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• Published: 17 June 2020

Half the world’s population are exposed to increasing air pollution

• G. Shaddick   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4117-4264 1 ,
• M. L. Thomas 2 ,
• P. Mudu 3 ,
• G. Ruggeri 3 &
• S. Gumy 3  

npj Climate and Atmospheric Science volume  3 , Article number:  23 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Air pollution is high on the global agenda and is widely recognised as a threat to both public health and economic progress. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 4.2 million deaths annually can be attributed to outdoor air pollution. Recently, there have been major advances in methods that allow the quantification of air pollution-related indicators to track progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and that expand the evidence base of the impacts of air pollution on health. Despite efforts to reduce air pollution in many countries there are regions, notably Central and Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, in which populations continue to be exposed to increasing levels of air pollution. The majority of the world’s population continue to be exposed to levels of air pollution substantially above WHO Air Quality Guidelines and, as such, air pollution constitutes a major, and in many areas, increasing threat to public health.

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Introduction

In 2016, the WHO estimated that 4.2 million deaths annually could be attributed to ambient (outdoor) fine particulate matter air pollution, or PM 2.5 (particles smaller than 2.5 μm in diameter) 1 . PM 2.5 comes from a wide range of sources, including energy production, households, industry, transport, waste, agriculture, desert dust and forest fires and particles can travel in the atmosphere for hundreds of kilometres and their chemical and physical characteristics may vary greatly over time and space. The WHO developed Air Quality Guidelines (AQG) to offer guidance for reducing the health impacts of air pollution. The first edition, the WHO AQG for Europe, was published in 1987 with a global update (in 2005) reflecting the increased scientific evidence of the health risks of air pollution worldwide and the growing appreciation of the global scale of the problem 2 . The current WHO AQG states that annual mean concentration should not exceed 10 μg/m 3  2 .

The adoption and implementation of policy interventions have proved to be effective in improving air quality 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 . There are at least three examples of enforcement of long-term policies that have reduced concentration of air pollutants in Europe and North America: (i) the Clean Air Act in 1963 and its subsequent amendments in the USA; (ii) the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) with protocols enforced since the beginning of the 1980s in Europe and North America 8 ; and (iii) the European emission standards passed in the European Union in the early 1990s 9 . However, between 1960 and 2009 concentrations of PM 2.5 globally increased by 38%, due in large part to increases in China and India, with deaths attributable to air pollution increasing by 124% between 1960 and 2009 10 .

The momentum behind the air pollution and climate change agendas, and the synergies between them, together with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide an opportunity to address air pollution and the related burden of disease. Here, trends in global air quality between 2010 and 2016 are examined in the context of attempts to reduce air pollution, both through long-term policies and more recent attempts to reduce levels of air pollution. Particular focus is given to providing comprehensive coverage of estimated concentrations and obtaining (national-level) distributions of population exposures for health impact assessment. Traditionally, the primary source of information has been measurements from ground monitoring networks but, although coverage is increasing, there remain regions in which monitoring is sparse, or even non-existent (see Supplementary Information) 11 . The Data Integration Model for Air Quality (DIMAQ) was developed by the WHO Data Integration Task Force (see Acknowledgements for details) to respond to the need for improved estimates of exposures to PM 2.5 at high spatial resolution (0.1° × 0.1°) globally 11 . DIMAQ calibrates ground monitoring data with information from satellite retrievals of aerosol optical depth, chemical transport models and other sources to provide yearly air quality profiles for individual countries, regions and globally 11 . Estimates of PM 2.5 concentrations have been compared with previous studies and a good quantitative agreement in the direction and magnitude of trends has been found. This is especially valid in data rich settings (North America, Western Europe and China) where trends results are consistent with what has been found from the analysis of ground level PM 2.5 measurements.

Figure 1a shows average annual concentrations of PM 2.5 for 2016, estimated using DIMAQ,; and Fig. 1b the differences in concentrations between 2010 and 2016. Although air pollution affects high and low-income countries alike, low- and middle-income countries experience the highest burden, with the highest concentrations being seen in Central, Eastern Southern and South-Eastern Asia 12 .

a Concentrations in 2016. b Changes in concentrations between 2010 and 2016.

The high concentrations observed across parts of the Middle East, parts of Asia and Sub-Saharan regions of Africa are associated with sand and desert dust. Desert dust has received increasing attention due to the magnitude of its concentration and the capacity to be transported over very long distances in particular areas of the world 13 , 14 . The Sahara is one of the biggest global source of desert dust 15 and the increase of PM 2.5 in this region is consistent with the prediction of an increase of desert dust due to climate change 16 , 17 .

Globally, 55.3% of the world’s population were exposed to increased levels of PM 2.5 , between 2010 and 2016, however there are marked differences in the direction and magnitude of trends across the world. For example, in North America and Europe annual average population-weighted concentrations decreased from 12.4 to 9.8 μg/m 3 while in Central and Southern Asia they rose from 54.8 to 61.5 μg/m 3 . Reductions in concentrations observed in North America and Europe align with those reported by the US Environmental Protection Agency and European Environmental Agency (EEA) 18 , 19 . The lower values observed in these regions reflect substantial regulatory processes that were implemented thirty years ago that have led to substantial decreases in air pollution over previous decades 18 , 20 , 21 . In high-income countries, the extent of air pollution from widespread coal and other solid-fuel burning, together with other toxic emissions from largely unregulated industrial processes, declined markedly with Clean Air Acts and similar ‘smoke control’ legislation introduced from the mid-20th century. However, these remain important sources of air pollution in other parts of the world 22 . In North America and Europe, the rates of improvements are small reflecting the difficulties in reducing concentrations at lower levels.

Assessing the health impacts of air pollution requires detailed information of the levels to which specific populations are exposed. Specifically, it is important to identify whether areas where there are high concentrations are co-located with high populations within a country or region. Population-weighted concentrations, often referred to as population-weighted exposures, are calculated by spatially aligning concentrations of PM 2.5 with population estimates (see Supplementary Information).

Figure 2 shows global trends in estimated concentrations and population-weighted concentrations of PM 2.5 for 2010–2016, together with trends for SDG regions (see Supplementary Fig. 1.1 ). Where population-weighted exposures are higher than concentrations, as seen in Central Asia and Southern Asia, this indicates that higher levels of air pollution coincide with highly populated areas. Globally, whilst concentrations have reduced slightly (from 12.8 μg/m 3 in 2010 to 11.7 in 2016), population-weighted concentrations have increased slightly (33.5 μg/m 3 in 2010, 34.6 μg/m 3 in 2016). In North America and Europe both concentrations and population-weighted concentrations have decreased (6.1–4.9 and 12.4–9.8 μg/m 3 , respectively). The association between concentrations and population can be clearly seen for Central Asia and Southern Asia where concentrations increased from 29.6 to 31.7 μg/m 3 (a 7% increase) while population-weighted concentrations were higher both in magnitude and in percentage of increase, increasing from 54.8 to 61.5 μg/m 3 (a 12% increase).

a Concentrations. b Population-weighted concentrations.

For the Eastern Asia and South Eastern Asia concentrations increase from 2010 to 2013 and then decrease from 2013 to 2016, a result of the implementation of the ‘Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan’ 21 and the transition to cleaner energy mix due to increased urbanization in China 23 , 24 , 25 . Population-weighted concentrations for urban areas in this region are strongly influenced by China, which comprises 62.6% of the population in the region. Population-weighted concentrations are higher than the concentrations and the decrease is more marked (in the population-weighted concentrations), indicating that the implementation of policies has been successful in terms of the number of people affected. The opposite effect of population-weighting is observed in areas within Western Asia and Northern Africa where an increasing trend in population-weighted concentrations (from 42.0 to 43.1. μg/m 3 ) contains lower values than for concentrations (from 50.7 to 52.6 μg/m 3 ). In this region, concentrations are inversely correlated with population, reflecting the high concentrations associated with desert dust in areas of lower population density.

Long-term policies to reduce air pollution have been shown to be effective and have been implemented in many countries, notably in Europe and the United States. However, even in countries with the cleanest air there are large numbers of people exposed to harmful levels of air pollution. Although precise quantification of the outcomes of specific policies is difficult, coupling the evidence for effective interventions with global, regional and local trends in air pollution can provide essential information for the evidence base that is key in informing and monitoring future policies. There have been major advances in methods that expand the knowledge base about impacts of air pollution on health, from evidence on the health effects 26 , modelling levels of air pollution 1 , 11 and quantification of health impacts that can be used to monitor and report on progress towards the air pollution-related indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 3.9.1 (mortality rate attributed to household and ambient air pollution); SDG 7.1.2 (proportion of population with primary reliance on clean fuels and technology); and SDG 11.6.2 (annual mean levels of fine particulate matter (e.g., PM 2.5 and PM 10 ) in cities (population weighted)) 1 . There is a continuing need for further research, collaboration and sharing of good practice between scientists and international organisations, for example the WHO and the World Meteorological Organization, to improve modelling of global air pollution and the assessment of its impact on health. This will include developing models that address specific questions, including for example the effects of transboundary air pollution and desert dust, and to produce tools that provide policy makers with the ability to assess the effects of interventions and to accurately predict the potential effects of proposed policies.

Globally, the population exposed to PM 2.5 levels above the current WHO AQG (annual average of 10 μg/m 3 ) has fallen from 94.2% in 2010 to 90.0% in 2016, driven largely by decreases in North America and Europe (from 71.0% in 2010 to 48.6% in 2016). However, no such improvements are seen in other regions where the proportion has remained virtually constant and extremely high (e.g., greater than 99% in Central, Southern, Eastern and South-Eastern Asia Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) regions. See Supplementary Information for more details).

The problem, and the need for solutions, is not confined to cities: across much of the world the vast majority of people living in rural areas are also exposed to levels above the guidelines. Although there are differences when considering urban and rural areas in North America and Europe, in the vast majority of the world populations living in both urban and rural areas are exposed to levels that are above the AQGs. However, in other regions the story is very different (see Supplementary Information Fig. 7.1 and Supplementary Information Sections 7 and 8), for example population-weighted concentrations in rural areas in the Central and Southern Asia (55.5 μg/m 3 ), Sub-Saharan Africa (39.1 μg/m 3 ), Western Asia and Northern Africa (42.7 μg/m 3 ) and Eastern Asia and South-Eastern Asia (34.3 μg/m 3 ) regions (in 2016) were all considerably above the AQG. From 2010 to 2016 population-weighted concentrations in rural areas in the Central and Southern Asia region rose by approximately 11% (from 49.8 to 55.5 μg/m 3 ; see Supplementary Information Fig. 7.1 and Supplementary Information Sections 7 and 8). This is largely driven by large rural populations in India where 67.2% of the population live in rural areas 27 . Addressing air pollution in both rural and urban settings should therefore be a key priority in effectively reducing the burden of disease associated with air pollution.

Attempts to mitigate the effects of air pollution have varied according to its source and local conditions, but in all cases cooperation across sectors and at different levels, urban, regional, national and international, is crucial 28 . Policies and investments supporting affordable and sustainable access to clean energy, cleaner transport and power generation, as well as energy-efficient housing and municipal waste management can reduce key sources of outdoor air pollution. Interventions would not only improve health but also reduce climate pollutants and serve as a catalyst for local economic development and the promotion of healthy lifestyles.

Assessment of trends in global air pollution requires comprehensive information on concentrations over time for every country. This information is primarily based on ground monitoring (GM) from 9690 monitoring locations around the world from the WHO cities database for 2010–2016. However, there are regions in this may be limited if not completely unavailable, particularly for earlier years (see Supplementary Information). Even in countries where GM networks are well established, there will still be gaps in spatial coverage and missing data over time. The Data Integration Model for Air Quality (DIMAQ) supplements GM with information from other sources including estimates of PM2.5 from satellite retrievals and chemical transport models, population estimates and topography (e.g., elevation). Specifically, satellite-based estimates that combine aerosol optical depth retrievals with information from the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model 29 were used, together with estimates of sulfate, nitrate, ammonium, organic carbon and mineral dust 30 .

The most recent release of the WHO ambient air quality database, for the first time, contains data from GM for multiple years, where available The version of DIMAQ used here builds on the original version 11 , 30 by allowing data from multiple years to be modelled simultaneously, with the relationship between GMs and satellite-based estimates allowed to vary (smoothly) over time. The result is a comprehensive set of high-resolution (10 km × 10 km) estimates of PM2.5 for each year (2010–2016) for every country.

In order to produce population-weighted concentrations, a comprehensive set of population data on a high-resolution grid (Gridded Population of the World (GPW v4) database 31 ) was combined with estimates from DIMAQ. In addition, the Global Human Settlement Layer 32 was used to define areas as either urban, sub-urban or rural (based on land-use, derived from satellite images, and population estimates). A further dichotomous classification of whether grid-cells within a particular country were urban or rural (allocating sub-urban as either urban or rural) was based on providing the best alignment (at the country-level) to the estimates of urban-rural populations produced by the United Nations 27 .

