for water has grown

twice as fast as population (Liu et al., 2022). This disruption is further exacerbated

by climate change leading to shifting weather patterns depleting precipitation

in some areas/seasons and increasing it in others. Since water is a renewable

resource, unsustainable use comes down to the depletion of stocks at a faster

rate than they are replenished by ﬂ ows.

Our Perspective article from John Pattison and Peter Cooke looks at the problem

of ‘global drying’, as population growth, urbanisation and climate change lead to

stress on groundwater aquifers – which account for thirty per cent of freshwater

resources. As the authors note, discussion of global warming and sea level rise

is common, but the depletion of groundwater aquifers less so. Through a range

of examples, Pattinson and Cooke focus on the most striking visible effect of

groundwater depletion – sinking cities. While sea levels are rising and threatening

island nations, many cities such as Mexico City are experiencing serious building

subsidence as the ancient aquifers on which they are built are depleted leading

to unstable ground conditions. They point out that, while increasing afﬂ uence is

a major driver of the growth in demand for freshwater, both population growth

per se, but more particularly urbanisation, have exacerbated total urban water

consumption and led to many cities and regions to abstract water from ancient

aquifers at a faster rate than it can be replenished. Importantly, until subsidence

occurs, aquifer depletion is invisible, which encourages mismanagement from

organisations often focussed on short-term political objectives. Moreover, private

abstraction via bore-holes or wells is difﬁ cult to regulate. Pattison and Cooke

ask ‘can a good life be provided to all within regional water boundaries if they

are better managed?’ Forward planning in the management and governance of

water resources is clearly a central consideration in sustainability, but Pattison

and Cooke draw attention to tackling population growth as part of the long-term

strategy of providing sufﬁ cient fresh water to all.

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

In our ﬁ nal article, Aalok Chaurasia analyses the detail of the mortality transitions

of China and India. He points out that as the world’s most populous countries,

constituting around 36 per cent of the total global population (UN, 2022), the

demographic prospects of China and India are closely linked to future global

demographic trends. Presently both have similar population sizes – just over 1.4

billion. However, China and India show signiﬁ cant differences in their mortality

transition over the last seven decades. In 1950, both were developmentally and

demographically similar but, where China is at an advanced stage of demographic

transition with its population just starting to decline, India’s population is still

growing. Moreover, over the same period, life expectancy at birth has gone from

the early 40s in both countries to more than 78 years in China but only a little over

67 years in India.

Nonetheless, Chaurasia shows that the conventional measure of aggregate

average life expectancy at birth is compromised and obscures much detail. He

argues that for the analysis of the aggregate mortality transition the geometric

mean of the age-speciﬁ c probabilities of death is more representative of the

actual population. More importantly, at the more granular level, employing a time

trend and decomposition analysis to compare the mortality transition in the two

countries, Chaurasia shows that China’s mortality transition has been fairly evenly

spread across all age cohorts, meaning that both child mortality and mortality for

other age groups has improved. In contrast, India’s mortality transition has largely

been conﬁ ned to younger age groups with little mortality transition occurring in

the 55–90 age group.

Since India’s total fertility rate is now at replacement levels and likely to continue

to fall, in years to come population ageing will be a more signiﬁ cant issue.

Chaurasia argues that India’s healthcare system must be reinvigorated and shift

from the successful delivery of healthcare tackling infectious and communicable

diseases amongst the young, towards the particular healthcare needs of its

growing older population.

Ageing populations are not conﬁ ned to India and China, of course; the population

is ageing globally. Under all projection scenarios, while the global population will

continue to grow in this century, the global average total fertility rate is expected

to continue falling, shifting the population age structure upwards (Lutz et al. 2018;

POPULATION DYNAMICS, ECONOMIC GROWTH AND PLANETARY BOUNDARIES

Volsett et al. 2020; UN, 2022). By 2050 over-65s will constitute sixteen per cent of

the population and will outnumber children under ﬁ ve by 2:1 (UN, 2022).

The fact that, since 1950, the global average length of life, or life expectancy at

birth, has increased from 46 to more than 78 years (Andreev et al., 2013; United

Nations, 2022) might suggest that the claim ‘most of our population growth is

not due to births but to most of us living much longer’ (Dorling, 2022) is correct.

However, most of the increase in life expectancy is not due to years added at

the end of life but due to declines in infant and adolescent mortality. Prior to

the industrial era, across all types of society, it is thought that around half of all

children died before reaching puberty but, over the last 200 years, infant and child

mortality has fallen to the current level of just over four per cent (Dattani et al.,

2023). This child mortality transition has been the principal driver of population

growth since survival into adulthood has a multiplier effect on population as

people go on to have children of their own, while longevity after family building

does not. Increasing longevity does contribute to population growth, but its

major effect is to retard the point at which births fall below deaths. At present

births exceed deaths by about seventy million a year and, although this ﬁ gure

is expected to decrease, births are expected to continue to exceed deaths

until 2085 (UN, 2022). Even when the reductions in mortality across all ages are

aggregated into a single ﬁ gure, fertility and population momentum combined,

that is births, will contribute the greatest amount to population growth over the

next century (Andreev et al., 2013).

Across the world, but more immediately in high income countries, population

ageing represents a signiﬁ cant adaptive challenge (Volsett et al. 2020).

Policymakers in many nations with below replacement birth rates, such as Japan,

South Korea, much of Europe, the United States and more recently China,

have expressed concern about the economic and social consequences (as well

as the geopolitical implications) of population ageing and the shrinking of the

working age population (Economist, 2024). In some countries the response has

been the enactment of pronatalist policies, but these have proved impotent in

increasing the birth rate (Economist, 2024). Immigration has also been posited

as the solution to labour shortages – however recent experience across Europe

and America indicates this would not be achieved without political difﬁ culty. The

extent to which the alarmism around population ageing is justiﬁ ed is debatable

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

(see Spijker and MacInnes 2013; Calvo-Sotomayor et al., 2020), yet clearly regional

population shrinking is highly problematic to the growthist paradigm which

dominates economic and political discourses. Bajaj, Crist and Stade’s critique of

the orthodoxy that claims economic growth as the route to a good life for all

appears apposite to tackling the social as well as the environmental problems

facing late modernity.

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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

10.3197/JPS.63799977346495 Open Access – CC BY 4.0

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

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

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

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

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

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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CONFRONTING THE UNITED NATIONS’ PRO-GROWTH AGENDA

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

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

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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CONFRONTING THE UNITED NATIONS’ PRO-GROWTH AGENDA

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

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

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

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).

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

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

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

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

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).

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.

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

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

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

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

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

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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https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00358-x

PEER REVIEWED ARTICLE

Evaluation of circular strategies and their

effectiveness in fashion SMEs in Ghana

Akosua Mawuse Amankwah1, Edward Appiah2,

Charles Frimpong3 and Aguinaldo dos Santos4

Abstract

Circular economy strategies may appear practical for business but

are complex in application. Country-speciﬁ c situations, taking into

consideration the cultural dimensions, aid the practicality of such

strategies. As part of a longitudinal research, this study sought to

identify and evaluate circular strategies that could be integrated into

selected fashion SMEs in Ghana. An in-depth qualitative case study

was adopted to engage nineteen owner-designers of SMEs through

interviews and observations. The owner-designers must have formal

businesses, have been running their retail stores during the last decade

and operate within the two major cities in Ghana where population

growth supports economic activities. Life extension strategies were

adopted for the study. The indications were that the majority of owner-

designers of fashion SMEs, although practicing some circular strategies

unknowingly, were not motivated to formally integrate the practice

into their businesses. Cost, time, labour and consumer attitudes and

1 Faculty of Art, CABE, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.

mawusepaaku@gmail.com; maamankwah2@knust.edu.gh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1732-0989

2 Faculty of Art, CABE, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6757-0030

3 Faculty of Art, CABE, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6842-0683

4 Paraná Federal University, Brazil. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8645-6919

10.3197/JPS.63799977346493 Open Access – CC BY 4.0

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

behaviour were factors considered to undermine the effectiveness of

adopting and implementing circular strategies in these ﬁ rms. Creation of

awareness of circular strategies and models for their implementation are

needed to enable practitioners to imbibe circular economy principles in

fashion SMEs in Ghana.

Keywords: Fashion, circular strategies, evaluation, small to medium scale

enterprises, cultural environment.

1. Introduction

The fashion industry is on a mission to remodel its production away from the linear

model to contribute to preserving the environment and its social foundations for

future generations (Steffen et al., 2015). The United Nations Agenda 2030 has

heightened the call for fashion to intensify aligning its practices towards reduced

consumption and production (SDG 12). Studies have shown overwhelming

support for the Circular Economy (CE) (Accenture, 2016; Ávila-Gutiérrez et al.,

2019) mainly due to its contribution towards the separation of biological and

technical nutrients under cyclic industrial metabolism. The incorporation of

the principles of the CE in the links of the value chain of the various sectors of

the economy strives to ensure circularity, safety, and efﬁ ciency. The framework

proposed is aligned with the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable

Development regarding the orientation towards the mitigation and regeneration

of the metabolic rift by considering a double perspective. Firstly, it strives to

conceptualise the CE as a paradigm of sustainability. Its principles are established,

and its techniques and tools are organised into two frameworks oriented towards

causes (cradle to cradle; Fuchs, 2016; Kirchherr et al., 2017; Koszewska, 2018),

which seeks to aid the use of resources in a regenerative manner (Ellen MacArthur

Foundation, 2013). According to Global Management Consultancy Accenture, CE

approaches have the potential to add as much as US$6 trillion to global economic

growth by 2030. Apart from the economic beneﬁ ts, the CE is touted as aiding

employment generation and business opportunities signiﬁ cantly, and more

importantly eliminating waste (Nijman-Ross et al., 2023) that accompanies the

linear production model. Focusing on the CE principle of the 3Rs (Reduce, Reuse

and Recycle) implies many materials are reclaimed for use instead of extracting

virgin raw materials.

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EVALUATION OF CIRCULAR STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS IN FASHION SMES IN GHANA

1.1 The fashion industry in Ghana

Garment production has existed for many years, but the fashion industry in Ghana

is a recent phenomenon which is steadily growing. The industry is primarily

composed of micro and small to medium-scale enterprises with a few large-scale

ﬁ rms (Ghana Statistical Service, 2016). The majority of producers cater for the

domestic market, with custom-made clothes sold directly to consumers. About

a decade ago, retail outlets operated by fashion ﬁ rms whose owners doubled

as designers emerged. Small to medium-scale ﬁ rms are championing the rise of

retail outlets, signiﬁ cantly situated in the two capital cities of Ghana. These two

cities have the largest population and highest economic and social activities. As

with selling seasons in Europe and America, owner-designers have predominantly

adopted four selling seasons. Although these selling seasons are not weather-

related, a quarterly approach is adopted to ensure that new collections are

developed to bring excitement to the shop ﬂ oor.

