Addressing population is central to a sustainable future

February 6th 2012

In its response to the report of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, Population Matters criticised the report’s omission of measures designed to explicitly address population growth and called for population to be at the heart of thinking on global sustainability.

Even though the report acknowledges that population growth is a major contributor to rapidly rising demand and hence to the unsustainability of our global development model, it fails to see population as an issue to be addressed. The report thus completely ignores its own strictures that policy thinking should be integrated and long term and that it should be about “seeing the whole picture”.

Population Matters Chair, Roger Martin, commented, “We all know that a finite and rapidly degrading planet cannot support, let alone sustain, ever-increasing numbers of people each consuming ever larger amounts of resources – it’s physically impossible. All sustainability problems boil down to too many people consuming too much stuff; so we all know that growth in both numbers and consumption will stop at some point. Population stabilization is clearly a necessary – though of course not sufficient – condition of any real sustainability. We look to the Rio conference to point the way to a soft landing.”

1. High-level Panel report
2. Population Matters submission to the UN for the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development.