It is noted that the estimates from DIMAQ used in this article may differ slightly from those used in the WHO estimates of the global burden of disease associated with ambient air pollution 1 , and the associated estimates of air pollution related SDG indicators, due to recent updates in the database and further quality assurance procedures.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the WHO Data Integration Task Force, a multi-disciplinary group of experts established as part of the recommendations from the first meeting of the WHO Global Platform for Air Quality, Geneva, January 2014. The Task Force developed the Data Integration Model for Air Quality and consists of the first author, Michael Brauer, Aaron van Donkelaar, Rick Burnett, Howard H. Chang, Aaron Cohen, Rita Van Dingenen, Yang Liu, Randall Martin, Lance A. Waller, Jason West, James V. Zidek and Annette Pruss-Ustun. The authors would like to give particular thanks to Michael Brauer who provided specialist expertise, together with data on ground measurements, and Aaron van Donkelaar and the Atmospheric Composition Analysis Group at Dalhousie University for providing estimates from satellite remote sensing. The authors would also like to thank Dan Simpson for technical expertise on implementing extensions to DIMAQ. Matthew L Thomas is supported by a scholarship from the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistical Applied Mathematics at Bath (SAMBa), under the project EP/L015684/1. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and they do not necessarily represent the views, decisions or policies to institutions with which they are affiliated.

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GS, PM, and SG conceived the project and led the writing of the manuscript. MLT and GR performed the data analysis. GS and MLT developed the statistical model used to produce the estimates. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to G. Shaddick .

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Shaddick, G., Thomas, M.L., Mudu, P. et al. Half the world’s population are exposed to increasing air pollution. npj Clim Atmos Sci 3 , 23 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-020-0124-2

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Public Health and Overpopulation: The United Nations Takes Action

With the world’s population rising faster than ever before, will our population growth outpace our resource reserves? How can the dangerous effects of overpopulation be managed without diminishing the major improvements in our quality of life that come about thanks to population growth?

The UN projects that over half of the Earth’s population growth in the next three decades will occur in the continent of Africa. This is due to the fact that, from 2010 to 2015, Africa’s population grew at a rate of 2.55 percent annually, with the continent still maintaining the highest pace of population growth among other continents. The UN predicts that, behind Africa, Asia will be the second greatest donor to future international population growth, with an expected addition of approximately one billion people by 2050. In contrast, within every European nation, fertility rates are currently below the population replacement level, which is approximately two children per woman. In most of Europe, fertility rates have remained beneath replacement level for decades. The global population grew fourfold in the past 100 years, so what impact could increased population growth have in the future? Will there be mass-migration? Overcrowding in already densely populated or resource-rich areas? Poor living conditions and sanitation similar to Industrial Revolution era slums?

The global population is currently rising at a steady rate. The number of humans existing on Earth has never been as high as it is now. In 1800, Earth had approximately 1 billion inhabitants, which rose to 2.3 billion in 1940, then 3.7 billion in 1970, and approximately 7.5 billion today. In the last five decades, Earth has experienced an extreme population boom. This phenomenon is known as overpopulation, where the condition in which the amount of humans currently existing on Earth outstrips future resource availability and earth’s carrying capacity. Throughout human history, birth and death rates have always counterbalanced each other, which ensured that Earth had a maintainable population growth level. However, in the 1960s, the global population increased at an unparalleled rate. This brought about a variety of apocalyptic predictions, most prominently, a revival of the Malthusian trap panic.

Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 novel, The Population Bomb , eerily echoes Thomas R. Malthus’s landmark 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population . Ehrlich’s novel proposes theories regarding potential outcomes for when agricultural growth does not keep pace with population growth. Ultimately his theories say that the world’s food supply will inevitably become inadequate for feeding the general population, whose numbers would continue to swell until famine, disease epidemics, war, or other calamities took root. These Malthusian predictions about out-of-control population growth have resulted in a variety of detrimental global impacts, particularly the emergence of extreme reproductive control measures, which have taken center stage on an international scale. Today, despite the fact that population scientists mostly agree that Malthus’s forecasts were overblown, the lingering prevalence of these fears have contributed to millions of forced sterilizations in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh and India, as well as China’s two-child policy . Overall, this has left many wondering whether extreme population growth projections are legitimate or merely groundless panic perpetuated by alarmists.

The Demographic Transition

In reality, rising birth rates and population booms are components of a four-step process called the demographic transition, which the Earth is currently undergoing. Most developed nations have already made this transition, but other countries are currently experiencing this change. In the 1700s, the entire world was undergoing the first stage of the demographic transition. During this time, the continent of Europe was in even poorer condition than the modern-day definition of a developing region, and was afflicted with inferior public health, sustenance, and medical facilities. Birth rates were higher; however, death rates were also higher. For this reason, population growth remained largely stagnant.

Statistically, in the 1700s, women birthed four to six children. However, on average, only two survived to adulthood. When the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the mid-18th century, the Earth experienced the most significant shift in human lifestyles since the Agricultural Revolution. The Industrial Revolution altered every aspect of society, and fostered a greater sense of global interconnectedness. For example, many peasants became factory workers, manufactured products became widely available due to mass production, and countless scientific advancements improved existing methods of transportation, communication, and medicine.

Gradually, this economic development created a middle class and, after the work of union activists, ultimately raised the standard of living and health care for the impoverished labor demographic. Thus began the second transition stage. The increased availability of better foodstuffs, sanitation, and medicine directly contributed to lower death rates, causing a population explosion that doubled Great Britain’s population from 1750 to 1850. In the past, families tended to have more children because not all were expected to survive, but when child mortality rates decreased, the third transition stage was launched. This stage involves reduced conception rates and slowing population growth. Ultimately, a balance was established, with fewer deaths and births, creating a stable population growth rate and signifying the attainment of the fourth and final stage of the demographic transition.

Even as birth rates have decreased dramatically, Earth’s population is still rising at an alarming rate because the humans conceived during the population boom of the 1970s and 1980s are currently having more children; however, the current average number of children per family remains two and a half, while it was five during the late 1970s. As this generation ages and its fertility diminishes, the rate of population growth will likely continue to decrease in every nation. Most of the world’s countries have reached the fourth stage of the demographic transition. In approximately 80 years, developed countries will experience a reduction in fertility from over six children to fewer than three children. Malaysia and South Africa reached this point in 34 years, Bangladesh in 20 years,  and Iran in 10 years. If developing countries are afforded more support, they will reach this point much faster.

Overall, most scientists postulate that human population growth will eventually come to an end, and the UN predicts that Earth’s population will not exceed twelve billion. Some of the major causes of population growth are reduced infant mortality rates, increased lifespans, higher fertility rates, advances in science and technology, and improved access to proper medical care. With the UN’s continued assistance, concurrent with overpopulation, the development level of the global community will increase, and the number of people living in poverty will decrease. Nonetheless, an ever-expanding human population is an immense social and economic challenge that necessitates the alignment of different national interests, especially with regards to reproductive rights, resource availability, and environmental concerns.

The United Nations Takes Action

In 1969, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) was established in order to lead the UN in implementing population programs fundamentally based on the notion of family planning, or the “human right of individuals and couples to freely determine the size of their families” without governmental interference or legislation. In 1994, at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, the designated objectives of the UNFPA were determined in greater depth. It was decided that the UNFPA would specifically focus on the gender and human rights elements of population issues; consequently, the UN Population Fund was granted the lead role in aiding nations in fulfilling the Conference’s Programme of Action.

The three most significant sections of the UN Population Fund mandate are “Reproductive Health,” “Gender Equality,” and “Population and Development.” The United Nations Population Division (UNPD) works to confront the interconnected global issues posed by population growth, which is primarily fueled by rising fertility rates, increased longevity, and greater international migration. The UN produces the official demographic approximations and predictions for every country and all regions of the world. The UNFPA specifically addresses global population by compiling data and statistics regarding migration, fertility, marriage, regional development, urbanization, world population projections, and national population policies.

In November 2012, the UNFPA declared family planning a global human right; however, approximately 12 percent of 15 to 49-year-old women internationally are not afforded access to family planning. This is considered an egregious modern-day human rights infringement. The UNFPA aids various UN bodies like the Commission on Population and Development, and endorses the implementation of the Programme of Action undertaken by the International Conference on Population and Development (IPCD) in 1994. The UNFPA has been successful in urging international cooperation on the issue of securing family planning as a human right, pushing the UN to hold three conferences concerning the issue of population, along with two special sessions of the General Assembly and a summit in 2019 .

The Way Forward

Ultimately, apocalyptic population growth fears are overblown, and as such, draconian population control regulations are unnecessary. We have witnessed progress on an international scale in this area, perhaps most notably with China revoking its infamous, longstanding one-child policy just seven years ago. However, a broader global focus on guaranteeing family planning as a human right remains essential. In the words of economist Julian Simon, “Whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster.” Since Ehrlich’s initial fear-mongering regarding an overpopulation-​induced Armageddon, the planet’s population has more than doubled . However, annually, famine deaths have dropped by millions. Today’s famines are war-induced, not caused by natural resource consumption. As production rose, prices fell and calorie consumption increased, which decreased malnutrition worldwide. In Simon’s words, human ingenuity is the “ ultimate resource .” Therefore, the enactment of heavy-handed population-​control regulations is not only abhorrent, but is also irrational and unsupported by scientific evidence.

Sophia Scott

Sophia Scott is a staff writer for the Harvard International Review. She is interested in global health & health equity, along with the intersections between science and policy.

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• Eur J Popul
• v.35(2); 2019 May

The Effect of Population Growth on the Environment: Evidence from European Regions

Hannes weber.

1 Department of Sociology, University of Mannheim, A5, 6, 68159 Mannheim, Germany

Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba

2 Department of International Studies, Rhodes College, 2000 North Parkway, Memphis, TN 38112 USA

There is a long-standing dispute on the extent to which population growth causes environmental degradation. Most studies on this link have so far analyzed cross-country data, finding contradictory results. However, these country-level analyses suffer from the high level of dissimilarity between world regions and strong collinearity of population growth, income, and other factors. We argue that regional-level analyses can provide more robust evidence, isolating the population effect from national particularities such as policies or culture. We compile a dataset of 1062 regions within 22 European countries and analyze the effect from population growth on carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions and urban land use change between 1990 and 2006. Data are analyzed using panel regressions, spatial econometric models, and propensity score matching where regions with high population growth are matched to otherwise highly similar regions exhibiting significantly less growth. We find a considerable effect from regional population growth on carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions and urban land use increase in Western Europe. By contrast, in the new member states in the East, other factors appear more important.

Introduction

Somewhere around 1990, the mood in Europe turned against limiting population growth. By the turn of the millennium, the dominant narrative had shifted from worries over “too many people” to worries over “too few people,” highlighting the global divergence between negative European population trends and those of less developed states still experiencing significant growth. In 1983, a majority of 52% of Italians considered the recent dramatic drop in the total fertility rate to 1.4 children per women in their country to be “a good thing” (Palomba et al. 1998 ). Only 15% thought the Italian population should increase, while a large majority preferred either a decreasing (29%) or a stationary population (52%) (see ibid.). By 1995, this picture had changed considerably. According to Eurobarometer survey data, 40% of Italians now wanted their nation to grow, with less than 20% supporting a population decline (European Commission 1995 ). In the year 2000, according to the second wave of the “Population Policy Acceptance Study,” only 8% of the respondents in 12 European countries preferred their respective populations to decrease, compared to 49% who favored an increase (Höhn et al. 2008 ). Rapid and intense population aging—and in many cases, shrinking—is partly responsible for this shift in European viewpoints on optimal population trends. Viewed in the context of Europe’s environmental plans, however, desires for population increase might contradict those states’ ambitious climate goals.

Primarily because of concerns over economic strains, the EU is scrambling to institute policies that soften the economic effects of population aging and decline on the size of the workforce (European Commission 2015 ). Yet, by 2020 the EU aims to reduce CO 2 emissions by 20% and achieve no new net urban land by 2050 (European Commission 2011 ). Can these population and environmental goals exist side by side? Has fear of “overpopulation” damaging the environment rightly been dismissed in Europe? To answer these questions we estimate the effect of population growth on two dimensions of environmental degradation in Europe, greenhouse gas (CO 2 ) emissions and urban land use, for 1062 European NUTS-3 regions. 1 We analyze CO 2 emissions and urban growth as outcomes in this paper since these factors are recognized as drivers of adverse climate change by both environmental research and EU policies. CO 2 emissions directly affect world climate, while urban growth can have (among other consequences) an additional effect on air pollution and carbon stock in soil and vegetation by soil sealing and increased vehicular traffic (see, e.g., De Ridder et al. 2008 ; Schulp et al. 2008 ).

Our results demonstrate that net population growth in Europe will undermine ambitious climate goals. While some cities and regions have been able to experience high or medium population growth and still reduce emissions, particularly in Western Europe, many regions have not. Reducing emissions of a growing population requires significant planning and investment. Contemporary population policies within EU member states are usually concerned with stimulating growth. Possible benefits for the environment accompanying low or negative population growth are rarely discussed in official documents (see, e.g., European Commission 2014 ).