The owner-designer concept is a development that is advantageous to the

practice of CE strategies since it is characterised by ﬂ exibility in decision-making

as a result of direct involvement in major decisions at the design stage. Also,

there is the likelihood of adapting to change more quickly than large-scale

counterparts (Claxton and Kent, 2020; Di Lodovico and Manzi, 2023; Karell and

Niinimaki, 2020). SMEs are seen to provide employment and economic growth,

hence adopting the principles of the CE presents numerous beneﬁ ts while

enhancing their competitiveness. While there is a host of research especially

from the global north on the fashion industry adopting a sustainable approach,

particularly the CE (Nijman-Ross et al., 2023) the reverse is true of the fashion

industry in Ghana. Nijman-Ross et al. (2023) identiﬁ ed several countries that have

adopted the CE, including Germany, Finland and China, citing authors from the

UK, USA, China and the Netherlands, but none from Africa. While research on

garment production in Ghana is common, few have covered sustainability and

the CE. James and Kent (2019) and Amankwah et al. (2023), although focusing

on sustainability and the CE, did not touch on fashion businesses integrating

the CE into their practices. Fashion sustainability and the CE are grey areas in

Ghana. As asserted by Nijman-Ross et al. (2023), research on the CE is low but

there are initiatives in some African countries such as the establishment of the

African Circular Economy Alliance (ACEA), and a study carried out by the African

Development Bank (AfDB). In Ghana, a report for the Tony Blair Institute for

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

Global Change highlighted the need for the adoption of the CE as a means of

curbing waste (Ahiable and Triki, 2021). That notwithstanding, some strategies of

the CE are, in the authors’ opinion, practised informally.

As part of a longitudinal research project, the study presented in this article

evaluates the adoption of circular strategies (CS) from the perspectives of owner-

designers of SMEs, and the interventions necessary for take-up. To effectively

address the issue, the research questions posed were: which CE strategies are

culturally and technologically effective in selected fashion SMEs in Ghana to

enhance sustainable fashion production? How do opportunities and challenges in

the local environment affect the adoption and implementation of CE principles?

This research signiﬁ cantly contributes to perspectives on CE adoption while

highlighting how the local environment in Ghana impacts the prospects of CE in

achieving sustainability.

2. The review

This section presents a review of sustainable strategies focusing on the CE. It

presents a narrative on the adoption of sustainable approaches in Africa and

Ghana in particular. It draws on the Sustainable Fashion Innovation Framework and

the Sustainability Framework; and their application to the CE. These sub-themes

provide a context for evaluating CSs in fashion SMEs in Ghana. It also brings to

the fore how the cultural dimension shapes the adoption and implementation of

speciﬁ c CSs in Ghana.

2.1 The fashion industry adopting CE principles

The fashion industry globally has been operating on a linear model: take-

make-dispose (Ellen McArthur Foundation, 2013). Research has pointed out

waste accumulation at each stage of the garment production process (Pingki

et al., 2019; WRAP, 2017; Yalcin-Enis et al., 2019). Critical to the linear model is

the amount of goods sent to landﬁ ll sites ( Juanga-Labayen et al., 2022; Morell-

Delgado et al., 2024) after each selling season. Clothes that could not be sold

become solid waste, clogging rivers and causing other environmental problems

(Bick et al., 2018). In low to medium-sized economies like Ghana, solid waste

is a potential environmental health hazard, particularly due to the less robust

municipal waste systems (Liyanage and De Silva, 2018). Akintayo et al. (2023)

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lamented the challenges of solid waste management in Nigeria, a neighbouring

country of Ghana. Signiﬁ cant concerns are growing about landﬁ lling garments

in both developed and developing countries (Juanga-Labayen et al., 2022).

Greater consciousness is required in the fashion industry to avert such excessive

environmental harm and attempt to reduce reliance on virgin resources through

recovery processes. Bick, Halsey and Ekenga (2018) asserted that the average

American throws away approximately eighty pounds of clothing and textiles

annually, occupying nearly ﬁ ve per cent of landﬁ ll space. As far as fashion

production is concerned in Ghana, such statistics are not readily available. As

the industry in Ghana is envisaging growth in the coming years, precautionary

measures need to be taken, and the CE provides a potential remedy (Ahiable

and Triki, 2021; Nijman-Ross et al., 2023). But how do these factors that trigger

sustainable practices in the fashion industry affect developing nations like Ghana?

The fashion industry in Ghana is arguably in the developing stage where

operations appear dissimilar to developed economies. Output, technology and

know-how, among other things, are comparatively low (Senayah, 2018). The World

Bank (2012) raised pertinent questions about the preparedness of developing

countries like Ghana for green practices, including: Will technology allow

developing countries to pursue a less environmentally damaging development

path than industrial countries? What is the best way to manage growth with

scarce ﬁ scal resources, limited planning, and technical know-how? In practising

the CE, these are key questions the operators of fashion SMEs must consider in

making critical decisions.

It is easy to conclude that countries like Ghana are not at the point where vigorous

sustainable fashion practices should be of concern. The industry is in the early

stages of building structures to become vibrant. The World Bank (2012) identiﬁ es

the ﬂ aws in the ‘grow now, clean up later’ argument. Therefore, heightened

environmental concerns in advanced fashion jurisdictions should be a prompt for

Ghana to develop sustainable strategies from the outset. In this regard, exploring

Ghanaian fashion brands’ perspective cannot be timelier.

2.2 Factors positioning Ghana for CE adoption

Raw material production, both natural and synthetic, is known to produce adverse

environmental and social impacts (Sahimaa et al., 2023; Sandin and Peters, 2018;

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

Tang and Ho, 2023). With a looming shortage of raw materials (Accenture, 2016),

a shift from a linear to zero-waste circular cycle is critical. In this regard, the CE

focuses on products designed to enable reuse, components disassembled and

durable pieces reassembled into new products, worn-out parts refurbished,

and material recycled as well (Ellen McArthur Foundation, 2015). The call for

CE is underpinned by a rise in demand from an increasingly afﬂ uent population

(Hammad et al., 2019) exerting pressure on resources (Bhardwaj and Fairhurst,

2010; Niinimäki et al., 2020). The expected growth in the world’s population will be

accompanied by signiﬁ cant growth of the middle class in developing countries.

The Business of Fashion ( BoF) report (Beltrami et al, 2019) envisaged that, if

consumers in developing countries buy more clothing as their purchasing power

increases, clothing sales may rise signiﬁ cantly. Ghana as a developing country

could beneﬁ t from the projected growth.

The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) (2021) report on population and housing pegs

Ghana’s population at 30.8 million. According to the report, there has been a

continuous growth in urban population, increasing, from 12,545,229 (50.9%) in

2010 to 17,472,530 (56.7%) in 2021 with almost half (47.8%) of the increase in the

Greater Accra and Ashanti regions. These two regions are also the economic

hubs of the country. National population density increased by 26 persons

between 2010 (103/km2) and 2021 (129/km2), with Greater Accra experiencing

the highest increase, of 445 persons (from 1,236/km2 to 1,681/km2). Moreover,

the age structure of the population has witnessed a shift from the domination of

children (0–14 years) to young people (15–35 years). The GSS report shows that

nationally females (15,631,579) outnumber males (15,200,440) by 2.8% (437,139),

while in urban areas this rises to 5.0%. Also, professionals constitute less than a

tenth (8.4%, 837,989) of employed persons above the age of 15, 80% of whom are

in urban areas and 60% under 35 years old.

These population dimensions positively impact the economic growth of the

fashion industry in Ghana. With the increase in the youthful population and

a steady growth of professionals in urban areas of developing countries,

consumption of fashion products is thought likely to rise by 2023 (Beltrami et al,

2019). However, there is currently (as of 2023) a lack of research on clothing sales

by fashion SMEs in Ghana to corroborate this.

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The steady growth of urban professionals and the rise of clothing retail require

that the fashion industry in Ghana prepares to initiate sustainable waste

management practices, particularly the CE. The CE principles illustrated in the

waste management framework (Kirchherr et al., 2017) have been adopted by

ﬁ rms such as Patagonia and Nudie Jeans. Pal and Sandberg (2017) asserted

that strategies like repairs and refurbishment have started worldwide and are

predominantly led by niche and small-scale redesign brands. In predominantly

micro, small-to-medium scale fashion ﬁ rms in Ghana, key lessons and success

stories could be replicated. Fortunately, disassembly, redesign and repair/

alteration are traditionally practised in Ghanaian homes. As a culture of marriage

in some tribes, brides are given sewing machines to enable the mending of

clothes of family members so garments could be worn over extended periods

and to reduce the ﬁ nancial burden of buying clothes regularly. Again, the huge

importation of second-hand clothes in Africa (Lewis et al., 2017) and by extension

Ghana, provides an enormous source of materials that could be disassembled

and reused. These practices provide a foundation for formally introducing such

models in fashion SMEs in Ghana.

2.3 Embracing circular strategies in Ghana

Stahel (2016) argues that Africa, and by extension Ghana, needs to build an

industrial economy and therefore a transition into a circular economy will not

be worthwhile. The World Bank report (2012) however, disagrees; it envisages

an African economy which is robust in sustainable growth. While developing

economies including Ghana seek to industrialise, they must consciously avoid

unsustainable and reversible environmental damage. SMEs in Ghana must

embrace the circular paradigm to avoid errors accompanying environmental,

social and economic aspects of linear production, as their structures are not yet

complex. While the World Bank encourages Africa to embrace sustainability, it

also highlights the accompanying challenges, the lack of resources, technical

know-how and the lack of sophisticated technologies. Twelve years after the

World Bank report, the fashion industry in Ghana still lacks resources, technical

know-how and sophisticated technologies to improve garment quality (Ghana

Statistical Service, 2016; Senayah, 2018). Although the CE is achievable, there

are barriers amidst economic opportunities that are untapped (Ellen McArthur

Foundation, 2015). Bearing in mind the challenges associated with the practice of

CE, which of the strategies might fashion SMEs adopt? According to the World

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

Bank report, one of the resources the local fashion industry lacks is the availability

of material inputs. Can fashion SMEs recover unique materials from used clothes

through disassembly for reuse or redesign?

2.4 Sustainable fashion innovation framework

Sustainable fashion innovation is a response to the linear mode. This new

paradigm of imbibing sustainable fashion practices is expected to integrate the

sustainable development framework (Ávila-Gutiérrez et al., 2019). To proceed

with a sustainable fashion agenda requires an understanding of the concept

of sustainability (Hur and Cassidy, 2019; Karell and Niinimäki, 2020). However,

the sustainable development framework keeps evolving. The adoption of a

framework is guided by the ﬁ rm in question and the dimension of sustainability it

seeks to achieve (Karell and Niinimäki, 2020). In this regard, the fashion industry

has a range of approaches to sustainable fashion, including design for longevity,

upcycling, slow fashion, product service systems, lean manufacturing, ethical

trade and circular economy, among others (Bocken et al., 2014; Cooper et al.,

2013; Ellen McArthur Foundation, 2013; Gwilt and Rissanen, 2011; Hernandez et

al., 2019). However, such approaches still require further investigation as there are

many overlaps (Pal and Sandberg, 2017) due to poor understanding regarding

the strategies and heuristics for their implementation. For SMEs in Ghana to

embrace sustainable fashion requires a clear knowledge of what the strategies

are, and ﬁ rms’ capabilities to operationalise them.

The ‘Sustainable fashion innovation framework’ embeds the categorisation of

impact levels ( Bhamra et al., 2013; Schaltegger et al., 2012) that align with the

waste management hierarchy (Kirchherr et al., 2017). The waste management

strategy a ﬁ rm adopts should align with the impact level expected to be achieved

(Schaltegger et al., 2012). To effectively identify and evaluate existing strategies

for application in the study environment, attention is given to the categorisation

under the 3R (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) framework of the CE (Ellen McArthur

Foundation, 2013) to guide the selection of the strategies and their suitability for

integration in fashion SMEs in Ghana.

Regarding the selection of strategies, it is imperative to consider how the

materials available in the local environment inﬂ uence the selection of strategies

that prolong the lifespan of products made from them. Citing Lacy (2015), Fuchs

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EVALUATION OF CIRCULAR STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS IN FASHION SMES IN GHANA

(2016) argues that if toxic resources are used to design a more reliable, longer-

lasting product, it is still not fully circular. In an environment where sustainability

in fashion is a grey phenomenon, awareness of what constitutes a toxic material

is a challenge. In this context, considerations can be given to strategies such

as adopting life extension and life optimisation, minimising resource usage and

enabling easy assembly of fashion goods. In the context of the Ghanaian fashion

landscape, garments produced for customers to pick up or sold at the retail store

could be adjusted by either resizing, mending or redesigning. Even though this

is an informal practice in Ghana, are SMEs willing to embrace CS formally as new

business models; and are there any known frameworks to determine the impact

levels of these businesses in Ghana?

2.4.1 Sustainability framework and the circular economy

In practising sustainability, a holistic approach must embrace all three pillars of

sustainability (Environment, Social and Economic). However, for sustainable

fashion, the three pillars require expansion. Kozlowski et al. (2019) argued that

adopting sustainable models will require cultural and aesthetic dimensions to

ensure that the people for whom the models are designed ﬁ nd them culturally

acceptable and aesthetically pleasing to use over a long period. While arguing for

their inclusion of cultural dimension to the existing sustainability pillars, Kozlowski

et al. (2019) stated that sustainability concepts generally fail to differentiate among

cultural systems, value systems, norms, behaviours and ideas. Culture is a signiﬁ cant

consideration in sustainable development (Rayman-Bacchus and Radavoi, 2020;

Sabatini, 2019; Zheng et al., 2021) which leads to partnerships being required to

tackle the complex nature of sustainability and the CE. Incorporating the cultural

dimension ensures fashion ﬁ rms do not blindly adopt blanket solutions but rather

consider local systems based on which sustainable circular models are integrated

into their operations. Sustainable practices can be tailored to, but not captive to

cultural context (Zheng et al., 2021). It is vital to adopt models through the lens

of country-speciﬁ c situations with considerations such as local culture, political

climate, economy, and infrastructure (Kozlowski et al. 2019, Tremblay et al., 2017).

These are critical factors to ensure selected models’ integration and longevity.

The local production culture enables fashion SMEs in Ghana to primarily have

direct engagement with customers even at the design stage. Therefore, it is fair

to assume that they know their customers’ cultural behaviour which could largely

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

inﬂ uence ﬁ rms’ willingness to practise a selected circular model. A ﬁ rm’s business

culture must align with the customers it intends to serve to make it proﬁ table

and sustainable. CSs ideally are not a mass production approach; hence ﬁ rms’

willingness to participate is a ﬁ rst step.

Given that these SMEs produce limited editions for retail, their owner-designers,

by means of their business cultural environment, can project strategies that yield

mutual beneﬁ ts. Waste in the fashion industry ﬁ nds a remedy in the CE principles.

As SMEs develop an interest in establishing retail outlets, waste accumulation is a

potential threat to environmental sustainability. As a developing industry, SMEs in

Ghana could formally adopt CSs that are practised traditionally by Ghanaians and

may not require sophisticated technologies. However, limited research in the CE

in Ghana presents a challenge to the integration of CS models in fashion SMEs.

3. Methodology

The study sought to identify and evaluate sustainable strategies and their

effectiveness in selected ﬁ rms with speciﬁ c reference to the 3Rs espoused by

the CE. To gain insight into the phenomenon, a qualitative case study approach

was adopted as this paves the way for an intensive analysis of speciﬁ c details

often overlooked by other methods (Kumar, 2011) and to explain participants’

perspectives on the subject. The study did not seek to measure but rather to

explain the phenomenon. Fashion businesses with their speciﬁ c brand concepts

will have different meanings and approaches to the subject. These different brands

will present different perspectives (Creswell, 2013) on the study. The population

for the study was SMEs in the two major cities of Ghana, and sampled fashion

SMEs that have owners doubling as designers, have operated formal businesses

within the last decade and have retail outlets.

3.1 Data collection and analysis

A purposive sampling strategy (Maxwell, 2012) was adopted to ensure that

data was collected from respondents who ﬁ t the description. Hence a snowball

technique according to Cohen, Manion and Morrison’s (2007) deﬁ nition was

employed in reaching 19 respondents; 6 from Kumasi and 13 from Accra as

presented in Table 1. As data collection occurred amid the COVID-19 pandemic,

recorded interviews were conducted via Zoom and telephone (9), along with 10

EVALUATION OF CIRCULAR STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS IN FASHION SMES IN GHANA

face-to-face interviews. Interview questions sought to ﬁ nd out the approach to

garments that did not sell during previous seasons and whether materials could

be recovered based on Research Question 1. Again, the opportunities and

challenges that could inﬂ uence participation in CE were of interest to answer

Research Question 2. The interviews lasted an average of 21 minutes. The scripts

were cleaned and coded line-by-line in an iterative manner using inductive and

deductive coding techniques with the Nvivo software. To conceal respondents’

identity, the owner-designers were coded alphabetically to read, e.g., ‘ODA’.

The results were categorised using thematic content analysis. The themes that

emerged were: techniques in managing retail pieces; feasibility and consideration

of adopting CS; material recovery and CS; and opportunities and challenges in

practising CS. Along with the interviews was an observation of stitch types, style

and embellishment techniques lending themselves to the adoption of the CSs.

Table 1. Background of selected ﬁ rms

Characteristics Accra Kumasi

Location 13 (68%) 6 (32%)

Size Small 10 Small 2

Medium 3 Medium 4

Category 13 formal business 6 formal business

4. Results and discussion

This section is divided into four sub-sections. Firstly, results on techniques for

managing retail items are presented and discussed. Secondly, results on the

feasibility and consideration of adopting CS are presented and discussed. Thirdly,

results on material recovery and the practice of CS are presented and discussed.

Fourthly, results on opportunities and challenges in practising CS are presented

and discussed.

4.1 Techniques in managing garments sold in retail outlets

To ensure that clothes are signiﬁ cantly bought during selling periods, retailers

usually adopt strategies like discounting and clearance sales. Even though there

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

are no distinct selling seasons in Ghana, retailers do have clothes hung on racks

for extended periods. During this period, certain techniques are adopted to

either sell or discard the clothes. To this end, respondents were asked to share

their thoughts on how they managed garments during and after each selling

period to avoid environmental waste, as captured in Table 2.

Table 2. Techniques in managing retail items

Approaches No. of Respondents

Discount/clearance sale, redesign 3

Discount/clearance sale, donation 2

Discount/clearance sale, stored to re-introduce 1

Discount/clearance sales, pop-up stores 2

Discount only 5

Redesign and donation 1

Discount/clearance sale, redesign, donation 1

Discount/clearance sale, redesign, reuse fabrics

recovered, donation

Discount/clearance sale, redesign, and stored to be

re-introduced

No option applied 2

Total: 19

Table 2 demonstrates that the conventional method of discounting and clearance

sales was the most popular approach, followed by redesign and donation. These

three were mainly combined. Only two respondents indicated that none of the

approaches was used because of the limited items produced. Particular to CS

was redesign, which appeared ﬁ ve times in combination with other approaches

and was considered a positive development for this study. The reasons for the

approaches or otherwise were captured as follows:

EVALUATION OF CIRCULAR STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS IN FASHION SMES IN GHANA

We make major sales; we do the ﬁ rst quarter, and if we cannot clear

everything, we do the second or third quarter. If some pieces did not

sell, something must be wrong with them. So, do we add some beads;

or do we make the sleeve short or long? After it goes to sale three

times and is still not selling, we bag it up and give it to an orphanage.

But rarely would we have a big bag; usually, we have about 20 or 40

pieces at the end of the year that did not even sell during clearance

sales. (ODP)

A respondent mentioned that ‘we bring them back and redo them; and then

usually, if we cannot sell because a particular style is going out of fashion, we store

them until a later date; that is the strategy’. To add to the techniques adopted,

another respondent mentioned that ‘mostly when we have a clearance sale, we

do a 50% discount or sell at very cheap price. But if some are not sold out after

the sale, I give them out or use the fabric to do something else by ripping the

garment apart’.

Approaches to managing clothes at retail were adopted for economic reasons,

considering the triple bottom line. None of the respondents indicated adopting

a technique with environmental or social sustainability in mind. Worth noting was

the redesign under the CS. However, from observation, the respondents did not

consider the aesthetic and functional renewal of the clothes during the design

stage. Applying CS becomes an afterthought (Gwilt and Rissanen, 2011) often

resulting in material waste or excessive time consumption when disassembling

or redesigning; an observation that defeats the sustainable approach. Again, the

limited quantities produced also implied smaller volumes of clothes to manage

at retail, hence integrating the redesign concept as a business model seemed

unattractive. However, cumulative numbers over time could be signiﬁ cant

(Williamson et al., 2006). Donated garments, which could become a useful avenue

for material recovery, could be channelled through the reuse-redesign concept.

With ﬁ rms positioning themselves to upscale production, introducing CS provides

a solid foundation as business practices are not entrenched, paving the way for

ﬂ exibility (Di Lodovico and Manzi, 2023). SMEs are likely to make sustainability a

core of their mission and business model (Claxton and Kent, 2020, Kozlowski et

al., 2018).

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

4.2 Feasibility and consideration of CS adoption

Based on the knowledge of the techniques adopted to manage clothes at retail, it

was imperative to interrogate the possibility of introducing circular models in the

management of garments that could not be sold. To this end, the respondents

were asked which of the circular strategies were feasible and could be considered

for adoption per their current practices. Six strategies were presented to the

respondents. It came out that twelve mentioned redesign, six repair, seven reuse,

and twelve disassembly. However, a combination of strategies was indicated as

feasible for adoption. The outcome is presented in Table 3.