In the European Union, fertility rates have been at or below replacement level for two or more decades in most countries and projections by the United Nations and others routinely expect Europe to shrink—the UN ( 2015 ) estimates Europe to lose 32,000 people by 2050. By contrast, Bijak et al. ( 2007 ) project the EU-27’s population to remain constant by 2052 in their “base” scenario, while higher immigration rates could lead to an increase to 563 million people by mid-century, up from 504 million in 2015 and 482 million in 2000. Migration is incredibly difficult to predict, but we do know that migrants will conform to the general consumption behavior of where they move to, rather than retaining consumption patterns from where they came. And if we consider density instead of just total population, “depopulation” is not imminent for the EU. After all, with around 116 people per km 2 , the EU’s population density is more than twice the world’s average and by far greater than the USA’s (35/km 2 ), Africa’s (36/km 2 ) and also Asia’s (87/km 2 ). Despite a lower per capita consumption of natural resources than the USA, Canada, or Australia, densely populated European countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, or Germany have a high ecological footprint, i.e., they consume a multitude of renewable resources compared to what their lands produce (Wackernagel and Rees 1996 ).

Theoretical Accounts on the Population–Environment Link

The relation between population and environmental degradation is often considered straightforward: More people should have a greater impact on the environment, if all other factors (such as per capita consumption) remain unchanged. As Laurie Mazur ( 2012 , p. 2) writes, “if we increase by 30% by 2050, we must swiftly reduce our collective impact by a third just to maintain the disastrous status quo.” The formal expression of this idea is the famous IPAT decomposition (Holdren and Ehrlich 1974 ), where humans’ environmental impact ( I ) is conceived to be a product of population size ( P ), per capita affluence ( A ), and technology ( T ) per unit of affluence. IPAT is still frequently referred to in the scientific debate, in particular by critics of population–environment (P–E) studies (e.g., Angus and Butler 2011 ). However, researchers in this field have long acknowledged the limits of IPAT for empirical research. In many applications, T is simply a ratio of I and A , and thus, the relative impact of population growth cannot be empirically assessed (see, e.g., York et al. 2003 ). In addition, in its simplest form, IPAT neglects possible interactions between the right-hand side variables.

Problems with IPAT are less acute in its stochastic version known as STIRPAT (Dietz and Rosa 1997 ) which allows for over- or underproportional weights of the factors in the equation determined by empirical data. Unobserved variables or interactions lead to a large error term which informs the researcher that the model only partly captures what is going on in the real world. There are many mechanisms of environmental degradation that do not involve population size or growth (see, e.g., de Sherbinin et al. 2007 for an overview). In the following, we review theoretical arguments on the link between population and the two outcomes of interest in this paper: urban land use change and CO 2 emissions.

With regard to urban growth, Lambin et al. ( 2003 , p. 224) list five “high-level causes” of land use change, only one of which specifically involves population growth. The other causal pathways focus on, among other factors, changing economic opportunities, policy interventions, and cultural change. In recent decades, cities such as Liverpool (the UK) or Leipzig (Germany) have experienced urban sprawl during periods of population decline (Couch et al. 2005 ). Many mechanisms driving urbanization of previously undeveloped land exist in the absence of population growth: Investors seek to build out-of-center retail facilities on cheaper building sites, and many families prefer detached houses in the “green” periphery (ibid.). This is particularly the case if income levels rise and households can afford larger homes (Patacchini et al. 2009 ). Commuting costs and public transport infrastructure in and around cities are also obvious determinants of how and where urban growth occurs (ibid.). Historical trajectories, local policies, and cultural preferences affect how compact or dispersed residential areas are built. For instance, European cities such as Barcelona are often contrasted against North American cities with a comparable population size, but a much larger urban area (e.g., Catalán et al. 2008 ). As an example of a more complex mechanism, urban growth into formerly suburban or rural areas can depend on whether socially deprived areas with high crime rates are more prominent in city centers (as is typical for North America) or in suburbs (as in many European cities, see Patacchini et al. 2009 ). Nevertheless, urban growth should ceteris paribus be stronger in the case of rapid population growth as compared with a stagnant population scenario. More people lead to a greater demand for accommodations and traffic—the question is whether this direct effect is empirically suppressed by other mechanisms as outlined above. Research mostly finds that population growth fosters urban land cover change, but there are geographical differences. In their meta-analysis, Seto et al. ( 2011 ) find that urban land expansion in India and Africa is mainly driven by population growth, while in China, North America, and Europe the main factor is GDP growth.

With regard to CO 2 emissions, there are also conflicting expectations in the literature. In general, few seem to doubt that a causal effect from human activity on the level of CO 2 emissions exists, mostly as a result of fossil energy combustion for purposes such as residential heating or transportation (e.g., de Sherbinin et al. 2007 ). Even though there are considerable differences in per capita consumption of energy, more humans ceteris paribus emit more CO 2 . As O’Neill et al. ( 2012 , p. 159) emphasize, if all other determinants of emissions and all relevant causal pathways are accounted for in a statistical model, “population can only act as a scale factor and its elasticity should therefore be 1.” However, the indirect effect of population growth via interactions and feedbacks with other variables remains often unclear. For instance, Simon ( 1993 , 1994 ) famously assumed that while population growth might create shortages of resources, rising prices for goods made with those resources will motivate technological innovations (which are more likely to occur in large populations) and therefore, in the long run, “more people equals (…) a healthier environment” (Simon 1994 , p. 22). Similar to the view put forward by Boserup ( 1965 ), technology is seen as endogenous to population growth (and positively affected by it). On the other hand, recent research suggests that more efficient technologies are paradoxically accompanied by an increase in energy consumption and thus emissions rise despite technological progress (York and McGee 2016 ). Empirically, most research finds that population growth is positively associated with CO 2 emissions increase (Bongaarts 1992 ; MacKellar et al. 1995 ; Dietz and Rosa 1997 ; Shi 2003 ; York et al. 2003 ; O’Neill et al. 2012 ; Liddle 2013 ). Against this body of research, critics point out that the bivariate correlation between population growth and emissions growth on the level of countries is zero or even negative (Satterthwaite 2009 ): Many countries marked by rapid population growth have low levels and low growth rates in emissions, and vice versa. This perspective suggests that differences in consumption levels caused by economic inequality, rather than population size or growth, are responsible for CO 2 emissions increase.

The biggest theoretical challenges to P–E research arguably lie in the insufficient knowledge about interactions and feedbacks between population, environment, and other factors. Most notably, population growth can interact with affluence. It is well established that fertility rates vary with factors such as socioeconomic modernity (e.g., Lutz and Qiang 2002 ), especially education (Schultz 1993 ), and human capital (Becker et al. 1990 ). According to the theory of demographic transition (Caldwell 1976 ; Dyson 2010 ), lower infant and child mortality rates (offset by higher affluence levels) are the primary cause of fertility decline (because humans have fewer children if they can expect more of them to survive). Due to a delay between the onsets of mortality and fertility decline, a population grows rapidly for a certain period and then stabilizes at a higher level. After fertility levels have dropped, a country can enjoy the “demographic dividend” (Bloom et al. 2003 ), as many young adults enter the workforce, but have fewer children to take care of. This change in age structure can also be accompanied by changing aspirations and preferences for accommodation (e.g., larger living space) and consumption, as has happened, for instance, in China in recent decades (Zhu and Peng 2012 ). Thus, in terms of IPAT, a decrease in P (or delta P) can cause an increase in A (and vice versa) and therefore halting population growth could possibly result in more environmental degradation rather than less.

In sum, most scholars agree that population size and growth have a direct effect on urban land cover and CO 2 emissions if all other factors are held constant. However, some authors argue that indirect effects—e.g., interactions and feedback processes with income or technology—typically compensate or even reverse the direct effect from population over time. We cannot solve this controversy in this paper. Instead, our research objective is to assess the total effect (i.e., direct and indirect effects) from population growth on the environment in Europe. The goal is to come to reasonable assumptions about what would happen if Europe’s population grew more or less rapidly. As described above, we use two operationalizations for environmental degradation: urban land use growth and CO 2 emissions.

Methodological Issues and Research Design

Contemporary P–E studies typically follow one of three types of approaches. The first approach focuses on an in-depth understanding of the causal pathway from P to E, including interactions and feedback with other factors. This approach often involves qualitative research, e.g., in the form of case studies of a particular country or region (e.g., Lutz et al. 2002 ; Gorrenflo et al. 2011 ). These studies can provide valuable insight for quantitative research with regard to how to model these direct and indirect effects. Yet, it is often difficult to generalize these qualitative findings on how population, policies, culture, and the economy interact in a specific setting to other countries or regions. The second approach quantitatively analyzes large (mostly cross-country) datasets with various statistical methods (for recent reviews see Hummel et al. 2013 ; Liddle 2014 ). These include linear regressions (Shi 2003 ; York et al. 2003 ) or more advanced econometric techniques for the analysis of panel data (Liddle 2013 ). They seek to attain generalizable knowledge of how P and E are usually correlated. Yet, different model specifications (with regard to how to deal with endogeneity or interaction effects) have produced different results in the past. Finally, a third approach uses simulations to arrive at different scenarios and predictions for future trends under varying assumptions. Simulations can either be done with macro-level models (e.g., Bongaarts 1992 ; O’Neill et al. 2010 ) or with bottom-up agent-based simulations, where household decisions, policy reactions, and feedback processes are modeled to study the emergent macro-level outcome (e.g., An et al. 2005 ). The validity of these predictions depends on how well the set of assumptions calibrating the simulations reflects reality, and they are commonly critiqued for excluding relevant variables and oversimplifying with regard to indirect effects and interactions. For instance, O’Neill et al. ( 2010 ) do not explicitly model any feedback effects from affluence or environment on population growth, which is why Angus and Butler ( 2011 ) refer to their models as “Malthus in, Malthus out.”

One of the biggest methodological problems in global cross-country research is the high level of collinearity usually found for many socioeconomic, political, and other variables (Schrodt 2014 ). Many comparative studies in P–E research suffer from the dissimilarity of the observed cases with regard to nearly anything that might affect population, environment, or both. For instance, emission levels have increased considerably in developed countries such as France over the past century, whereas this increase has been only modest in developing countries such as Ethiopia. The opposite is true for population growth. Thus, the observed correlation between population growth and emissions change is negative, as pointed out by Satterthwaite ( 2009 ) and others. However, this can hardly lead to the conclusion that France’s low population growth was causally responsible for the increase in emissions and a much higher population growth rate would have benefitted the environment. This is because France and Ethiopia also differ with regard to previous levels of population density and state of the environment as well as many other economic, technological, and other factors. A better approach could be to match France to a similar country that has experienced notably higher (or lower) rates of population growth and compare emission levels between the two countries. This could certainly provide a better foundation for a counterfactual scenario to determine what would happen if France’s population grew more or less rapidly. There might just not be many countries that meet the requirements for such a design to provide us with a sample sufficiently large to conduct quantitative analyses.

We argue that a good way to find appropriate cases is to examine the sub-national level (as in, e.g., Cramer 2002 ). Regions within one country are affected by the same national policies and are usually highly similar with regard to many potentially relevant factors such as climate, culture, or technological standards. For instance, Siedentop and Fina ( 2012 ) find that country-specific drivers of urban land use are important beyond demographic and economic variables; this distinction cannot be made in global country-level analyses. We avoid a large number of potential fallacies if we compare population growth and environmental trends in two French regions as opposed to comparing France to Ethiopia.

It might seem counterintuitive to select contemporary Europe as the location to examine the effects of population growth. As is well known, Europe is the world region with by far the lowest growth rate. Empirical studies usually find a much stronger detrimental population effect on the environment on other continents (e.g., Seto et al. 2011 ; Liddle 2013 ). However, net population growth—whether through natural increase or migration—in higher-income European areas potentially has greater detrimental effects on the environment than does growth in a lower-income area because the average European inhabitant has such high consumption. Additionally, from a methodological perspective, European regions provide a good sample to study the effect of population change on greenhouse gas emissions and urban land use because population is growing in some European regions, while in others is stationary or declining. Europe also includes considerable variation with regard to changes in emissions and land use. At the same time, the broader demographic, socioeconomic, and political context is held constant to some extent—our sample includes only upper-middle-income countries so we can move beyond emphasis on consumption patterns that dominate discussions of population and environment at the global level, and can isolate population growth to see if it is still a relevant issue for environmental discussions in developed states. By contrast, previous studies have often compared countries at various stages of the demographic transition that are embedded in different socioeconomic and political contexts. This wide sample poses some serious methodological issues as well as a risk of misinterpreting the data. By analyzing sub-national regions, we can also achieve greater statistical power through a larger sample size.

All European countries have already completed the demographic transition, and fertility rates are at or below replacement level. Variation in population growth is therefore not rooted in different levels of human development or broad cultural values, factors that could also affect the environment. Even differences in fertility rates between urban and rural regions, which were prominent until the mid-twentieth century, have almost disappeared. For instance, in 1960, the total fertility rate (TFR) in Switzerland was below 2 in urban areas such as Geneva compared with 3.5 or more children per woman in several rural cantons; today in all cantons the TFR falls somewhere between 1.2 and 1.7 (Basten et al. 2012 ). Population growth in Europe today mainly depends on internal and external migration. Net migration into a region partly varies with economic factors, such as employment opportunities, as in, say, south–north movements within Italy. On the other hand, international migration, especially, is path dependent and networks often lead to spatial variation in inflows long after the original cause of the first migration wave is gone (see, e.g., Mayda 2010 ). Consider, for instance, that many immigrants in Europe came as workers in the 1960s and 1970s and clustered into industrial areas. Later, new immigrants continued to prefer these cities over other destinations because family members or other co-ethnics already live there, despite the decline in the heavy industry in cities such as Lille (France), Duisburg (Germany), or Malmö (Sweden), where employment or income levels are similar or even worse compared with other regions hosting fewer immigrants. It also seems reasonable to assume that migrants do not target specific cities or regions primarily due to their environmental quality. Thus, we can argue that population growth in European regions is at least partly exogenous to the other variables in the equation and therefore issues of endogeneity or unobserved interactions should be much smaller compared with global cross-country analyses.