Table 3. Feasibility and consideration of CS adoption

Circular Strategies No. of Respondents

Redesign 3

Redesign, repair, disassembly 2

Redesign, reuse, disassembly 5

Redesign, reuse 1

Redesign disassembly 3

Redesign, repair, reuse, disassembly 1

Redesign, repair 1

Repair, disassembly 1

Repair 1

None of the strategies 1

Resale 0

Total: 19

Respondents expressed their thoughts on the strategies mentioned as captured

in the following excerpts:

Sometimes we have clients who bring garments they bought or were

custom-made to be redesigned because they do not ﬁ t in them

anymore. So recently a client brought one of such garments with a

EVALUATION OF CIRCULAR STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS IN FASHION SMES IN GHANA

piece of fabric to redesign it from the waist to the knee, and also the

sleeves, so the person can wear it again. The fabric of the garment was

still in good condition. (ODN)

For another respondent,

Sometimes when customers order clothes for events like shoots or

second dress for weddings, they don’t wear them again. They bring

them and we redesign them into simpler styles they can wear for other

purposes. I do that a lot. So, we can now consciously do that because

I was doing it without thinking about it or knowing it was a sustainable

approach. (ODF)

One respondent also mentioned that ‘Mostly we do for our customers, especially

the cuffs and collars of shirts that have faded or worn out; we redo them,

sometimes with different colours, textures or patterns’.

Even though most of the respondents indicated that CS was feasible, they

expressed reservations about disassembly, repair, and reuse/resale. The following

are excerpts on the concept of disassembly;

The time required for ripping the seams of a garment can be used to

make something that will sell three or four times more than a product

made using this concept.

ODQ, ODC and ODO supported this view. This group of respondents also opposed

any practice that takes away production time and derails proﬁ t. ‘ODC’ added that:

Already we are running a deﬁ cit of skilled labour for the main

production; if we have enough labour, and there is demand, then we

can establish a unit for it.

Strategically, it’s not sustainable for any business person. Although it

sounds great in theory, it cuts into your production line. We tried in

the past to have a unit to do repairs but was not lucrative. You cannot

charge much for alterations, but the resources that it would require;

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

hiring staff, machinery etc., are not commensurate with what the client

is willing to pay. Someone might say it is another channel of income,

but the income level and the effort going into it, do not tally.

However, there was a positive view on the repair strategy expressed as follows:

‘I think we have the demand for the repair and alterations. We usually resize for

items bought at our retail shop. So, we can now position ourselves to control

that consciously.’

Feasible circular strategies indicated by respondents pointed to redesign, repair,

reuse and disassembly. These strategies were practised, albeit unconsciously, and

hence the respondents might have gained some level of experience in practice.

The unconscious practice of some CS stemmed from respondents’ unawareness

of the CE and its principles. For designers to consciously integrate CSs, their

ﬁ rms would need to understand the negative impacts of production (Karell and

Niinimäki, 2020). Again, the awareness of tools (Kozlowski et al., 2019), sustainable

business case drivers (Schaltegger et al., 2012) and sustainable business model

innovation techniques (Bocken et al., 2014) are required for the successful adoption

and implementation of CSs in fashion SMEs in Ghana. Thus, the complexities

of formally practising these sustainable business models represents a signiﬁ cant

challenge (Di Lodovico and Manzi, 2023).

The lack of awareness revealed that respondents had no idea of impact levels

(Bhamra et al., 2013; Schaltegger et al. 2012) or of the collaborations that

guide the practice of sustainable approaches. Again, the strategies considered

feasible were informed by the cultural environment within which these SMEs

operate. Limited pieces being manufactured enabled these owner-designers

to quickly innovate into new styles. However, this was motivated by a focus on

the growth and expansion of business, not consideration of environmental and

social aspects, which were not considered proﬁ table. Also, direct customer

engagement meant consumers could walk in to request some changes needed

to garments bought from the shops. In this regard, the fashion SMEs in Ghana

are more likely to contribute signiﬁ cantly to the adoption of CE than large-scale

ﬁ rms. This enhances their competitiveness in receiving the needed support from

policymakers. However, there are currently no known policies that enable the

practice of sustainability among fashion SMEs in Ghana.

EVALUATION OF CIRCULAR STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS IN FASHION SMES IN GHANA

Even though owner-designers informally practised some identiﬁ ed strategies,

some difﬁ culties have been identiﬁ ed as likely to hinder their formal adoption.

The difﬁ culties expressed were time, cost, labour, consumer perceptions and

readiness to pay for the cost of garments. Labour availability was one of the

signiﬁ cant hindrances, given that the current model, as Amankwah et al. (2023)

argue, struggles to get the skill set needed for production. This feeds into the

needed labour to disassemble, while the main production line is in progress. In

addition, the cost of paying labour to disassemble a garment and the overheads

incurred in re-designing were not proﬁ table. Finally, the consumer’s readiness to

buy a redesigned garment was questioned as there is a lack of research (Hur and

Cassidy, 2019; Kirchherr et al., 2017) on consumers’ willingness to participate in

CE. While these ﬁ rms directly engage with clients and have a pre-informed idea

of consumers’ behaviour towards such initiatives, consumer research regarding

the perception of CS is lacking in Ghana.

Again, while disassembly and redesign are adaptable, stitch types and patterns

were observed to be possible setbacks. To enhance the aesthetics of garments,

top stitches were commonly used, making disassembly unattractive. Straight

stitches afford ease of disassembly, and loose garment styles provide adequate

reusable fabrics. These factors could be considered at the initial stage and not as

an afterthought, as proposed by Gwilt and Rissanen (2011). Careful consideration

was deemed necessary if these strategies were to be formally adopted.

4.3 Material recovery and the practice of CS by SMEs

Material recovery requires chemical or mechanical processes. In an environment

where technology is a challenge, disassembling garments through unpicking

is possible and hence materials could be reused. Respondents were asked if

they could recover materials either from their products or garments used by

their consumers, or other brands. One out of nineteen respondents, recovered

materials from garments that did not sell during the selling periods while eighteen

had never considered it. Giving reasons for the lack of attempt, ﬁ ve respondents

cited time wasting, three respondents mentioned cost, and one respondent

said energy waste was associated with the disassembly process. However, ten

respondents expressed the possibility of recovering materials from ﬁ rms’ unsold

garments at the end of the selling period if the stitch and patterns lent themselves

to the process.

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

Again, when respondents were asked if they could request their customers to

bring back relatively little-used garments of their brands, all nineteen respondents

were not enthusiastic about the idea. The responses given were revelatory. ‘By

the time they bring it, the fabric value will be low, and treating the garment will

be more costly than making a new one’. Another respondent indicated that ‘Here

in Ghana, most people do not know how to care for their clothes; the fabrics to

be recovered might not be in good condition.’ For consumers to make sense of

such garments, one respondent emphasised that ‘Maybe post a video of how you

go about the clothes and some certiﬁ cation to prove that the clothes had been

inspected by a recognised body; that they are in good condition, etc; you have

to build that conﬁ dence’.

Again, on material recovery, respondents were asked if they would be receptive

to imported second-hand garments that have ﬂ ooded the local market. Twelve

of the respondents indicated this to be a possibility, while seven said it was

impossible, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Possibility of recovering materials from second-hand.

Authors’ construct

Impossible

37%

Possible

63%

EVALUATION OF CIRCULAR STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS IN FASHION SMES IN GHANA

Expressing their perspectives on second-hand materials, three respondents

indicated that they were unaware of some fabric names, compositions and

classiﬁ cations. Two respondents believed that process disclosure would ensure

consumer conﬁ dence, while four respondents noted that consumers would be

unwilling to patronise the products if process disclosure was pursued. Similarly, in

recovering materials from customers’ relatively used garments, two respondents

believed that pre-treating the worn garments for use in new production would

be costly. However, two respondents believed that certiﬁ cation of the process

could be given to boost consumer conﬁ dence. On the condition of second-hand

products (garment / fabric), six respondents notably mentioned fabric stock or

store-rejected garments as an attractive proposition for consideration. Table 4

provides a perspective.

Table 4. Respondents’ perspectives on material recovery from

second-hand garments

Perspectives on second hand recovery No. of Respondents

Fabric composition 3

Process disclosure 2

Process disclosure renders the product unattractive 4

Costly treatment process 2

Ensuring process certiﬁ cation 2

Preference for fabric stock 6

Total 19

Again, with twelve respondents indicating the possibility of recovering materials

from second-hand garments, they were asked about the attractiveness of

establishing a warehouse. Seventeen respondents deemed it as a welcome idea,

however, with the caveat that the products must be in good condition. Some

respondents had this to say: ‘Industrial waste could be considered. When it comes

to fabrics, we are all lacking. So, if somebody can source fabrics/garments and

have an open day for sales, it will minimise direct sourcing from these factories

polluting the environment.’ Another respondent conﬁ rmed by saying; ‘that will

work because we buy fabric stock which is relatively scarce on the market and is

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

also unique considering our brands, unlike the bulk imports coming from Asia’.

Questioning the beneﬁ t of having a warehouse to stock second-hand materials,

a respondent opposed earlier respondents saying, ‘It is possible to have a

warehouse; but as far as they are considered used clothes, for me, it’s difﬁ cult’

One of the beneﬁ ts of practising the CE is the economic value as more revenue

generation has been associated with CE. However, for owner-designers of SMEs

in Ghana, additional costs could be incurred due to low-skilled labour, uncertainty

about demand and the time required to work on these items. These factors make the

practice of CS unattractive and costly. Apart from the cost, material value was seen

as a contention, particularly with how local consumers handle garments during the

use phase. The humid environment requires that consumers wash clothes regularly.

These washed clothes are continuously exposed to sunlight, which weakens the

ﬁ bres and also leads to colour fading. Another important factor is the cultural

beliefs and superstitions associated with transferring personal clothing to another,

especially a non-family member. Environmental and cultural conditions ( Kozlowski

et al., 2019) were seen as signiﬁ cant hindrances to the reuse concept.

Associated with reuse was the concern about pre-treatment cost and process

certiﬁ cation to boost consumer conﬁ dence. While the transparency of the

process is one of the key indicators in sustainable strategy practice in developed

countries, as championed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the majority

of respondents believe process disclosure would make circular products rather

unattractive to the consumer, bringing the element of culture into play. The

concerns regarding disclosure conﬁ rm Di Lodovico and Manzi’s (2023) observation

of the difﬁ culty with transparency when it comes to sustainability practices.

The lack of regulations exempliﬁ ed by the impact level frameworks (Bhamra

et al., 2013; Schaltegger et al., 2012) hampers the practice of the CE as owner-

designers have no guiding principles to relate their processes to the attainment

of sustainability. A level of awareness among these producers and customers

is necessary for imbibing the sustainability concept, justifying the assertions by

Hur and Cassidy (2019) and Kircherr et al. (2017) about the need for designer and

consumer awareness creation.

From the perspective of the study of the environment, material recovery for

reuse is possible with imported second-hand garments or fabric stock. Reusing

EVALUATION OF CIRCULAR STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS IN FASHION SMES IN GHANA

garments from second-hand apparel – through a redesign strategy exists among

some ﬁ rms and conﬁ rms the ease of adopting a recovery strategy. The challenge

is sourcing these second-hand garments in the required volume, and scouting

for preferred pieces is time-consuming. To this end, establishing a warehouse to

facilitate the sourcing of rare pieces was welcomed. In other jurisdictions such

as Brazil, textile banks are providing the bridge between manufacturers, waste

management companies, fashion designers and fashion ﬁ rms to enable stocking,

sourcing and reusing of fabrics. Collaborations with textile ﬁ rms overseas could

enable direct sourcing of required quantities in assorted fabrics for warehousing.

For SMEs typically producing smaller quantities, product exclusivity is important;

warehousing rare fabrics will add to their competitiveness while contributing to

solving environmental issues.

However, second-hand garments have been a threat to environmental health,

especially in countries that have difﬁ culty managing solid waste. Apart from

local challenges with waste management, transporting the garments impacts

negatively on climate health (Morell-Delgado et al., 2024). Jacometti (2019)

emphasises high fuel consumption and signiﬁ cant emissions of greenhouse

gases as a result of the transportation of goods. While these are major issues with

second-hand garments, the government of Ghana has yet to put in place policies

that guide the creation of products sustainably.

4.4 Opportunities and challenges in practising CS

To ensure that SMEs embrace circular strategies, the study sought to ﬁ nd the

opportunities that can be harnessed to enhance participation. It was gleaned

from the data that, even though all the respondents ran retail shops, sixteen

respondents had regular direct engagement with end customers by running

retail and providing custom-made products. The advantage of direct customer

engagement was seen as a starting point, as summarised by a respondent; ‘In our

small way, we have to play our role, because deﬁ nitely, we have contact with the

client, and what we are talking about goes back to the client.’

Having indicated the feasible CSs as shown in Table 3, and the opportunities

available, it became necessary to know the challenges that may come with

consciously adopting and implementing a strategy. Most of the respondents

reiterated considering redesign, reuse and repair. However, the concept of

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

CS was new to them and, though they practised unknowingly, certain factors

needed to be examined, and are summarised as follows; ‘The challenges are

more of capacity and awareness on the part of consumers and willingness to

pay for service.’ To add to capacity and awareness, a respondent added that;

‘We are still looking out for labour, get a bigger space, so we can adopt and

implement a sustainable strategy. Once that structure is in place, we can be

conscious about it.’ Again, another hinted that; ‘In the ﬁ rst place, we need to

get a design model that we can use for the implementation and then probably

get the market base to hold on to that production level for a long time’. To

consolidate the views stated earlier, one respondent highlighted that; ‘It’s just

the know-how. We are not in the sustainability business, so we may not know

how to go about it. We are familiar with the concept, but how to put it in a

proper structure will be our challenge.’

It came to light that, for the majority to get involved in practising CSs, six

respondents indicated that there should be mandatory participation so it does

not become an individual initiative, with the government providing support

systems; ‘so this is like a collective side of things; we all can decide to have a

level of sustainable fashion value or practice. I think that will also help. It can even

be compulsory.’ As there is no compulsion for garment producers to practice

sustainably, a respondent shared that, ‘At this point, I doubt if I can do that unless

everybody is on board.’ This assertion was supported by another, who opined

that, ‘It must be implemented so that it’s not an option anymore, so it becomes a

law with legislative backing.’ A respondent brought two dimensions that could aid

effective implementation: ‘I think if the market is made for it, it becomes easier for

everybody to practise. Again, currently, what the government puts in place does

not fully support businesses such as fashion to engage in sustainability.’

Fashion SMEs in Ghana have the advantage of working closely with their

customers on CE principles. This is very important as it encourages consumers

to share their thoughts on what is produced for them and how (Kozlowski et al.,

2019). Owner-designers have the opportunity to engage their customers more

accurately than relying on consumer surveys. The CS integration is critical at the

design stage. The issue of afterthought, as noted by Gwilt and Rissanen (2011),

could largely be avoided; this will promote more accurately tailored products,

hence reducing dissatisfaction accompanying mainstream products. However,

EVALUATION OF CIRCULAR STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS IN FASHION SMES IN GHANA

the practice of CE principles comes with challenges. There is no strategy for

integration, as advanced by Bhamra et al. (2013) and Schaltegger et al. (2012).

Some respondents advocated mandatory participation; a defensive approach,

to ensure everyone is on board. In a space where little is known of sustainability

(James and Kent, 2019; Amankwah et al., 2023) and regulation is non-existent,

designers have little motivation to adopt CSs. The respondents practising some

forms of strategy were not aware of CSs to enable a conscious practice, a situation

that requires attention. Adopting any of the approaches needs to be carried out

in tandem with a model for implementation to achieve successful integration.

Currently, structures are not in place for an initial take-off. The World Bank’s (2012)

statement that Africa, and for this study Ghana, lacks resources, technology and

technical know-how are still pertinent.

Summary of ﬁ ndings

The major ﬁ ndings emanating from the study are that owner-designers practise

CS such as disassembly, redesign, reuse, repair/alterations unknowingly, due to

their lack of awareness of the CE principles. Regarding Research Question 1,

these strategies do not require sophisticated machines to operate. The awareness

created by the informal practice, coupled with the application of less sophisticated

technology represents an opportunity. However, the unattractiveness of formally

integrating CSs in fashion SMEs in Ghana is due to cost, time and labour, and

the lack of policy direction by the government to encourage adoption and

implementation. Also, respondents’ impressions based on regular interactions

with consumers throw some doubt on consumers’ willingness to accept products

made with material recovered from used clothes. Again, non-consideration of

CS at the initial stage of design makes life extension strategies difﬁ cult to adopt.

There was no indication of an existing model to help fashion SMEs understand

the impact levels of strategies they might wish to adopt. A considerable literature

on sustainability and the CE is available concerning the West and the same is now

required in Africa, and (in respect of this study) in Ghana in particular, to increase

understanding of the concept, its application and implications.

5. Conclusion

Fashion production is a commercial activity focused on the economic dimension,

and, until recently, has relegated the social and environmental dimensions to the

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

background. As it is a basic human necessity, the growth in population, particularly

in the two major cities in Ghana, will require an increase in the production and

consumption of clothes. The steady rise in designer clothing retail outlets meeting

the demands of urban professionals will further add to the growth of the clothing

industry, potentially exacerbating existing waste management issues. When a

growth in consumption is unavoidable, then a circular perspective might provide a

viable strategy to achieve sustainable consumption and production. Evaluating a

ﬁ rm’s current process for sustainability helps to identify lapses and the sustainable

circular strategy a ﬁ rm can adopt to bring value. Based on research questions

proposed for the study, life extension strategies such as Redesign, Repair, Reuse

and Reduce are informally practised. These strategies require basic production

equipment and are informal clothing care practices of the average Ghanaian.

Regarding challenges and opportunities – internally, CS could be formally

introduced to fashion SMEs in Ghana, supported by experiences gained through

informal practices of some strategies and direct consumer engagement over the

years; externally, adoption could be hindered by cultural beliefs and attitudes of

local consumers as opined by respondents. However, effective implementation

is dependent on government policies towards the achievement of sustainability

in the coming years. Sensitisation efforts for awareness creation and a model

for implementation are critical factors that must be addressed to provide the

enabling environment for fashion SMEs in Ghana to operate sustainably. It is fair

to say that the principles of the CE are not new to Ghana, but the dimension

of environmental sustainability is. The effectiveness of CS in fashion SMEs in

Ghana largely depends on understanding the relationship between practices

and sustainability. As a new phenomenon, efforts from the government, industry

practitioners and the citizenry are fundamental to understanding the complexities

and roles of all stakeholders towards the success of CE in Ghana. Collaborative

efforts from all stakeholders (Di Lodovico and Manzi, 2023) are required to tackle

the complex nature of sustainability and the CE to enhance the environmental

and social health of communities.

Study limitation

Consumers’ exclusion from the study stems from the basis that, with CE principles,

consumer participation is largely inﬂ uenced by the willingness of fashion SMEs to

provide service. Hence, as a new phenomenon in the Ghanaian fashion industry,

owner-designers’ perspectives were deemed essential to trigger conversations

EVALUATION OF CIRCULAR STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS IN FASHION SMES IN GHANA

and subsequent research into consumer perspectives and government policies

required to aid the adoption and successful implementation of the CE in Ghana.

Declaration of conﬂ ict of interest

The authors declare no conﬂ ict of interest with the study.

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PERSPECTIVE

Groundwater: sinking cities, urbanisation,

global drying, population growth

John E. Pattison1 and Peter Cooke2

Abstract

An examination of a few examples of aquifer use shows the importance

and fragility of groundwater, with poor management leading to over-

extraction by individuals and authorities producing subsidence – sinking

cities. Freshwater is one of our most precious resources and it is rapidly

disappearing, leading to global drying. At the same time, the global

and urban populations are increasing, with civil unrest increasing due,

in part, to freshwater shortages. The increasing global population and

global urbanisation are driving an increase in water use, restriction of

aquifer recharge and increased aquifer pollution. It is argued that urban

population growth with attendant increased water use, combined with

climate change and poor management, is signiﬁ cant in water stress.

Particular attention must be paid to the effect of rising populations on

local water resources, especially groundwater, and the knock-on effect

on urban sustainability.

Keywords: groundwater over-extraction, subsidence, infrastructure damage,

population growth, urbanisation, urban sustainability.

1 Independent researcher, formerly University of South Australia. Email: jepattison364@gmail.com

2 Independent researcher, formerly University of South Australia. Email: pcooke1000@gmail.com

10.3197/JPS.63799977346492 Open Access – CC BY 4.0

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

Introduction

Global warming receives considerable media attention as an urgent major global

issue. A visible consequence of global warming is the melting of glaciers and

polar ice, resulting in rising sea levels. Consequently, some low-lying islands and

coastal communities are threatened with being submerged under the rising sea.

Interestingly, there are communities under a similar threat of being submerged

owing to a process unrelated to global warming but seldom discussed – some

cities are sinking. The reason for this second phenomenon is indisputably related

to the increasing number of people in these communities using groundwater from

underlying aquifers. Graphs showing the rapid increase in global water use (Figure

1) and the rapid decline in global freshwater resources (Figure 2), at the same time

as the global and urban populations are rapidly increasing, communicate a strong

message, but do not convey the complexity of the situations that underlie the

graphs, particularly in the case of freshwater from aquifers.

There is often mismanagement and indecision leading to problems such as aquifer

depletion and sinking cities with damage to civil infrastructure, corruption and civil

unrest. Given the increasing global population and global urbanisation driving

the increase in water use, the restriction of aquifer recharge and increased aquifer

pollution, this article considers whether the global and urban water cycles are

sustainable for the current and future populations and how they impinge on urban

sustainability. After outlining the nature and importance of groundwater, a few

examples of aquifers and their contexts are brieﬂ y described. Issues concerning

sinking cities, urbanisation, global drying and the difﬁ culty of predicting future

populations – global and urban – with any certainty are then considered. It is

argued that regional population growth with increased water use, combined with

climate change and poor management, is signiﬁ cant in water stress.