Data and Statistical Models

Our dataset encompasses 1062 NUTS-3 regions within 22 countries where data were available for our main variables of interest. 2 All countries are EU member states. We analyze changes between two time points with regard to urban growth and CO 2 emissions. Data for urban growth come from the CORINE Land Cover (CLC) project, a satellite-based classification of land surface by the European Environmental Agency ( 2007 ), distributed by the European Spatial Planning Observation Network (ESPON 2012 ). We use the first and the third releases of CLC with reference years 1990 and 2006, respectively, and calculate the change in the proportion of land in a NUTS-3 region that is classified as “artificial surfaces” (CLC-1), i.e., urban fabric, industrial areas, transport, etc., between these years. For greenhouse gas emissions we use data from the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), aggregated for European NUTS regions as part of the “Greener Economy” project by ESPON ( 2014 ). The dataset contains estimates for total CO 2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion (excluding emissions from organic carbon, large-scale biomass burning, aviation, and shipping, as these cannot be directly attributed to human activity within the region) for the years 2000 and 2008. Average annual population growth within the same time period is calculated using data from Eurostat ( 2015a ). 3 We include regional data for per capita GDP and GDP growth (from Eurostat 2015b ) in our models. A list of all variables with descriptive statistics is given in “ Appendix .”

How are trends in population growth, emissions, and urban land use connected to one another? In a first step, we use the total sample of regions. We specify a dynamic model where changes in environmental impact Δ y i (representing either urban land use or CO 2 emissions) in region i = 1, …, N are regressed on their level at the time of the previous observation ( y i , t - 1 ). 4 Using changes rather than levels in the dependent variable reduces the problem of non-stationarity that likely exists when analyzing time-series data of autoregressive phenomena such as land use cover. This is relevant because non-stationary processes imply the risk of finding spurious correlations (Granger and Newbold 1974 ). In addition, the lagged dependent variable (LDV) y i , t - 1 captures the unobserved time-constant causes that led to differences between regions in the first place and also controls for a “Matthew effect.” (Urban land cover change occurs more often in areas that are already highly urbanized.) Note that observations are not yearly, but refer to first and last years of the observed period (thus T = 2) due to data availability. For both population ( p ) and per capita GDP ( a ), we include lagged level as well as change over the observed time period. Total population and per capita GDP are log-transformed to account for skewed distributions. A squared term of GDP to test for an environmental Kuznets curve (see, e.g., Carson 2010 ) was tested, but dropped from the final models since there was no evidence for such a pattern in Europe. As an additional control, we include a dummy for coastal location ( c ) of a region. The regression parameters are denoted by β 0 to β 6 , while ε i is the regional-level error term. Model 1 reports an ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation based on the following equation:

In a second model, we consider spatial autocorrelation: Regions are likely influenced by neighboring areas because of, e.g., commuter networks between regions, leading to a correlation in error terms among nearby regions. For instance, we can expect a rural region close to a city to develop differently in terms of urban land change and CO 2 emissions compared to an otherwise similar but remote rural region. These expectations are in line with previous research showing that, e.g., urban expansion is affected by surrounding land use (Huang et al. 2009 ). In our data, a test for spatial autocorrelation reveals significant amounts of spatial interdependence: Moran’s I is .31 for urban land use change and .46 for CO 2 emissions change in our sample. Neighboring regions are defined by contiguity here, and a binary weight matrix is applied, where the value is 1 if regions are contiguous and 0 otherwise. We estimate a spatial lag model (see Ward and Gleditsch 2008 ; LeSage and Pace 2009 ), where a spatially lagged dependent variable is added to the model. In Eq. ( 2 ), the term W y denotes the spatially lagged dependent variable together with weight matrix W .

As a robustness test, we also use a distance-based concept of neighborhood since this might better capture some drivers of spatial dependence in our dependent variables (such as commuting flows). In addition to the spatial lag model, we also estimate a spatial error model and a spatial lag model where the independent variables are lagged as well. These models can be found in “ Appendix .”

Next, we add a country-specific error term α j which is allowed to correlate with the other predictors (equivalent to a set of M-1 dummy variables for country j = 1, …, M ). 5 These country fixed effects control for unobserved country-specific influences such as national environmental policies. The equation for Model 3 can accordingly be written as:

Since regions in formerly communist Central-Eastern European countries may be more similar to each other than to Western European regions, we run the same analysis as in Model 3 separately in subsamples of only Western (Model 4) and only Eastern (Model 5) regions. We used base R for OLS regressions (R Core Team 2013 ) and the spdep package (Bivand and Piras 2015 ) for spatial models.

Finally, we preprocess the data using different matching algorithms (see, e.g., Ho et al. 2007 ). The idea is that for every region with high population growth, we find a region with a considerably lower growth rate, but otherwise highly similar characteristics. This type of “most similar case” design results in a more balanced sample and arguably gets us as close to identifying the population growth effect as it can get with this quasi-experimental study design. Around 10% of all regions ( N = 96) in the sample have experienced population growth rates of 1% or more per year on average during the study period. These regions represent the “treatment” group. As reported below, this “treatment” is only weakly correlated with other predictor variables in the data and therefore issues of endogeneity appear to be of low salience. The control group consists of regions with less than 0.5% growth per year ( N = 815). This cutoff value is chosen arbitrarily, though the results do not change significantly if we use a somewhat different threshold. We perform one-to-one nearest neighbor matching with a propensity score matching algorithm (Ho et al. 2007 ). 6

The result leaves us with a sample of 96 high-growth and 96 most similar low-growth regions. We then compare the distributions of urban growth and change in CO 2 emissions between “treatment” and control cases. To deal with missing values we used multiple imputation, creating ten multiply imputed datasets with Amelia II software (Honaker et al. 2011 ). Matching and model estimation are performed in each of the datasets, and the results are averaged with Rubin’s ( 1987 ) rules. (Note that 1029 out of 1062 cases have complete information, so missingness is not a major issue in our data.) An acceptable balance between the distributions of the variables in the two groups can be achieved with the algorithm. In the matched dataset for urban growth, both the high and the low population growth groups consist of predominantly Western European regions (93 vs. 91%), around half of them with a coastline (compared with 22% in the total sample). Per capita GDP averages at 27,500 Euros in the treatment group and 27,300 Euros in the control group (compared with 23,000 Euros in the total sample). Mean GDP growth rates are 4.0% over the observed period of time in both groups; only in terms of initial population size (652,000 vs. 548,000) the average values differ somewhat. For CO 2 emissions, balance is equally acceptable. Initial level of emissions (4400 tons vs. 4200 tons), per capita GDP (27,500 Euros vs. 27,600 Euros), GDP growth (4.0 vs. 4.1%), coastal location (49 vs. 52%), and location in Western Europe (93 vs. 91%) are very similar among the high and the low population growth groups. Again, initial population size (652,000 vs. 571,000) slightly differs. Some examples from the match tables: Madrid, Spain (high population growth), was matched with Rome, Italy (low population growth). The Irish South-East (high growth) was paired with South Jylland, Denmark (low growth). Dutch city of Utrecht (high growth) was matched with Salzburg, Austria (low growth), while the fast-growing Algarve in southern Portugal was paired with French department of Yvelines, where population growth was low.

Figures  1 , ​ ,2, 2 , and ​ and3 3 show the regional variation in population growth, CO 2 emissions, and urban land use between the regions in our dataset. Population growth was highest in Spain and Ireland in the 2000s, as these two countries witnessed the largest increase in their immigrant populations (in percentage points), followed by Italy (see Fig.  1 ). For Germany and France, the 2000s was a decade of low net immigration, but France’s major urban agglomerations still increased. Many Central-Eastern European countries had a net population loss, although not all regions; several populations in metro areas around cities such as Budapest, Prague, or Poznan increased. Urban growth, as Fig.  2 shows, is clearly related to the level of urbanization that was already present in a region. Artificial land use increased strongest in the already highly densely populated regions in the Netherlands and West Germany, along the Spanish, Portuguese, and French coastlines and in their respective capital regions, around the Irish and Danish capitals, in the tourist hotspots of Tyrol and in the industrial centers of northern Italy and Polish Silesia and capital region. The amount of soil sealing (destruction of soil due to urbanization construction, such as buildings) of farmland, pasture, or forests was rather low in many rural regions, in the Baltics and Balkans, or in inland France and Spain, apart from their capitals. There are observable differences in CO 2 emissions between countries and regions, too (see Fig.  3 ). Emissions grew strongly in the Baltic countries and in many parts of Ireland, Spain, and Bulgaria. By contrast, Denmark, Germany, and the Czech Republic largely reduced the emission of CO 2 .

Population growth in 20 European countries, 2000–2008, average annual rate

Urban land use change in 20 European countries, 1990–2006

CO2 emissions change in 19 European countries, 2000–2008

Tables  1 and ​ and2 2 show the regression results using the full dataset with urban land change (Table  1 ) and CO 2 emissions change (Table  2 ) as the respective dependent variables. Table  1 confirms that population growth is positively correlated with urban growth. This effect holds when spatial autocorrelation (Model 2) and country-level fixed effects (Model 3) are taken into account, while the effect of GDP vanishes. When East and West are differentiated, a fairly strong positive effect for population growth is shown to exist in the West, while this effect is insignificant in the East. By contrast, urban growth is strongly determined by regional per capita GDP in the formerly communist countries, while affluence has no impact in the West.

Table 1

Predictors of urban growth as a percentage of total land use (logit-transformed) in 1062 European NUTS-3 regions between 1990 and 2006, all regions and by location in Eastern or Western Europe

Cells show unstandardized coefficients with standard errors in parentheses. * p  < .05 ** p  < .01 *** p  < .001

Table 2

Predictors of change in CO 2 emissions (in kilotons) in 1033 European NUTS-3 regions between 2000 and 2008, all regions and by location in Eastern or Western Europe

The pattern is similar for CO 2 emissions (see Table  2 ). One additional percentage point of annual population growth is associated with 2.5 additional kilotons CO 2 emitted between 2000 and 2008 in Western Europe. In the East, however, there is no significant correlation between population and emissions change. Rather, the interesting finding here is that the lagged value of CO 2 emissions is negatively related to its increase. This finding means emissions grow stronger in Eastern regions where the level has previously been low, indicating that these regions seem to “catch up” in terms of CO 2 emissions. These emissions are not related to economic activity, however, since the coefficient for GDP growth is negative in all models where country-specific differences are controlled for.

Our data lend some support for the argument that population growth in European regions is partly exogenous to other variables in question, where on the level of Western European regions, population growth between 2000 and 2008 is only weakly correlated with per capita GDP in 2000 ( r = .10) and even negatively with GDP growth ( r = − .19) for the observed period. Note, however, that in Eastern Europe, the correlation between regional per capita GDP in 2000 and population growth between 2000 and 2008 is considerably stronger ( r = .41) than in the West (while for GDP growth, the coefficient is also weak and negative (− .18)). This might indicate that in Eastern Europe, population growth is endogenous to wealth to some extent, probably as a result of intra-national (e.g., rural–urban) migration, as international migration only played a minor role in most Eastern countries during the period under study.

It is also instructive to compare the effect of per capita GDP between models with (Model 3) and without (Models 1 and 2) country-specific errors in Table  2 . Judging from Model 1, we would assume a strong negative relationship between GDP and CO 2 emissions in Europe. This could be interpreted as showing that European regions are beyond the turning point on an environmental Kuznets curve, and the higher the affluence, the cleaner the regions with regard to emissions. These differences can entirely be attributed to the country level, however, and disappear once the country level is included. Thus, it seems as if the more affluent countries have made greater efforts to reduce emissions, but within countries there is no such relationship. These differences point to a possible interaction between socioeconomic prosperity and country-level policies, while dismissing a direct negative effect from affluence on emissions. A research design restricted to cross-country comparison likely fails to differentiate the effects of this sort.

Finally, results from the preprocessed sample using propensity score matching are shown in Figs.  4 and ​ and5. 5 . Figure  4 displays differences in urban land take between regions with high population growth compared with a control group of otherwise most similar regions but where population growth was small or zero. Again, high population growth regions show a significantly larger increase in urban fabric compared with regions of similar size, affluence, and income growth, but with lower population growth. Urban land use increased at a mean rate which was more than twice as high in the high population growth regions compared with the control group. With regard to CO 2 emissions, the differences are similarly large (see Fig.  5 ). While regions with low to medium population growth have on average kept their level between 2000 and 2008, similar regions with higher population growth increased emissions by more than 10%. The significant population effect remains if we run multivariate models on this reduced sample where the other covariates are taken into account.

Urban land use change in European regions with high population growth and matched control group with low growth (red mark = mean).

Note Thick black lines denote the median, box limits are 25th and 75th percentile, respectively, red marks are mean values, and jitter points are regions ( N = 96 in high population growth group and N = 96 in control group). (Color figure online)

CO2 emissions change in European regions with high population growth and matched control group with low growth (red mark = mean).

So how are some European regions with high population growth able to achieve low CO 2 emissions? The city of Brussels, which put ambitious climate policies in place in 2004, provides one such example. The city set a specific target to reduce CO 2 emissions by 40% per capita by 2025, partly through high energy and air quality standards. Although population is growing, the city aims to improve air quality by encouraging public transportation and reducing car traffic by 20% from 2001 to 2018 (European Union 2016 ).

East Jylland provides another example. East Jylland forms the eastern portion of the continental portion of Denmark, north of Germany. The largest city in East Jylland is Arhus, which is considered the economic, trading, and cultural hub of both Jylland and Denmark (outside of Copenhagen). In 2008 and 2009, Arhus was named one of the six “Eco Cities” by the Danish Ministry of Climate and Energy—a scheme “developed in order to acknowledge cutting-edge cities and to inspire other local authorities to make increased efforts in the field of climate and energy” (Rasmussen and Christensen 2010 , p. 217). As a “cutting-edge” city in developing clean energy alternatives and fighting global warming, local officials in Arhus in 2007 committed the city to being CO 2 neutral by 2030 (ibid.). Arhus was also the first city to monitor and map its CO 2 emissions and to develop a “CO 2 calculator,” which is now used across Europe. The city’s current eco plan “consists of several generations of climate plans reaching towards 2030” (City of Aarhus 2016 ). The primary legs of these plans consist of: developing an extensive and efficient light rail, committing public funds to increasing the size of local forests and wetlands, improving biking accessibility and safety, improving the municipality’s heating system (which is derived from the local incineration plant), planning and implementing flood prevention plans, increasing public knowledge of and funding for housing energy efficiency, and finally, increasing public knowledge and public–private partnerships. In direct public spending on these goals, local authorities have committed over 72 million Euros. However, the actual sum is much larger when you take into account government subsidies for energy efficiency improvements, investments in current energy infrastructure, and public–private partnerships. These investments are paying off. For example, improvements to the city’s incinerator/zero-carbon energy producer have decreased CO 2 output by 60,000 tons per year, while investments into reforestation will begin absorbing nearly 14 tons of CO 2 annually (City of Aarhus 2016 ).

Hamburg, in northern Germany, is a case of low population growth and low emissions. With around 1.7 million inhabitants, Hamburg is one of the European Union’s largest cities and its population grew at a modest 0.48% per annum during the study period. The city won the European Union’s award for “Europe’s Green Capital” in 2011. Rather than expanding outwards, Hamburg is focusing on redeveloping formerly industrial areas (brownfields), such as HafenCity, Hamburg, which sits on 388 acres and is slated to add 5500 homes, commercial areas, green space, offices, schools—including a university—and daycare, all following the city’s green building standards. Hamburg’s “urban densification” efforts, as opposed to urban sprawl, prevent the city’s ecological footprint from spreading outward, potentially converting rural lands into suburban areas (Benfield 2011 ). Hamburg’s city leaders have made raising awareness about air quality among its residents a priority and have “ambitious climate protection goals” that aim to reduce Hamburg’s CO 2 emissions by 40% by 2020 and by 80% by 2050. Investments in energy-saving measures in public buildings are partly responsible for reducing the per capita emissions by 15% against 1990 (European Commission 2009 ).

Finally, Dublin, which has similar characteristics to Hamburg in terms of per capita income and other variables in our dataset, illustrates the environmental consequences possible with high population growth (1.51% during the period of study). With a growing population and growing emissions, Dublin, Ireland, does not represent the typical trend in European environmental standards. Between 1990 and 2006, Dublin’s annual emissions increased by almost 15,000 kilotons (CO 2 ). The majority of that increase in emissions came from the rapidly increasing transport and residential sectors as a result of the transportation and housing demands of Dublin’s burgeoning population. In fact, the transport sector has shown an increase of 165% from 1990 to 2006 (Environmental Protection Agency 2006 ). In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency projects Ireland will fail to meet its obligations under the EU emissions reduction agreement by 2020 (ibid). As a solution to Dublin’s growing population and rising emissions, the Dublin City Council’s 2016 –2022 Development Plan proposes redeveloping “vacant, derelict, and under-used lands with a focus on areas close to public transport corridors as well as areas of under-utilized physical and social infrastructure.” The city council also recognizes the importance of green infrastructure and has identified it as significantly contributing “in the areas of development management, climate change and environmental risk management” (Dublin City Council 2016 ).

Conclusion and Discussion

Bookchin ( 1996 , p. 30) suggests that “[t]he ‘population problem’ has a Phoenix-like existence: it rises from the ashes at least every generation and sometimes every decade or so.” But this is also true about the “depopulation problem,” which has recurred periodically over the last centuries (see Teitelbaum and Winter 1985 ). Both Malthusian (abundance of population is bad) and “cornucopian” (abundance of population is good) ideas are found in writings throughout recorded history (see, e.g., Schumpeter 1954 , pp. 250–251; Spengler 1998 , pp .4–5). Today, worries about “too few” instead of “too many people” seem to dominate the European discourse (Coole 2013 ). Trends in public discourse may or may not reflect empirical evidence on the topic. The question of whether population growth is harmful for the environment cannot be solved by solely looking at the discourse. The fact alone that people (perhaps unfoundedly) warned of “overpopulation” at times when world population was 0.2 billion (Plato), 1.0 billion (Malthus) or 3.5 billion (Ehrlich 1968 ) does not prove that any further increases from today’s 7 billion will necessarily come without further adverse consequences.

Population growth affects the environment in Europe: This is what our regional-level analysis of changes in urban land growth and CO 2 emissions indicates. However, we find significant differences between Western and Eastern Europe. In the West, regions with population growth are clearly experiencing both more urban growth as well as a greater increase in CO 2 emissions compared with stationary or shrinking regions. This suggests that population acts as a scale factor for environmental degradation in the West, as proponents of IPAT have argued. In the East, however, where population is mostly decreasing, there is no such correlation. Instead, urban growth in Eastern Europe seems to have more to do with affluence, and emissions have grown strongest in those regions where they have previously been low.

Many Western European regions are expected to experience population growth in the coming decades, mostly due to internal population shifts and international immigration. Immigration from non-European countries has clearly been one of the most salient political topics in recent years and will likely continue to be in the near future. However, it is also a strongly polarizing topic that has triggered schisms among many environmentalists (Huang 2012 ). Some have pointed out that, on a global level, migration is a zero-sum game and therefore world population growth matters, not changes in its spatial distribution (e.g., Mazur 2012 ). Others have shown that an individual’s environmental footprint grows after moving to a developed country (e.g., Conca et al. 2002 ). This argument obviously only holds if the unequal distribution of wealth and pollutants is assumed to persist. In any case, there are no reasons to believe that for a specific ecosystem under pressure from human population growth, it matters whether the additional people were born within some specific borders or somewhere else. And global environmental problems can certainly not be solved by limiting immigration to Europe. However, the empirical evidence suggests that future population growth as a result of immigration will make it harder for the European Union to achieve its climate goals.

See Tables  3 , ​ ,4, 4 , and ​ and5 5 .

Table 3

Descriptive statistics

Table 4

Determinants of urban land growth in European NUTS-3 regions (additional spatial model specifications)

Table 5

Determinants of CO 2 emission change in European NUTS-3 regions (additional spatial model specifications)

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

1 The EU classifies its territory into four layers according to the Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales Statistiques (NUTS). The lowest level consists of NUTS-3 regions, designed to usually host between 150,000 and 800,000 people. France, for instance, consists of 100 NUTS-3 regions (départements), 20 NUTS-2 regions (régions), 8 NUTS-1 regions (groups of régions), and one NUTS-0 region (metropolitan France).

2 These countries are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain. For CO 2 emissions, no data were available for Croatia. As a result of a reform of regional boundaries in the German state of Saxony, most regions in Saxony are missing from the analysis (note the white area on the maps).

3 For the models explaining urban growth which is measured between 1990 and 2006, population growth is averaged for this period. However, population data are not available for all regions since 1990 in the source dataset; for these regions the values refer to average population growth between the earliest available year since 1990 and 2008. Figure  1 displays average annual population growth rates between 2000 and 2008 for all regions.

4 Since urban land use is measured as a percentage of total land use and therefore 0–1 bounded, we use the logit transformation on this variable.

5 A random effects model was initially considered (providing similar results to the fixed effects model), but a Hausman test suggested superiority of the fixed effects estimator. Since we are not interested in estimating country-level predictors, we went without random effects (or multilevel) models.

6 Optimal matching and genetic matching were used as alternative algorithms. Since the results do not differ substantially, we only report the findings from propensity score matching here.

Contributor Information

Hannes Weber, Phone: +49 621 181-2816, Email: [email protected] .

Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, Phone: +1 901 843-3571, Email: ude.sedohr@jabbuics .

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Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change pp 685–697 Cite as

Climate Change and Overpopulation

• Raffaele Bifulco 3  
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Part of the book series: Handbooks in Philosophy ((HP))

The chapter focuses on the relationship between climate change and overpopulation, and it claims that such a thorny issue can be addressed only through a global agreement on limits to demographic growth. It draws on the assumption that overpopulation is a major cause of climate change. Indeed, the link between the growth of population and the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions has been ascertained since long ago. Section “Introduction” explains that the planet is experiencing a “population momentum” due to the tendency of the population to grow. Section “Overpopulation and Climate Change” shows how such a tendency contributes to climate change as it affects the intensification of economic activities and the combustion of fossil fuels. Section “The International Debate on Overpopulation: From the Kissinger Report to Reproductive Rights” illustrates how the international community has addressed the issue of overpopulation in international conferences on reproductive rights and world population. Finally, section “Conclusions” examines possible regulatory policies on family planning, arguing that reproductive rights shall be reconciled with regulatory policies that focus on the responsibility and independent choice of individuals.

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Bifulco, R. (2023). Climate Change and Overpopulation. In: Pellegrino, G., Di Paola, M. (eds) Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_137

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Home > CUNY Graduate Center > Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects > 1906

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Overpopulation and the impact on the environment.

Doris Baus , The Graduate Center, City University of New York Follow

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Document type, degree name.

Liberal Studies

Sophia Perdikaris

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Agricultural and Resource Economics | Demography, Population, and Ecology | Economics | Education Policy | Environmental Policy | Environmental Studies | Family, Life Course, and Society | Growth and Development | Health Economics | Health Policy | International and Area Studies | International Relations | Place and Environment | Politics and Social Change | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Urban Studies | Urban Studies and Planning

overpopulation, environmental impact, malthus, population growth, environmental issues, causes of overpopulation

In this research paper, the main focus is on the issue of overpopulation and its impact on the environment. The growing size of the global population is not an issue that appeared within the past couple of decades, but its origins come from the prehistoric time and extend to the very present day. Throughout the history, acknowledged scientists introduced the concept of “overpopulation” and predicted the future consequences if the world follows the same behavioral pattern. According to predictions, scientists invented the birth control pill and set population control through eugenics. Despite that, population continued to increase and fight with constant diseases. Migration was another component that encouraged population rise, which imposes severe threats to the environment. Urbanization destroys natural habitats and reinforces carbon dioxide emissions, which cause climate change and global warming. Species are becoming extinct and humanity is at threat that it set up for itself. Food scarcity and shortage of water as well as lack of job opportunities and inadequate education are the results of global inequality. Uneven distribution of natural resources, financial means, and individual rights give rise to poverty and define the global culture as greedy, despite the aid of international organizations and agencies. Solutions to overpopulation lie in the efforts of national institutions to implement policies that will correspond to the guidelines given by international institutions that work for the best of the global community. Within this global network, individuals act in their best interest, leaving the rest in extreme poverty and shortage. The inequality supports issues that contribute to overpopulation and leads to a humanity’s extinction.

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Baus, Doris, "Overpopulation and the Impact on the Environment" (2017). CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1906

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Human Overpopulation: Causes and Effects in Developing Countries

This research paper outlines the causes and effects of human overpopulation, focusing in developing countries. The primary cause of this problems includes low mortality rates coupled with high birth rates. The exponential influx in human overpopulation has had negative effects on both the economic stability and environment of the affected countries. In addition to the causes and effects discussed, potential solutions are proposed to assist in the mitigation of the problem.

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Over-population is a great Problem for many countries. This research looks into all possible solutions for this problem. World population has jumped from about 2.5 billion in 1951 to 7.8 billion in April 2020 , 212% increase. Over-population has been an issue for many countries especially in Africa, as Africa has the highest fertility rate ,children per woman, and Africans are low on resources especially for those who live in the middle of Africa ,in other words, near the equator, Because of its hot weather and being low on water, it is optimum environment for spreading diseases and droughts which its direct relation to overpopulation was later discovered resulting in lack of resources and slowness of economy development. Human Resources management has important terminology which need to be understood before getting into our main topic: fertility rate is the average children per woman, birth rate is the average number of children born per year and death rate is the number of deaths per year, natural change is the birth rate minus the death rate . Social Scientists have many theories on what causes over-population, Some suggest that poverty is the main cause of over-population as it is seen in most poor countries like in Africa unlike rich countries in Europe. They suggest that families try to overcome their poor condition by having more children. But other scientists argue that it can be correlation and something else is causing both of them. They suggest that it is a high death rates. Also, through comparing between poor Countries and rich Countries, it can be notice that in poor countries, death rates are high as of that most families give birth to many children. There are other suggested causes like lack of education and child labor. Over-population can cause many serious problems especially for poor countries. For example, It can cause lack of water in developing countries because as the population grow, water consumption increases. For countries that do not have a fresh stable water source, This can lead to droughts and lower life expectancy. Also, population growth could cause Extinction of wild life and pollution because forests and natural environments for various animals are cut down to free more space for buildings and cities. green house effect was learned in (CH.2.11) about and learned In (ES.2.10) about the role of plants in stabilizing the carbon dioxide percentage and the role of forest in keeping biodiversity in (BI.2.12). For These reasons, Countries tried to solve this issue, because of its significant impact on the economy and the productivity. Some of these solutions were the “one-child-policy” and “two-child-policy” tried by China to control population growth using the law. The Results of them were very fast. Other places tried to control over-population by focusing on education especially for girls like in Europe in the 19 th century. To conclude, This research will focus on these prior solutions and others and discuss why they work.