Groundwater

Groundwater is the water found in soil pores, rock formation voids and

fractures located beneath the ground surface. A volume of below ground-level,

unconsolidated rock is called an aquifer when it can provide a usable quantity of

water, while the depth below ground-level at which the soil pores and fractures

and voids in the rocks become completely saturated with water is called the water-

table. Groundwater is naturally recharged by surface water percolating down

from rain, streams and rivers; it may discharge from the ground-surface naturally

GROUNDWATER: SINKING CITIES, URBANISATION, GLOBAL DRYING, POPULATION GROWTH

Figure 1. Trends from 1750 to 2010 in globally aggregated global and

urban populations and of global water use. Water use includes agricultural,

domestic and industrial uses

Billion

Population

Year

1750

1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

2010

Billion

Urban

Population

Year

1750

1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

2010

Thousand km3

Water use

Year

1750

1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

2010

SOURCE: AFTER STEFFEN ET AL. 2015

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

Freshwater resources

per capita (1000 m3)

Population

(billion individuals)

Humans

Ruminant livestock

1960 1992 2016

SOURCE: AFTER RIPPLE ET AL. 2017

Figure 2. Trends from 1960 to 2016 in globally aggregated freshwater

resources per capita and of global human population

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at springs and seeps. Evaporation can also cause loss of water from an aquifer,

especially in arid regions. Groundwater is pumped for agricultural, municipal and

industrial purposes by constructing and operating extraction wells, as it is often

used for public water supplies because it is cheaper, more convenient and less

vulnerable to pollution than surface water. However, if more water is extracted from

an aquifer than is going in, it will eventually run out, leading to dire consequences.

Groundwater may be polluted by improper disposal of industrial and domestic

wastes on land, overuse of agricultural chemicals on farms, dissolving of soluble

salts from the rocks through which the water passes, or seawater intrusion. The

main pollutant salt is sodium chloride, but others, some hazardous to health, such

as those of arsenic (Podgorski and Berg, 2020) and uranium (Riedel and Kubeck,

2018), may also occur. Pollution may also be microbial, particularly with faecal

bacteria from septic tanks and crop irrigation with untreated efﬂ uent (Ferrer et al.,

2020), which may lead to diarrhoea and malnutrition.

Groundwater makes up ~30% of the world’s freshwater supply, which is ~0.76% of

the world’s water; including oceans and permanent ice (WSS, 2018). Groundwater

is a valuable resource that can serve as a natural buffer against surface water

shortages since its global storage capacity is about equal to the total amount

of freshwater frozen in snow and ice, including at the north and south poles.

The largest users of groundwater (in 2010) were, in descending order, India,

USA, China, Pakistan, Iran, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, which accounted for 74

per cent of global groundwater usage (Berne et al., 2020). The Nubian aquifer

in Northern Africa (below most of Egypt and parts of neighbouring Libya, Chad

and Sudan) is the largest aquifer system in the world being just over two million

square kilometres in area. The Great Artesian Basin in central and eastern

Australia extends to almost two million square kilometres, while the Guarani

aquifer in central South America (below parts of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and

Uruguay) covers ~1.2 million square kilometres. By analysing the trace elements

in groundwater, hydrologists have determined that water extracted from aquifers

may be more than a million years old.

Similar to surface water, aquifers have been over-used and polluted in many places,

but their invisibility leads to mismanagement. Aquifer capacity is hard to estimate

and water management organisations typically ignore effects that won’t materialise

during their term of ofﬁ ce (three to ﬁ ve years), ignoring the decades or centuries

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

of time delays inherent in groundwater’s dynamic response to development.

Groundwater extracted from insufﬁ ciently recharged aquifers, can severely damage

both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Subsidence is the collapse of the ground

above when too much water is removed from the underground, decreasing the

occupied space below the ground surface. Damage at the surface is exacerbated

by the development of large features such as ﬁ ssures and sinkholes, in addition to

uneven settlement. During the collapse, sand and silts may move into the spaces

previously occupied by water decreasing the volume of space that water can

reoccupy when the aquifer is being recharged. Subsidence, caused by the increasing

extraction of groundwater due to growing populations, is a problem globally. A

world map of land subsidence has recently been published (Herrera-Garcia et al.,

2021) and may be used to visualise the subsidence in any area of interest. It shows

that nineteen per cent of the global population, and twelve per cent of the global

gross domestic product, face a high probability of subsidence.

The World Health Organization estimates that a healthy person needs between

ﬁ fty and a hundred litres of freshwater a day, depending on their cultural practices

(Reed and Reed, 2013). However, there is a water crisis in many regions of the

world, particularly in the poorest regions, and the problems will progressively

become global. There are three inter-related crises: safe water access, water

quality or pollution and water scarcity, the last being the pre-eminent problem

(Lall et al., 2008). There is widespread scientiﬁ c agreement that population growth

and unsustainable consumption are the main drivers of the current growing

scarcities of freshwater (Bradshaw et al., 2021; Crist et al., 2022). Freshwater has

been a scarce resource historically and conﬂ icts over water go back about 5,000

years (Angelakis et al., 2021). Predictably, severe mismanagement by some cities

and countries will cause excessive migration and possibly lead to water wars in

the future (Parker, 2016). It is also generally acknowledged that the recent civil

unrest in Iran had a water shortage component (Dehghanpisheh, 2018). Even

within a single country, different aspects of water resources may be managed by

different government agencies, causing internal power conﬂ icts and inefﬁ ciencies

(e.g. Davies, 2019).

Examples

The following examples will show the complex situations related to regulation of

groundwater, and water in general, faced by governments and managers.

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Beijing, the capital of China, with a population of more than twenty million,

has no major river in its vicinity and rain is unreliable with frequent droughts.

Tens of thousands of wells in and around Beijing have dropped the water-table

of a large aquifer under Beijing. There are regulations on their use, but they

are inconsistently regulated or enforced so that areas of Beijing are sinking 11

centimetres per year (Chen et al., 2016). Total annual water use was 3.6 billion

cubic metres, whereas freshwater resources provided only ~3 billion cubic metres

before 2015. A South to North Water Diversion canal and tunnel system of 2,400

kilometres from the Hann River was completed in 2015, to bring 45 billion cubic

metres of water to Beijing each year to overcome its water shortage (Chen et

al., 2020). Simultaneously, plans were announced to phase out 367 wells, and

programmes introduced to improve pollution control and treatment, and reduce

freshwater use in industries, farms and households. It has been proposed that

Beijing be moved further south to more reliable water sources.

Greater Mexico City is built on an ancient lake-bed in a mountain-ringed basin more

than 2.1 kilometres above sea level, and has a population of ~20 million. The city

requires water at a rate of about 60 cubic metres per second, of which about thirty

per cent comes from distant rivers and lakes, and the rest from a vast underground

aquifer that is being depleted at a rate faster than it is being replenished (Kahn,

2018). Consequently, the city is sinking at a rate of up to 50 centimetres per year

due to groundwater extraction, with surface ﬁ ssures occurring around the city. For

ﬁ ve months every year there is a lot of rain which, instead of recharging the aquifer,

runs into a massive drainage system to prevent ﬂ ooding. As the city now sits ~2

metres below neighbouring Lake Texcoco, ﬂ ooding has become a major concern.

The city has sunk ~9 metres in the last century, and it is estimated that in the next

century and a half, sections of the city could drop by as much as ~20 metres and

parts outside the city by up to 30 metres (Chaussard et al., 2021). Due to different

sections of the city subsiding at different rates the built environment reportedly

looks like a surrealist painting with everything appearing twisted and tilted (Simon,

2021). Damage to the metro railway has already caused an accident and more are

predicted (Kornei, 2017). Mexico City is also subject to occasional earthquakes. In

1954 pumping was banned in the city centre, but not in the metropolitan areas. The

subsidence in the city centre stabilised, but is still a major problem in most parts of

the metropolitan areas. Because of damaged water pipes, nearly forty per cent of

water is wasted, such that the eastern section of the city has only about an hour of

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

water supply a day during the rainy season and can go dry for months without water

during the dry season (Kahn, 2018). The quality of the water is also poor because

of contamination from broken sewer pipes. It is more economical and common to

use water-carrier tankers to transport the water directly from the aquifer to its place

of use. The repair cost is much larger than after a severe earthquake with no end

result as the city continues to sink. Mexico City has spent billions of dollars on ﬂ ood

control; however, this has not helped the city’s water shortage or sinking problems.

Little water is recycled or used to recharge the aquifer.

Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, with a population of ten million, sits on marshy

land on the coast of the Java Sea, with thirteen rivers running through it, and is

subject to frequent ﬂ ooding from both the rivers and the sea. The city does not

pipe in enough drinkable water, and its rivers are highly polluted, so Jakartans

rely largely on wells which extract groundwater from shallow aquifers, leading to

subsidence. It is one of the fastest sinking cities in the world (Lin and Hidayat, 2018)

and is sinking faster than the sea-level is rising. Areas of north Jakarta, including

the seawalls designed to protect them from ﬂ ooding, are falling ~25 centimetres

per year; almost half the city is already below sea level, and some areas could be

totally submerged by 2050, notwithstanding the presence of seawalls (Andreas

et al., 2018). Other parts of Jakarta are also sinking but at slower rates, varying

between 1 and 15 centimetres per year Attempts by the authorities to regulate

groundwater extraction have failed; illegal extraction is still common. The

problem has been aggravated by the sea level rise due to global warming and the

rapid growth of new apartment blocks, shopping centres and government ofﬁ ces

which increase the risk of disastrous ﬂ ooding. Despite heavy monsoonal rain, the

rainwater is drained away and does not recharge the aquifer because 97 per cent

of the city is covered with concrete and asphalt. The national capital, Jakarta, will

relocate to Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), according to a statement made by

the President Joko Widodo in August 2019 (Lyons, 2019). Nonetheless, Jakarta

will remain the ﬁ nancial and commercial hub of the country, and the majority of

its residents and industries are expected to remain in Jakarta and will still require

freshwater. Unfortunately Jakartans have become complacent and have adopted

a fatalistic attitude to the sinking of their city (Lin and Hidayat, 2018).

Manila city, the capital of the Philippines, has a population of nearly two million

and is located on relatively ﬂ at, low coastal ﬂ ood plains on the eastern shore of

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GROUNDWATER: SINKING CITIES, URBANISATION, GLOBAL DRYING, POPULATION GROWTH

Manila Bay, Luzon Island. The Greater Manila Area includes the built-up areas

and some rural areas around metropolitan Manila and has a population of >28

million. Most of the region has a tropical wet and dry season. In the wet season

it rarely rains all day, but heavy rainfall occurs during short periods. The surface

reservoirs are too small to store enough of this rain for agriculture, ﬁ sh ponds and

domestic needs during the dry season. The Pasig River ﬂ ows through the middle

of the city to Manila Bay; however, it is reportedly one of the most polluted rivers

in the world. Groundwater is extracted from a number of aquifers in the delta

plain and is used for drinking by about ﬁ fty per cent of the population (Mirano,

2019). Fishponds, a large industry in the coastal areas of Manila Bay, use large

volumes of groundwater to replace the water fouled by overfeeding. Due to

excessive unregulated groundwater extraction, areas of metropolitan Manilla are

sinking at up to 10 centimetres per year (Eco et al., 2020). Areas in metropolitan

Manila sunk from 70 centimetres to 135 centimetres over the thirty years from

1979 to 2009. The rise in the sea level due to global warming is estimated to be

~0.3 centimetres per year, making it the lesser problem for coastal communities

suffering from subsidence. Manila is exposed to many natural hazards such as

earthquakes, ﬂ oods, landslides, tsunamis and typhoons; it is surrounded by

numerous active fault systems, and has been ranked as the second riskiest capital

city after Tokyo to live in. Flooding is endemic in the Greater Manila Area because

waterways are blocked by human rubbish and volcanic debris, and constricted by

structures because of poor building regulations or their implementation (Mirano,

2019). Numerous ground ﬁ ssures have emerged in areas away from the coast,

causing extensive damage to overlying structures. Although neither natural nor

man-made land subsidence is yet understood or acknowledged in the Philippines,

local, relative sea level increase from these sources can occur far faster than the

global sea-level rise (Rodolfo and Siringan, 2006). Work to clean-up the Pasig

River commenced in 1989 but was ineffectual with the executive director being

dismissed in 2019 for alleged corruption (Gita-Carlos, 2019).

Venice, Italy, is located within the Venetian Lagoon at the northern end of the

Adriatic Sea, and is notorious for its regular ﬂ ooding. Although the residential

population of the historic island city was only 53,000 in 2019 (before Covid), and

is decreasing, the population of greater Venice (including the neighbouring

mainland boroughs and other lagoon islands) in 2019 was 636,000, and is growing

(PopStat, 2023). In addition, the annual tourist population in 2019 was 5.523

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

million and is also increasing (Imboden, 2023). Venice has, since its beginning,

obtained freshwater from an underlying coastal aquifer system, as well as by

collecting rainwater (Tosi et al., 2014). Before the 1960s, the water extracted from

the aquifer had been replenished naturally. However, over-exploitation during the

1960s, especially by an increasing population, lowered the water-table alarmingly.

In the 1970s, the authorities closed many wells, and the water-table appeared to

stabilise. Freshwater is now mainly supplied by aqueducts from nearby mountains.

More accurate measurements in 2012 revealed that Venice is still slowly sinking

(Bock et al., 2012) because of two other factors in addition to the compaction

of the aquifer. Venice was built on marshland. The buildings sit on top of more

than ten million 25-metre-long tree trunks forced into the marshlands to reach

the more solid sedimentary clay below, forming pile foundations (Mat, 2020).

Although these piles have proven to be excellent for their purpose, they are not

perfect and buildings are very slowly subsiding due to their extreme weights. In

addition, the Venetian Lagoon sits on the Adriatic tectonic plate that is slowly

subducting beneath the Eurasian plate causing everything on it, including Venice,

to slowly lose elevation (Devoti et al., 2002). Venice is estimated to be sinking at

a combined rate of 1 to 2 millimetres per year, which is substantially less than

when groundwater was being extracted (Bock et al., 2012). Nevertheless, apart

from a ~110 mm rise in sea level, natural processes and groundwater extraction

are believed to have played a part in the estimated 120-millimetre subsidence of

Venice throughout the course of the twentieth century. In the next twenty years,

the city and surrounding land is estimated to sink by ~80 millimetres relative to

the sea. Flooding has been exacerbated by poor management (Mat, 2020). The

building of massive ﬂ ood gates designed to isolate the Venetian Lagoon from the

Adriatic Sea was commenced in 2003. The project, however, has been plagued by

controversy and political scandal, and has run continually over budget; in 2014, 35

people were arrested, including the mayor and a former governor of the region,

in connection to funding irregularities (Harlan and Pitrelli, 2019).

Greater Tehran, capital of Iran, has a population of ~16 million and has a cold

semi-arid climate; rainfall is highly seasonal with a short rainy season leaving

the land hot and dry for most of the year. Greater Tehran is supplied by surface

water from dams, as well as by groundwater (Ravilious, 2018). Tehran’s aquifers

have been severely depleted owing to drought, a growing population, urban

and industrial development, and irrigation of nearby agricultural land. Because

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GROUNDWATER: SINKING CITIES, URBANISATION, GLOBAL DRYING, POPULATION GROWTH

of inefﬁ cient practices, a large part of the water used in agriculture is lost via

evaporation. Further, the average Tehran resident uses 325 litres of water per day,

making domestic water consumption in the country seventy per cent above the

global average. Notably, the average groundwater level in Tehran decreased by

~12 metres from 1984 to 2011. A recent study (Haghshenas and Motagh, 2019)

found signiﬁ cant subsidence in ~10% of the city centre and in many satellite

towns and villages in Tehran’s southwestern region: with rates exceeding 25

centimetres per year in the western Tehran Plain, which is a mix of Tehran’s urban

sprawl, satellite towns and agricultural land, and 22 centimetres per year to the

southeast of Tehran city. The effects of Tehran’s sinking are seen in uneven streets,

shifted curbs, cracks in walls and tilted buildings. In addition, huge ﬁ ssures,

several kilometres long and up to four metres wide and deep, have appeared

in the Tehran Plain to the southeast of Tehran – some of these are threatening

to collapse power-transmission lines and buckle railway lines. In and around

Tehran, there are areas containing about 250,000 houses,120 kilometres of railway

lines, 2,300 kilometres of roads, 21 bridges, 30 kilometres of oil pipeline, 200

kilometres of gas pipeline, and 70 kilometres of high-voltage power lines, which

have substantial subsidence (Ravilious, 2018). This infrastructure will be badly

damaged by Tehran’s continuous subsidence unless appropriate groundwater

management is put in place. Unfortunately, efforts by the government to control

groundwater extraction are failing. Some 30,000 unlawful wells are thought to

be still operating throughout Greater Tehran, despite the fact that ~100,000

illegal wells have been shut down in Iran (Ravilious, 2018). Another problem is

the pollution of groundwater caused by industrial and municipal wastewater. In

the past, the Iranian government’s main concern was to prioritise the building of

dams (Madani, 2014). However, this approach is no longer appropriate as the total

storage capacity behind Iran’s dams now exceeds the water potential of its rivers.

The government now plans massive investments in seawater desalination. Some

analysts believe that the continuing water crisis has been a signiﬁ cant factor in

the growing civil unrest in rural areas (Dehghanpisheh, 2018). A decision to move

the capital from Tehran was made in 2009, but progress has been very slow (Tait

and Hoseiny, 2009).

In addition to the aforementioned examples, many other cities are concerned

about their rapidly depleting aquifers, which are or may commence sinking, or

may become contaminated by sea water, such as Gaza City and Brasilia.

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

Gaza City, in the narrow coastal Palestinian Gaza Strip, with a population of ~2

million, has negligible surface water. It relies almost entirely on a large coastal

aquifer that stretches along the eastern Mediterranean coast from the northern

Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, via the Gaza Strip, into Israel covering an area of 18,370

square kilometres (UNESCWA, 2013). The ground water originates from inland

recharging areas and generally ﬂ ows towards the sea where it discharges.

However, the Gaza Strip extracts only ~11 per cent of the total water extracted

from the aquifer, with Israel and Egypt taking the greater proportion. Continued

over-extraction has led to lowering of the water-table, causing seawater intrusion.

Additionally, pollution from untreated sewerage and agricultural return ﬂ ows has

severely impaired water quality, with the UN warning that >97 per cent of Gaza’s

water is unﬁ t for domestic use (Khatib, 2017): the residents of Gaza have relied

upon bottled water for many years (Wade 2023). Reconstruction after the current

Hamas-Israeli war ceases will provide an opportunity for the Gazan government

to rebuild the water and sanitation systems. Though the problem is exacerbated

by sanctions, it shows what happens because of overpopulation and poor

management of a limited resource. Unfortunately, due to political constraints

there are no formal or informal agreements for the optimum use of the aquifer.

Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, has a population of ~4 million. Water is obtained

from dams and the Guarani aquifer beneath Brazil. Decreasing rainfall, low level

of dams and rapid and disorderly growth in Brasilia have caused occasional water

rationing. It is ironic that Brazil is nearly half the area of South America, with heavy

rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, and yet it suffers from occasional droughts. This is

primarily due to the deforestation of its rainforest, which has changed the weather

pattern in Brazil causing areas to become drought-prone (Perugini et al., 2017).

The Amazon River and its tributaries have become polluted with rubbish and

sewage in addition to the topsoil washed down from deforested areas (Ribeiro,

2018). Heavy extraction of groundwater continues, especially for irrigation, and is

rapidly becoming politicised with its control becoming increasingly controversial.

Discussion

These examples show that each individual situation is complex. Importantly, these

cities face many other environmental problems that governments consider more

urgent, such as incessant ﬂ ooding, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, volcanic

eruptions and the like, all causing damage to infrastructure incurring high repair

GROUNDWATER: SINKING CITIES, URBANISATION, GLOBAL DRYING, POPULATION GROWTH

costs. However, the most important common factor for water sustainability

is the increasing populations that require fresh water for domestic, industrial

and agricultural uses. Personal and national self-interest is evident, as are

mismanagement and possible corruption. Freshwater is wasted on water-hungry

crops such as cotton and rice. Due to their invisibility, aquifers are often overused

and not replenished because of lack of rain or draining rainwater out through

stormwater systems. Better management of freshwater is urgently required in

order to avoid further subsidence and civil unrest.

Sinking cities

It is interesting that many coastal cities are experiencing a rate of subsidence, and

hence, ﬂ ooding, which is greater than the rising sea-level due to global warming.

Subsidence is a global problem: it reduces aquifer-system storage capacity,

causes earth ﬁ ssures, damages buildings and civil infrastructure, and increases

ﬂ ood susceptibility. The only known method to prevent subsidence is to use less

groundwater, and to rely mainly on surface water – a remedy which is extremely

difﬁ cult to enforce when many people own their own wells. Attempts to recharge

aquifers may not be successful and may possibly decrease the volume of the

aquifer permanently. Further, natural recharging is a slow process owing to the

long time it takes for water to percolate from the ground surface down to the

aquifer. In many cases, the immediate needs for freshwater are considered more

important by governments than long term sustainability, and it is optimistically

hoped that rain will eventually recharge the aquifers and reduce subsidence. An

attitude of do nothing and hope that the problem will go away or be tackled

by later governments frequently prevails, often resulting in poor management of

groundwater (Rodolfo and Siringan, 2006; Diamond, 2011; Dehghanpisheh, 2018;

Mat, 2020).

Urbanisation

In 2020, 56.2 per cent of the global population was urbanised and it is predicted

that by 2050 about 68 per cent of the developing world and about 86 per

cent of the developed world will be urbanised (UNDESA, 2019). The impact of

urbanisation on society, the economy and the environment is immense, and it

offers the promise of sustainability with more efﬁ cient use of resources. Urban

population growth is due to three factors: local fertility; international migration,

especially from neighbouring countries with internal conﬂ icts; and rural-to-urban

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

migration for those in search for a better quality of life. But unplanned migration

into areas often results in the rapid grown of slums and shanty towns and the

beneﬁ ts don’t materialise.

It is a general problem that, as cities grow, surface water is often directed to ﬂ ow

away from the city by storm water systems to avoid ﬂ ooding, while any prior-

existing natural drainage channels and swamp-land are drained and built upon so

that recharging of aquifers will no longer occur even though there may be sufﬁ cient

rain. The denser the population, the more problems there are with maintaining

the aquifers. Sustainable water drainage and aquifer recharging systems should

be planned before urbanisation takes place; if undertaken afterwards to revitalise

an area, these often cause preventable social upheaval.