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Overpopulation is an immensely dangerous problem that does not affect only individual countries but worldwide. It has many causes such as immigration; early marriages, poor medical access, and education are the main reasons to be indicated. While it has many reasons why the earth faces overcrowded, overpopulation's effects are considered a perilous crisis more than itself. In the past, researchers have explored how to stop this rising problem even though; they have tried several ways from mass sterilization to awarding families with no child. None of these approaches worked instead, people tend to have more children and take this dangerous risk. Therefore, depletion of natural resources, rise in pollution, epidemics, and other diseases are the main consequences of overpopulation which this literature review has discussed. Even though scientists and nature activists have argued about the effects of overcrowding on the earth, humankind, and health, there is no right solution taken by us: humans as a creator of this crisis. Furthermore, this research will concentrate on the possible effects of overpopulation on the earth, health, and human kind. Plus, it suggests some possible solutions. Significantly, it illustrates how overpopulation will impact natural resources and human health.

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The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the overpopulation issue of India and propose recommendations on how to overcome it. First, the paper summarizes the crucial demographic conditions and where India stands by numbers. Then the article presents the development of the state approach to the issue starting from the early years of independence up to the current policies. It does so by scrutinizing its cultural, economic and social factors and implications of overpopulation and identifies socioeconomic backwardness, early marriages and family norms, lack of adequate health care infrastructure and education as the correlated and interdependent features supporting the trend of overpopulation. The authors come up with three recommendations to tackle the issue – women empowerment, education and industrialization.

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Analysis of how to tackle this issue. Written in spring 2016.

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Rapid population growth has been a topic of contestation on a socio-economic, statistical and environmental stance. It has proven to be a great cause for concern in much literature with regards to resource scarcity and the earth’s capacity to withstand the impact thereof, it’s hindrance to economic and social development and it’s threat to global political stability. It is important to note that 80 percent of the world’s population is found in low income countries (Hewitt) and in as much as it has been proven that population growth is exponential in these areas, it has not been resolved that one is poor because they have many children. Quite the opposite has been argued of which recent literature on the relationship between population and development has illustrated. When looking specifically at overpopulation in relation to development, there are two standpoints. The first one sees population growth being the barrier to sustainable development efforts as a whole, and much like the Malthusian Theory it urges control over population growth. The other standpoint denounces claims that overpopulation is the cause of social and economic development problems, but says it is a symptom of it. This essay will be looking at both standpoints so as to critically evaluate whether overpopulation really is the principle cause of development problems.

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Is the Earth really overpopulated?

| November 14, 2022 | Leave a Comment

Image from The Overpopulation Project

Item Link: Access the Resource

Date of Publication: February 26

Year of Publication: 2018

Publisher: The Overpopulation Project - University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Yes, for two main reasons.  First, people are rapidly displacing wildlife species across the globe, initiating a mass extinction event . Second, we are degrading ecosystems that provide essential, irreplaceable environmental services that future generations will need to live decent lives. Both these trends are driven, in large part, by immense and unprecedented numbers of human beings. Because there are too many of us to share the Earth fairly with other species and with future human generations, Earth is overpopulated.

Overpopulation already exists for billions of poor people living under insecure conditions around the world: on unsuitable land, in unsafe houses, lacking fresh water, or living in severely polluted environments. Natural catastrophes such as drought, flooding, or earthquakes may kill people, but overpopulation does too, by severely increasing people’s vulnerability . But the news media rarely reports this fact.

Overpopulation exists today in crowded mega-cities where many residents have never seen a wild landscape. Even small green spots are disappearing in densely populated urban areas, which will become increasingly crowded as population growth and urbanization continue. The negative effects of crowding and lack of connection to nature are well documented .

We are currently 7.8 billion people and the United Nations predicts an increase of almost 3.5 billion by 2100 if current trends continue. Our overpopulation is obvious if we compare the population in 1960 (3 billion) to today’s and ask questions such as: “How serious a problem would climate change be if we had kept our population at 3 billion?” “How many fewer people would have died due to famine, conflict and war?” “How much less pollution and plastic garbage would there have been?” and “How much less food would have been needed and how many millions of acres of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other ecosystems would have been spared conversion to agricultural use?”

Studies suggest that a future population of 11 or 12 billion could require a doubling of global food production. Tens of millions of people around the world already go to bed hungry every night. Continued population growth, combined with the uncertainties of climate change, could lead to much greater food insecurity in the years ahead. Meanwhile, the attempt to feed ever more people will inevitably come at the expense Earth’s remaining biodiversity, shrinking wild lands and extinguishing many thousands of species. Human beings have no right to act so selfishly and destructively. Earth is their home, too.

It is important to realize that overpopulation exists in many rich countries with too high rates of consumption as well as in many poor countries with too high fertility rates. Every effort should be made reduce consumption rates as well as high birth rates; in combination, these two measures would create a much better future for people on the planet.

The word ‘overpopulation’ is rarely used by political leaders, the news media, or even many environmentalists. But a recent international survey showed that people in many countries consider overpopulation to be a serious problem. In this case, common people seem to be out in front of their leaders. They are also more willing to consider futures that do not rely on endless growth—an ecological impossibility on a finite planet.

The good news is that it is possible to end global population growth, fairly and without coercion. The right policies have already helped dozens of nations stabilize their populations, and many others have made substantial progress toward doing so. Ending population growth and then allowing population levels to decline as a result of lower fertility levels are necessary steps toward creating ecologically sustainable societies. They will help enable future populations, human and nonhuman, to flourish far into the future.

Do you want to learn more about the  solutions for overpopulation and actions towards sustainability ? What actions we need to take on individual, community, national and global level? Check out the Overpopulation Project’s  list of solutions !

Overpopulation: Causes, Effects, and Solutions Essay

Introduction, causes of overpopulation, effects of overpopulation, solutions to overpopulation, works cited.

The concept of overpopulation of the planet is not new. There is a finite amount of space and resources that the planet can offer, and technological advances can only mitigate the situation so much. The first scholar to consider the idea of overpopulation was Thomas Malthusian, who brought it up in a work called “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” He managed to outline the reasons for population growth such as the improvement of standards of living, an abundance of food, and advanced medicine (Barbier 4).

When Malthusian made his predictions, however, he did not consider technological progress. The apocalypse he predicted was averted through innovations in technology and agriculture. Today, in 2016, humanity faces the problem of overpopulation once more. Despite many who dismiss the threat of overpopulation, it is much more real now than it was in 1796, as natural resources are now much fewer than they used to be and the population – much larger.

Although different scholars point to different factors that influence population growth, the core ones remain the same. These factors include the following:

• Advances in food production and agriculture;
• Advances in industry and production;
• Advances in medicine; and
• Poor family planning (Barbier 92).

It is obvious that these four factors are the ones that affect population growth the most. Advances in food production and agriculture create a surplus of food, which allows for population growth without famine as a natural barrier to curb it. Advances in industry and production provide clothes and items for the growing population to use, thus creating and maintaining a higher standard of living. Modern medicine curbs child mortality and effectively prolongs peoples’ lives.

Lastly, poor family planning means families become large and produce many children, with no regard for how it affects the environment. Together, these factors have contributed greatly to the incredible population growth rates today.

Many scholars have identified the disastrous effects overpopulation has on the environment. There are main three points of concern to which overpopulation will inevitably lead:

• Depletion of natural resources;
• Degradation of the environment; and
• Resource wars (Barbier 75).

With consumer culture on the rise, the population requires increasingly more materials to maintain their high standards of living. Everybody wants to have an iPhone, and everybody feels the need to have a personal vehicle. While certain resources, such as wood and energy, are renewable, the rest are not. Eventually, Earth will face a resource crisis, which is only sped up by the ever-increasing population (Toth and Szigeti 284).

More people mean a quicker degradation of the environment. Humanity, in general, has a negative influence on nature. Therefore, the more humans there are, the worse the impact is. This fact is especially true for developing countries, where advances in medicine and agriculture promote population growth, but eco-technologies and recycling are not yet implemented (Cafaro and Crist 75).

As natural resources become more and more depleted, resource wars will follow. Covert resource wars are already being waged, as major powers confront one another over the oil basins located in the Middle East. This competition will become even fiercer in the future as non-renewable resources become less and less common.

There are two popular paths to take when trying to solve the overpopulation problem. The first deals with the roots of overpopulation itself and are aimed at lowering the number of births through state programs, family planning, sex education, and other such initiatives. Such a strategy is already implemented in China, where the government imposes severe financial penalties for having more than one child. The country was forced to face the overpopulation problem earlier than most due to the unprecedented population growth it experienced in the decades prior.

The second route is not aimed at lowering the population but rather at providing for them. This approach involves recycling, using renewable energy, developing eco-clean technologies, and implementing other ideas that slow down and reduce the damage caused by the excess population. Looking for materials and resources outside the planet is futuristic, but it represents a viable strategy nonetheless. Eventually, humanity will have to look for resources in space, as it is impossible to create a completely self-sustaining resource model – some resources will inevitably be lost in the recycling process.

Combining both of these paths into one all-consuming strategy seems like the most reasonable and effective approach to mitigating the problem of overpopulation. Introducing statewide policies on birth control – in addition to popularizing recycling, using renewable energy, and minimizing the damage to the environment – would severely reduce the dangers presented by overpopulation and would buy humanity more time to find a permanent solution (Barbier 184).

As it stands, the effort to combat overpopulation is in its infancy. Outside of a couple of concerned governments who have to deal with overpopulation at home, nobody seems to give the issue the proper attention it deserves. If humanity is to overcome this problem, a united stance and a complex approach are required. This effort would require cooperation between different nations on all levels, as well as a vast informative campaign to make sure the general populace understands the need for such initiatives. Without such a joint effort, any local attempt to deal with the situation at home would have a limited effect.

Barbier, Edward. Economics, Natural-Resource Scarcity and Development, New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Cafaro, Phillip, and Eileen Crist. Life on the Brink, Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, London: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. Print.

Toth, Gergery, and Cecilia Szigeti. “The Historical Ecological Footprint: From Over-Population to Over-Consumption.” Ecological Indicators 60 (2016): 283-291. Print.

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1. IvyPanda . "Overpopulation: Causes, Effects, and Solutions." October 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/overpopulation-combating-analysis/.

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IvyPanda . "Overpopulation: Causes, Effects, and Solutions." October 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/overpopulation-combating-analysis/.

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• The Impact of Overpopulation on the Global Environment
• China and India Population: Causes, Impact and Management
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Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Jerusalem Demsas

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Jerusalem Demsas. Listen wherever you get your podcasts .

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

A $1.7 Million Toilet and Liberalism’s Failure to Build

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

So the book I’m writing is about why it’s become so hard for Democrats to build in the places where they govern. It’s not that they don’t want to build. Democrats have passed no end of laws putting money towards clean energy and affordable housing and mass transit and much, much more. But when you look into what has happened after those laws passed, the outcomes don’t always match the intentions. Let’s put it that way.

But not that many people do look at what happens after those laws pass. And honestly, I found it kind of radicalizing to follow a bunch of these through to their completion, or their noncompletion. Even pretty wonkish liberals, of which I am one and have been one, we sometimes seem to me like we love weddings, but we don’t have the patience for marriage.

Implementation matters. What happens after the bill passes matters. And across a lot of domains of policy, implementation is not going that well in the places where Democrats govern. And it is creating or worsening real public policy crises.

I’m not the only person who’s been obsessing about these issues. Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic, now a rare three-time guest on the show. She and I are always in some kind of running conversation on these themes.

But I’m in a sticky part of the book-writing process right now, and so I wanted to have her back on the show to do some of this thinking together, in public. As always, my email for feedback, thoughts, guest suggestions — [email protected].

Jerusalem Demsas, welcome to the show.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Thanks for having me.

EZRA KLEIN: I’ve been thinking about this piece you wrote a while back about this fight to build more housing on an old golf course in Denver, Colorado, and the way that what came next complicates this question of what we mean when we talk about the government, or who we mean when we talk about the people or what they believe. So can you walk me through what happened there?

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: So there’s a golf course in this neighborhood in Denver called Park Hill. And in 1997, Denver paid the owners of the golf course $2 million to put a conservation easement on the property, which means that it would limit what you could actually do with it.