Unfortunately, it is often considered a waste of resources by proﬁ t-oriented

companies to clean up their pollution, including any that will seep down to an

underlying aquifer, unless prosecuted and ﬁ ned (Lall et al., 2008). A recent study

found that urban megaprojects in south-east Asia threaten freshwater justice

for local communities (Hawken et al., 2021). They concluded that large scale

urban initiatives are typically the opposite of effective urban planning: They

negatively affect regional water systems, and their sponsors and funders take

little responsibility for these effects. When large sums of money are involved

in any major development project, there is always the possibility, or at least a

suspicion, of corruption. On the other hand, in a few cases, governments are being

reluctantly forced to consider relocating cities due to the shortage of freshwater

for their growing populations and increasing damage to their infrastructure. But

the old city remains occupied, still requiring freshwater, and may still be sinking.

Some governments are proposing desalination of seawater, but these plants are

very expensive to construct and to operate. For example, in 2007 during a severe

drought, the South Australian state government decided to build a desalination

plant to guarantee the water supply to its state capital city, Adelaide, which has a

population of ~1.3 million. A desalination plant with the capacity to provide the

city with up to ﬁ fty per cent of its drinking water needs, around 1,000 gigalitres per

year, was completed in 2012 at a cost of A$1.83 billion. It operated at full capacity

for two years at a cost of A$130 million per year. After the drought broke in 2015,

the plant has been operating at ten per cent of its capacity to reduce costs (DEW,

GROUNDWATER: SINKING CITIES, URBANISATION, GLOBAL DRYING, POPULATION GROWTH

2022), showing that even an advanced economy has problems affording the

construction and operation of a relatively small desalination plant.

With climate change, many regions of the world will experience more droughts,

while, combined with population growth, the ability of local storage infrastructure

such as dams and aquifers to buffer the population from the impact of such

droughts decreases. As water consumption is increasing, water management

becomes a major challenge for governments to provide freshwater at minimal cost

and minimal energy consumption in a sustainable way, but is made difﬁ cult due to

the uncertainties created with climate change, growing populations and ageing

infrastructure for water supply requiring maintenance or replacement. (Lezcano

et al., 2021). Notwithstanding the hyperbole of some billionaire entrepreneurs,

the mining of off-the-Earth bodies, such as asteroids and moons, is unlikely to be

ﬁ nancially viable nor is there likely to be any beneﬁ t to large-scale environmental,

social or economic conditions on Earth (Glester, 2018; Zeisl, 2019).

Subsidence is a growing problem in the developing world as cities increase in

population and in water use per capita without adequate pumping regulations

and/or enforcement (and with possible corruption). Subsidence is not restricted

to urban areas but civil infrastructure is more concentrated there, causing a

greater amount of damage.

Global drying

The loss of fresh groundwater adds to the loss of fresh surface water, including

polar and mountain ice and snow, receding glaciers and the drying and pollution

of freshwater rivers and lakes, producing global drying (Diamond, 2011). The

increased extraction of groundwater is probably the reason behind the ongoing

rise in water use (Steffen et al., 2015). The loss of surface water will decrease

the average albedo of the Earth and cause the exposed ground to absorb more

of the Sun’s radiation contributing to global warming. There is also a consensus

among weather modellers that ‘the average global biophysical climate response

to complete global deforestation is atmospheric cooling and drying’ (Perugini

et al., 2017: 1). At the 2018 UNESCO World Water Forum held in Brasilia, it was

noted that there are a growing number of cities with freshwater shortages. By

2050, ﬁ ve billion people could have poor access to water. It was forecast that

by 2025 the global demand for agriculture will increase by sixty per cent with

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

the water required for this. Agriculture is the dominant water user accounting

for seventy per cent of global water use and greater than ninety per cent in

arid and semiarid regions. Agricultural water use is very inefﬁ cient and often,

depending on the watering technique employed, only between ten and twenty

per cent of the water supplied is utilised by the plants (Lall et al., 2008). A 2018

report (UNWWDR, 2018) states that ‘The global demand for water has been

increasing at a rate of ~1%/yr over the past decades as a function of population

growth, economic development and changing consumption patterns, and it

will continue to grow signiﬁ cantly over the foreseeable future.’ It recommends

using natural processes to improve water availability, such as soil moisture

retention, groundwater recharge, improving water quality, and reducing risks

associated with water-related disasters and climate change. Other sources of

freshwater, such as desalination, recycling, harvesting fog and collecting icebergs

from the polar regions, should be developed (Lisbona, 2021). More efﬁ cient

methods of freshwater use in agriculture and industry should be adopted, as

should sewerage treatment to reclaim water, as well as reducing domestic use

of water with water tariffs to provide an incentive to save water. However, the

2018 report has been severely criticised for underplaying the connection between

population and economic growth, and water demand (Boretti and Rosa, 2019).

The UN, through the IAEA, also mediates the water allocations of users of

large multinational aquifers, such as the Nubian aquifer in Northern Africa and

the Guarani aquifer in South America, in an attempt to avoid conﬂ icts and to

sustainably manage the aquifers (Britain et al., 2015). As aforementioned, there

have already been conﬂ icts over access to freshwater and other resources, and

more are expected to occur (Nnoko-Mewana, 2018; Ribeiro, 2018; Darling, 2019;

Angelakis et al., 2021).

A less commonly known effect of global drying is that it changes the distribution

of water stored around the Earth (through glacial ice melting and aquifer

depletions), which, in turn, contributes to polar drift (Deng et al., 2021). The points

where the Earth’s rotational axis passes through the Earth’s surface, the north and

south poles, are not static but move, as does the equator, changing the global

weather distribution pattern. Earth’s natural climate change is not unexpected:

astronomical factors, such as variations in orbital eccentricity, axial tilt, precession

of the Earth’s orbit and varying luminosity of the Sun, can change, affecting the

Earth’s weather patterns. For example, at the end of the last Ice Age the Sahara

GROUNDWATER: SINKING CITIES, URBANISATION, GLOBAL DRYING, POPULATION GROWTH

Desert in northern Africa was as dry and uninviting as it is today. However, ~11,000

BP, arguably the largest climate change-induced environmental change in the

Holocene period occurred, rapidly transforming the Sahara into a lush green

savannah in less than 500 years, with forests in the valleys, with groundwater

sources, that were occupied by prehistoric humans (Cheddudi, 2021). This

transformation was caused by slight cyclic changes in the tilt of the Earth’s

orbital axis, which in turn caused the intensiﬁ cation and northward expansion of

the summer monsoon over northern Africa. During a few millennia of plentiful

rain and lush vegetation, and under growing population pressures, prehistoric

humans evolved from hunter-gathers to farmers with well-established settlements.

However, the Green Sahara did not last; the Earth’s orbital precession slowly

changed again, this time weakening and causing a slow southward contraction

of the summer monsoon between 8,200 and 4,500 BP, with a relatively abrupt

change ~5,000 BP (Wright, 2017). It is theorised that this contraction was aided

by the pastoralists overgrazing and employing ﬁ re suppression, which changed

the savanna to shrubland, reducing atmospheric moisture and decreasing soil

fertility (Boissoneault, 2017). This change in climate was a major factor in the

rapid collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt ~4,200 BP (Welc and Marks, 2014). A

prosperous civilisation which existed for almost 500 years disintegrated in only a

couple of decades because of extensive severe drought, catastrophic low ﬂ oods

of the Nile, continual crop failures and mass starvation.

Population growth

The increasing scarcity of freshwater is a critical issue for humanity, with the

increasing global population being a signiﬁ cant driver (Ripple et al., 2017; Crist

et al., 2022). At the same time, the per capita use of water is increasing as people

move from rural to urban areas and from developing to developed countries,

particularly as the global middle class grows (Steffen et al., 2015). The availability

of freshwater at the local levels must be managed sustainably. Water is a limited

resource: however, recycling wastewater and sewerage, desalination and removal

of other pollutants requires further limited resources, including energy, which are

expensive. Continuing population growth and climate change make the problem

more difﬁ cult to deal with.

Difﬁ culties in making predictions of future populations – global or urban – create

considerable uncertainty in the predicted estimates. Many researchers have

POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY VOL 8, NO 2, 2024

attempted to estimate the maximum human carrying capacity (or, more recently,

the tipping point population) of the world for a sustainable future. The 65 estimates

before 2012, using different models and assumptions, ranged widely from as low

as 500 million up to the most common estimate of 8 billion, a number we have

recently exceeded (Pengra, 2012). In 2017, the UN Population Division undertook

a meta-study of past population estimates (UNDESA, 2017) and concluded that ‘it

is most likely that the global population will reach 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion

in 2100’. However, UN Reports in the past have not been reliable (Holm, 2000) and

UN development targets not always achieved (Bradshaw et al., 2021), creating

some uncertainty in the predicted populations (Pengra, 2012). O’Sullivan (2016) is

particularly critical of the UN’s population growth projections. Nonetheless, these

diverse studies have produced some optimism that all is well (Economist, 2019;

Hance, 2020). The question remains: can a good life be provided to all within

regional water boundaries if they are better managed?

Considerable faith has been put in the demographic transition occurring to ‘bend

the population curve’ as has already happened in many countries. However,

it is not guaranteed to occur in all countries (see Pell, 2016 for a counter example;

and Cleland, 2017 for the uncertainty of the sub-Saharan African demographic

transition) and, even if it should occur, there is no guarantee that population

growth will not restart at some future time, creating further uncertainty for

urban planners. An unexpected situation that is currently occurring is due to

many nations adopting de facto open national borders, allowing apparently

organised mass migrations from the developing to the developed nations, so

leading to an increase in unplanned urbanisation and chaos in many of the

developed countries.

Conclusion

There are challenges in improving the global water cycle (Lall et al., 2008) and

individual urban water cycles (Lezcano et al., 2021) by sustainable means, which are

made more difﬁ cult with growing populations. As discussed above, urban water

cycles are different in each city, depending upon local geography, demographics

and weather patterns, which will change with global warming. Past civilisations

on Earth collapsed because the leaders were not sufﬁ ciently knowledgeable or

forward thinking (Diamond, 2011; Ialenti, 2020), which still appears to be a problem

in many countries. Unfortunately, it is easier to see the collapse of civilisations

GROUNDWATER: SINKING CITIES, URBANISATION, GLOBAL DRYING, POPULATION GROWTH

in hindsight and being on the outside rather than on the inside (Power, 2000).

Groundwater is a particular problem due to its invisibility to managers and ease

of access by users. At the local level, there must be improvements in the use of

water as outlined by the UN, including being better management and stricter

regulation. Importantly, urban design must allow any underlying aquifers to be

recharged to avoid infrastructure damage. It has been argued that there are

uncertainties with attempting to estimate future populations, both globally and

in urban settings, and with whether the demographic transition will necessarily

occur and persist.

A solution to the increasing global population, which is driving global drying,

amongst other environmental problems, is not impossible (Pengra, 2012; Perkins,

2017; Tucker, 2020). Particular attention must be paid to the effect of rising

populations (including through migrations) on local water resources, especially

groundwater, and the knock-on effect on urban sustainability. As aforementioned,

water stress has frequently been linked with social tension and conﬂ ict, which

should be avoided in any urban planning.

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