And then, decades later, a development company bought the defunct golf course for $24 million and wanted to redevelop it into housing and some commercial space, as well. And there is a very contentious battle of whether or not to actually redevelop this into more housing. And the measure loses by a significant margin. I think it’s nearly 20 points.

But it’s weird because those same voters, almost a quarter million Denver voters, supported Jared Polis in the 2022 election. And Jared Polis has made increasing housing supply a core part of his campaign strategy. And then, that year, also, 1.3 million Coloradans voted to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to increasing affordable housing in Denver proper.

So I say all that because the same people are ostensibly voting at different levels of government for things that seem contradictory. But I think the real thing that’s going on here is that people, when they’re asked questions at different levels of government, they respond with different parts of themselves.

When you’re asked, hi, would you like to solve this problem of the housing crisis, I recognize that you’re upset about this, we need to have a solution, I’m a governor who’s going to attract this solution with pragmatism, they say, yes, I like this. I want you as my representative in order to solve this problem. I don’t want to get into the minutia because I’m not a city planner or whatever. I want you to solve it.

Versus, when they look at the local level, the only thing they’re asked is, yes or no, should you develop this? They’re not asked, Do you want to solve the housing crisis? They’re asked, all things equal — because what is a few thousand homes really going to do for the housing crisis, not very much — would you want this to change? And they’re like, all things equal, I’d like it to stay the same. Because you’re asking them a different question.

How we define the people really depends on the venue in which we’re meeting them because if you think about yourself, too, it depends what you’re being asked what you’re willing to give up.

EZRA KLEIN: There is a principle believed by many people, sometimes believed by me, that the government that is nearest to the people is the best level of government at which to act, because that is where you get the closest match between representation and democracy. A lot of your work has begun to pick at this question of localism and pick at this question of whether or not that is actually true — or, at least, what is lost when we act that way. So talk a bit about that dimension of it.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Fundamentally, I think the problem with local government is that the reason why people feel generally OK with it is because they have no idea what’s going on, and they’re not actually engaged in the conflict and the very contentious decisions that are happening all the time in their local government. You’re frustrated with your national government because you’re tuned in.

You’re aware that there are very consequential questions going on about abortion, about immigration, about climate. And you see it. You hear about it. You’re engaged in it. And you’re frustrated when things don’t turn out your way. It is a part of the democratic discourse in a way that is not true for lower levels of government.

So as you get lower down and as you get more decentralized, you get less and less attention. The local government’s doing some of the most important, influential decision-making when it comes to people’s quality of life, and they’re not actually being held accountable for it.

So local governments are fundamentally responsible for how land is used in this country. They get a lot of permitting authority for whether or not new houses can come up, what kinds of houses can come up. They get permitting authority about what kinds of energy can come up, energy infrastructure can be used for, what kinds of transit can be used for. Anything you can imagine that can be done with land is decided, basically, at the local level.

And so the problem I have is that we see repeatedly that very few people actually vote for local government. There is a survey called “Who Votes for Mayor?” done by State University, and it looks at 23 million voting records in local elections across 50 cities. And they find that, in 10 of America’s largest cities, turnout doesn’t exceed 15 percent. In Las Vegas, Fort Worth and Dallas, turnout was in the single digits.

And then we have other findings that indicate that the older you are, the much more likely you are to vote. And the people who decide to be a part of local government are also, themselves, self-selecting as people who are already more likely to be involved in government, which means they’re more likely to be wealthy, they’re more likely to be politically connected, they’re more likely to be a homeowner. And all of these things really bias the system.

I remember asking a hyperlocal elected official in a poorer area in D.C. about bike lanes. And they told me that, well, nobody bikes in my area. People just have to drive. It’s just ridiculous. But in their area, there was 20 percent of people who did not even own a car.

So when I think about your question about, Why is there this through-line critique of localism in my work, it’s because I don’t really buy the contention that these individuals are more likely to know what their local community looks like on the questions that are actually relevant for politics. And the way that we have that in democracy is through voting. And if you don’t have people voting for you, I don’t think you have to actually be attuned to their interests.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me talk a bit about a story that I’ve been tracking for my book because I think it gets at a lot of these dynamics. There is, quite famously — there’s been San Francisco Chronicle coverage of it, New York Times coverage of it.

In San Francisco, there’s a part of the city called Noe Valley. Noe is lovely. It is very rich. It has a wonderful farmers market. At that wonderful farmers market, there’s a little park where you can take your kids, and they can play on this tiny slide while you’re getting your extremely expensive produce.

And in this parkish area, this little square, there is plumbing for a toilet. And for a long time, the community has wanted a nice public restroom there. Eventually, the state representative representing that community was able to get the money for that public restroom.

And he got $1.7 million. [LAUGHS] Sorry. He got — sorry, it’s a very funny story, on some level, but very grim. He got $1.7 million from the state.

Then people noticed that this toilet was going to cost $1.7 million, and they got really mad, and it got a bunch of press coverage. And the celebration became a scandal. And the state came in and said, we’re going to claw back this money. This is ridiculous.

So then people began digging into the story, like, What’s going on here? The representative who gets the money says, look, I know this is ridiculous. I know this costs too much money. But this is how much I’m told a toilet costs. And so I’ve got to get you the money. Nobody wants me to get them the money for half of a public restroom.

So then there’s a question of, Well, why does installing a public restroom cost so much money right here? And you begin to get — this answer unspools, which I would call not an explanation but a description of process. And construction costs are very high in San Francisco. And you got to pay, for the city, a higher wage. And there are seven or eight or nine different agencies that need to sign off on this. And it has to go through a design review. And the normal way we would do it is have a design come out, and then we have to do a feedback meeting with the local community to make sure they like the design. And there are just a million things that pile on. And in every point of this pile-on, there are public employee salaries that are coming into the cost of this.

And the rec and park agent who ends up being quoted on this in the media, he’s like, look, this is just our process. But nobody likes the process. Everybody’s mad about it. The members of government are mad about it. And he’s mad about it, too. He’s saying in the paper, listen, if you want it to be cheaper, you can pass some bills to make this cheaper for me. You can pass some laws. You can exempt putting a toilet in from environmental review, which, again, is just extremely funny on some level.

So then you get this war of words back and forth. And the guy notes, look, this isn’t even unusual. We installed toilets that cost about this much in neighboring parts of the city, and nobody cared. It’s really just the press getting involved here that has made everybody so mad.

I tell the story, in part, because I think it gets a dynamic that I keep running into in my reporting, which is that when you follow the line of trying to build things — and certainly in blue areas, which is where I’m focusing — when you follow it down the line, you end up seeing a process that doesn’t seem to make anybody happy. And yet at no point did this end with them reforming the process.

And most of the time, and this was the point of the rec and park director, nobody even knows about the process. And they don’t want to be experts on local procurement and contracting processes. And probably, if you asked them, Do you want there to be a rule in the city that the city has to have a public notice when it’s going to do a development, they would say yes. And on the other hand, they don’t want things to cost as much and take this long.

I’ve come to think of this as a sort of liberalism of the details, where people, they pass the bill. But then, if you follow what’s happening after the bill passes into the details of the governance, it looks completely nuts.

But on the other hand, nobody’s really well incentivized to reform the way government works. It’s a lot of fighting with your own government and fighting with your allies. They would need some kind of mass public outcry that would get them to focus on the structure of government itself. And they don’t have that, either.

And to me, this is actually responsible for a lot of liberalism’s current problems and pathologies. If everybody was happy with what they were getting, and I just didn’t like it, fine. But it is very strange to listen to Gavin Newsom and London Breed and these other people condemn their own government but also not have any real traction on how to change it.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah. I think that the problem here, and the reason why this has been so prevalent in blue areas, as you said, is because the coalition of the Democratic Party has so many individual groups with varying concerns, none of which constitute a majority. So you have people who are really focused on the environment, people who are really focused on immigration, people who are really focused on labor, people who are really focused on women’s rights. The list goes on.

And these are often very laudable groups who are fighting for the interests of the people in the public they want to represent. But when their interests end up trading off against one another, there isn’t really someone who can just mediate and say, we don’t want a $1.7 million toilet. And in order not to have a $1.7 million toilet, we need to relax environmental review in this way, and that’s just something you’re going to have to sit with, environmental groups.

The environmental groups won’t stand for that. They’re very afraid, rightfully so, often, in many cases, that if you do something like that, maybe that means a slippery slope towards allowing other things that are environmentally harmful. And so they fight very strongly for their own interests in order to maintain that.

Or you have another situation, where I think this comes into play again, the plethora of government agencies and levels of government that are involved in these decisions. Every single level of government is very afraid and jealous of its own power being taken away. They’re worried that, OK, if we lose control over this now, what if there’s a future situation, maybe not about this toilet but about something else, where we will need this veto power. And of course, every individual feels like, well, my office is pretty efficient. It’s the other guy’s that are the problem.

So you have this endemic issue then, where they have so many points in the process where you have the opportunity to delay and pause, and no points in the process where everyone’s trying to rev up. Even though every individual in this could be the most publicly minded, most publicly oriented person who’s trying to do the right thing, there’s no way to go through dozens of agencies to require detailed review to create all of these processes for public input without taking up the kind of time that would then run up the cost of any project.

And so I think that that is a real problem for blue areas because regulations are costly. And they can be costly for good things. There are a lot of regulations that have saved so many countless lives.

But if we can’t actually do an accounting of which ones are worth the cost for individual types of projects, if we can’t do an accounting of which ones we need to keep, then you’re going to end up with everything costing so much money, with everything taking so much time, and you lose out on a lot of the equity gains that you’re trying to get by maintaining this power.

EZRA KLEIN: One of the interesting things happening in the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act is you’re seeing more of the money for decarbonization infrastructure go to red states. You’re seeing, in particular, a lot of it go to Georgia and Texas.

And Texas has a very anti-renewable streak in it right now. There are a lot of bills and regulations being proposed to make it harder to build renewable energy in the state. And at the same time, because it is so damn easy to build things in Texas, more renewable infrastructure is being built there.

Defaults are really important. And so in a lot of my work around this sort of liberalism that builds a set of issues, I’ve come to understand the basic issue is the problem in the blue states is the default is set to make things hard, even when the politics want to make it easy.

It’s a very strange way to watch government playing out. And I think it often offends a lot of our ideological intuitions. But when you see it enough, you gotta, at some point, be like, there’s a real problem here.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: I think a good example of this is in Pennsylvania when there was the I-95 catastrophe last year. And they had to stop traffic on one of the highest arterial interstates in the country. Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat in a purple state, he relaxed and paused a ton of different types of regulations and said, we’re going to streamline this extremely quickly, and we’re going to get this built. And it took 12 days to get I-95 back and operational.

And so I think this tells us something important. It tells us a couple of things. One is that when the person who is responsible for a salient catastrophe is actually empowered to wade through the morass of regulations and different bodies to get something done, they can. That means we have the capacity to get something done when it’s important to us.

This is most obviously happening in the housing space, where you have tons and tons of regulations that have been behind the scenes for a really long time, doing a lot of work to prevent the construction of much-needed housing. And people got really, really mad about that outcome. They got really, really mad about high housing costs. They got really, really mad about the fact that their kids can’t live near them. They got very angry about how homeownership was really out of grasp. They watched homelessness spike out of control in many of these urban areas.

And that pressure caused government to have to respond. And it’s caused them to have to respond in a way that is addressing, in some places, many of the very minutia that we’re talking about here.

In Montana, after Covid-19 caused a lot of people to move to the state, spiking home prices, you had the Republican governor and Republican legislature address the problem. In Colorado, as I talked about, Jared Polis is trying to do this, in California where it has been multiple reforms, and I think often unnoticed, is in Washington State, which is a liberal state where Jay Inslee and a coalition of folks in the legislature have worked very hard to try to undo, bit by bit, these regulations that are stopping the construction of affordable housing.

I think, of course, it’s notable that red states have been able to take the largest steps the most quickly. I think Montana is a really good example of that. But at the same time, I do think that the problem is bigger in blue states. There are more expensive cities. There’s been more people in these places for longer. It’s only now that we’re seeing a lot of growth heading towards the southwest and the South, in general, where you have these red states having to confront these problems in a way that they haven’t had to do for decades.

So I think there’s a lot of correct criticism that I and other people level at blue governments. But at the same time, I do think that, even though Republicans have had a more lax approach towards permitting and towards regulation, they also haven’t had to deal with the problem.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m delighted you brought up I-95 in Pennsylvania because I’ve been doing a lot of reporting on that for the book, actually. And it’s an interesting, I think, case for us to have spent a couple minutes on. So I spent some time talking to Mike Carroll, who’s the secretary of transportation there, and just going through what actually happened and what they did.

And you mentioned that Governor Shapiro was able to relax and pause a bunch of rules. What he was able to do was declare a state of emergency. There had been a tanker with more than 8,000 gallons of fuel. It overturned. It set on fire. And then the bridge above it collapsed.

And in declaring that state of emergency, the normal procurement rules, the normal contracting rules, the normal going out for comment rules, the normal ways you might sue or have to do environmental review, all of that got swept away. So Mike Carroll told me that he got the call that this had happened. He makes his way to the bridge as fast as he can.

And not far from him are two contractors who are already doing work in that area. And basically, by the day’s end, he has chosen these two contractors to manage the demolition and the rebuild. And he could only do that because all of this got waived.

I said, how long would that have normally taken you? And he said to me that the normal way — and here, I’m quoting him — so in a traditional delivery of a project, it would be months. We’d hire a consultant to design it. We’d need final design approved by the Federal Highway Administration. Then there would be bidding from interested contractors. Then we’d process the bids. Then we’d issue a contract.

So that would be 12 to 24 months. And he said, that is probably an underestimate because you’d have to do a bunch of things before you got to that point in the process to even get the process off of the ground. It’s not like they threw everything out the door. They used union labor to rebuild this. They had union labor going 24 hours a day, which would not normally be allowed. But again, under the emergency rules, it was allowed.

And so it was not just a huge victory for Shapiro, making him quite popular, or even more popular than he was, it was also a big victory for union labor in Pennsylvania, which it was this great object lesson that the government and the unions can do this amazing thing super fast.

Now, on the other hand, to make the case for process, you can really imagine how, in government — and given our history, or look at any other country’s history with government — if you don’t have pretty rigid rules on who you hire and how, it becomes patronage. It becomes corruption. People get elected, and they give money to their friends, and their friends give them money to get elected. And then you have a corrupt political system.

Who would get contracts in a Trump administration, if the government he ran could give it to whomever he wanted with no review and no rules? And on the other hand, if everybody’s so happy about how this I-95 rebuild went — and Shapiro is happy about it, and Joe Biden said he did an amazing job, and the Biden administration is very happy to tout their role in it — if our emergency processes, on some level, are better than our default processes, isn’t that a problem?

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: I think that that’s something that we have not done in a while is think about the cost of what these processes add and whether they’re worth paying. A lot of these regulations came out of a desire to make sure that the process was equitable. And then, when we see that the process gets slowed down, there’s also a cost. And that cost is disproportionately borne by the populations that we are often most concerned about.

Of course, the procurement process, you’re talking about the potential for corruption. But there’s also just a lot of really good reasons to want to have review, to make sure, hey, are we only ever considering people who are from a certain race or certain background? Are we giving people opportunities from different places? And those are all laudable goals. And I think that, often, when we’re critiquing them, it can sound to other people like you’re saying like, oh, it doesn’t matter, that these impulses are not important.

But the real issue is that we’re not saying, OK, but who gets hurt in a world where we can’t build I-95 back up quickly, if people can’t get to work, if people can’t take their kids to school? It’s not rich people, who can overwhelmingly, now, in this day and age, work remote, or, in a previous age, would not lose their jobs or would have a savings to rely on. It’s poorer people. It’s people from minority backgrounds. It’s people who many of these regulations are attempting to protect.

EZRA KLEIN: As you say, a lot of these processes are built, at some level, to protect groups that — particularly under post-New Deal super-growth liberalism — got just run over. Sometimes literally run over — highways driven right through their communities. And then this whole infrastructure of, I don’t know if you want to call it anti-growth liberalism or new left liberalism or something, but it emerges in the ’60s and ’70s, the ’80s, and grows through to today, where you have all these groups that are using these laws — environmental laws, procurement laws, other things — to stop really bad abuses from happening.

And so now these groups, this is the thing they have that gives them their reason for existing. This is where their power comes from.

So I think this raises two questions. One is this question of, Who do these groups represent? Because when the California government or the federal government thinks about, What are we doing from environmental justice, that doesn’t mean they’re putting together in a room a bunch of people who live in super disadvantaged communities. It means they’re putting together in a room a bunch of people who run environmental justice groups.

But then the other question that I think it raises is a sort of macro/micro problem here. You were getting at it earlier, in Denver. You might want, in order to stop bad developments, to run everything on a project-by-project basis. If you believe the inability to develop quickly is harming people overall, you might want to change the default, even though that gives you more individually bad projects, but you get more housing overall. And that makes houses cheaper. It helps abate homelessness — whatever. And those two things actually do conflict. The tension here is a real tension.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah. So on your first question, the government wants to know, What does the Black community want? And they say, well, what are the groups that represent the Black community? So maybe we’ll go to the NAACP. Or they say, we want to learn about environmental justice communities, so they’ll go to the groups that have organized themselves to speak on behalf of that issue.

And you have this question of, OK, is it true that the people in environmental justice communities have actually lent their voice to these organizations? And it’s a very hard question to suss out because I think that many organizations now — and this is coming out of political scientists’ data, Skocpol has research on this that talks about what has happened to nonprofits from membership to management. So we used to be members of these large-scale organizations. And now it’s sort of like, maybe I’ll send $20 to the Sierra Club every month, but I’m not really paying attention to what they’re doing. I just get a calendar at the end of the year.

And so that change in how people interact with these organizations that happened for various reasons lends some kind of skepticism to saying, you’re saying that you speak for this group. What’s your proof of that? And so I think it’s hard because it’s not a question of, oh, do I think these groups are acting in bad faith, because what if you just can’t get those groups to vote? What if you can’t actually reach all those people? What if it costs way too much money to canvas?

So should no one speak for them in that case? That feels wrong. But then again, it feels wrong to have a group saying, hey, I’m speaking for this group, but, actually, I have not even talked to even a 10th of the members of it.

And so I think that that is a very difficult problem. I think it can be solved in a few ways. I think one is that groups should then be held to a high standard of proving their claims, rather than just leaning on representational authority. And what I mean by that is if I am someone who has a poll and I say, well, I know that 70 percent of people agree with this statement, so that’s why we should do it, that’s one type of democratic claim.

The second type is saying, hey, we did the research. Here’s some arguments why I believe it is best for this group in order for us to pass policy X. Those are two different arguments. That does not rest on whether or not people agree with you. It’s just saying, I think it’s better for them, based on these measures, based on this research, based on these arguments. And so I think we should, A, really default more towards the second when we don’t have evidence that the first is actually happening.

And then, on your second question about the macro/micro problem, many of the biggest successes of the environmental movement, when we’re talking about acid rain or you’re talking about D.D.T. and even lead remediation, these are situations where the environmental movement set specific standards and said, we need to stop this thing from happening. They just said, this is bad. We need to stop it. Here’s a standard for which everyone is going to be held across the board. It doesn’t matter. That’s just the rule now.

And that’s very different than, let’s examine each one and look at it holistically and decide whether or not it’s good or not. It’s just setting a specific rule. And when I talk to developers, they often tell me that they’re less interested, even, in really loosening and making it easier to build more housing or even to build different kinds of renewable energy. They just want a consistent set of rules that they can just follow. Because when these groups have certainty about how the system works, when it’s clear that it’s not going to come to the discretion of some random agency here or some bureaucrat there, and you don’t have to worry that one person’s public input or a group claiming to speak for some other community is going to come in and then derail the whole thing, then you can say, OK, we’re going to try, and we’re going to be able to build a lot more things much more quickly. So I think that standards should just be the focus of future regulatory changes in this space.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, this also gets to a way that liberalism in America — and, actually, just government in America — works differently and is held accountable differently than it is in other countries we think of as peers, like Western European countries and Canada, which is a lot more of how this works in America is by lawsuit. Here, we have a lot of legislation at the both state and federal level where the enforcement mechanism is we have given private or local groups, or people, a clear pathway to suing the government. And that creates very different dynamics.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah. So in 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act is passed — NEPA. Then a bunch of state versions of that get passed, as well. And it basically is a very short bill. And all it says is that the government basically needs to account for all the potential environmental harms before it approves of a project.

And at the time it was thought of, all you have to do is look at this project that you’re going to approve or this government that you’re going to do. Let’s spend a little bit of time thinking about whether this is harmful, maybe adjust some things and then move forward.

And then there’s a lot of activist courts in the 1970s who interpret the language of this bill in a much larger way. They say it’s not just that you have to give us a four-page document that says, here are a couple of things that we were worried about and we thought about, and we changed some things, whatever. You have to really show that you were thinking through the entire process, that you were thinking very clearly about potential alternatives at every step.

And that sounds really good. You’re like, yes, I do want the government to not just do some shoddy check mark at the end of the process. I want them to really care about the environment.

But what this ends up meaning is that when government tries to do anything, it has to assemble reports that can number into the thousands. And this doesn’t happen with every project. But it does give room for people to sue not on the grounds that you have harmed the environment or they think you’re going to harm the environment but on the grounds that you have not actually done the procedure well.

So you have many of these lawsuits against things that we would obviously think are bad, whether it’s new pipelines or oil fields or whatever it is, and they’re not really making the argument on the environmental grounds. They’re making the argument on procedural grounds. And so you have all of these environmental organizations come up in this space of legal practice in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, who make this their bread and butter.

And they develop all this case law that really makes government accountable to making sure that they are following a really strict procedure. And it can take years. It can cost tons of money. It can take a lot of lawyers. And so I do think that the legal system here plays a huge role.

But at the same time, it would be very possible for legislatures to say, this is not what we meant for you to do. We did not mean to hamper government to this extent. We’re going to reform what this legislation is saying to make it clear what the parameters are and make it clear who’s allowed to sue and under what conditions.

And so this is something that happened in Minnesota State House. They’re trying to reform one of their state environmental statutes, MERA, the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act, in order to make sure it doesn’t allow for some of these lawsuits to come about that can often not be focused on environmental concerns but using the procedural aspect of environmental litigation in order to get something else done.

EZRA KLEIN: I was really stunned when I began digging into these laws over the past couple of years to realize that they were about the process by which you build something and what you consider in it and not showing that the thing you’re trying to build is better for the environment than not building it.

Congestion pricing in New York City has been held up for quite some time. It’s moving forward now. And I ended up talking to a bunch of the players in that. And this was an extraordinary situation where it got — it’s a very simple thing. You’re just hanging sensors on poles, more or less, in order to charge cars coming in and out of the city, so there are fewer cars. And then you give that money to mass transit, so there’s more mass transit. It’s about as purely pro-environmental an approach as you can imagine.

And this is the blue government of New York who’s trying to do it. And they’re working, now, with the Biden administration, which also wants to do it. And they end up in this multiyear environmental assessment because they want to make sure they don’t get sued. And so they’re doing things like, how many cab drivers of color might be displaced by something like this?

And it’s not even that the considerations are bad considerations, but the fact that it is holding up a very pro-environment piece of legislation, that’s actually not considered in the thing at all. The fact that the very process you’re going through might itself be bad for the environment is nowhere in the analysis.

There’s also just a very strange version of this in California, to keep going back to that. And Jake Anbinder, the historian, has done really fantastic work on this. But in California, they passed CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, based on the national version, NEPA.

And when they pass it, nobody thinks it’s a big deal. This is passing in the heyday of environmental legislation. It doesn’t even get a full write-up, a full article, in the L.A. Times. It’s signed by Ronald Reagan. Nobody thinks it matters much at all. It’s like, yeah, when the state does something, they need to consider the environmental impact of it.

But then there’s an effort to build a mixed condo and commercial development in Mammoth. And if you know California, Mammoth is the greatest place to snowboard and ski there is. It’s beautiful. It’s a resort. And this local coalition of homeowners in Mammoth, they sue. And they sue in this very novel way, where they go to the courts and say, this needs an environmental impact review.

And the assumption is, no, it doesn’t. It’s not a state or public project. But the California Supreme Court, they reinterpret the law and say, actually, a public project is anything that requires public permits, which almost everything does.

And so now, the law means something totally different than anybody had initially believed. There’s a complete shutdown, in many ways, of construction. The state legislature has to pause the law so people can figure out what this means for a little bit. And now, that same law has made it much harder to cite housing, much harder to cite clean energy. Now people are seeing some problems with it. But it is a kind of crazy situation of how powerful the judicial role often is in this.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah. I think that people would be, maybe, surprised to realize that what’s contained within environmental considerations can literally, basically, be anything from, as you said, noise to locals. It could include public input processes because much of environmentalism became very intertwined with concerns about participatory democracy.

And so you’re making sure, well, did you just put one posting here, or did you put several postings in high-visibility areas in town? What was the size of the font on those postings? There’s so many considerations under the umbrella of environmentalism.

And what has happened is that a bunch of different actors have realized that, actually, you could use this for anything. You could use this to stop anything, no matter whether or not it is environmental. Now, I think there are a lot of people who consider themselves environmentalists who use these regulations to stop things that I would think are good. But then there are a lot of people who are straightforwardly not environmentalists who would use this.

There was, in Los Angeles, the L.A. City Council had voted to end oil drilling. And a privately held natural gas and oil company sued under the California Environmental Quality Act. And they’re claiming that banning oil drilling in the lawsuit will increase greenhouse gas emissions. And they say that L.A. is depriving the public of an opportunity to meaningfully comment on the measure and its feasibility.

And they pause. They’re able to pause the city council’s ban on oil drilling as a result of the California Environmental Quality Act. So I think that that’s, obviously, a really absurd version of this, but I think it really just speaks to how far away these laws have grown from the original intent.

EZRA KLEIN: This gets, to me, to this reality that there are two failure modes for this kind of liberal governance. And one is a failure mode where a law is being used to do something you did not mean for it to do. I think the people who passed these laws did not mean to allow the oil drilling company to stop the oil drilling ban.

And then there’s a failure mode of there’s actually a disagreement, a deep disagreement, in liberalism now over what to do. And you talk about this quite a bit in your piece about Minnesota, about this tension in environmentalism between those who are there for conservation and those who are there for the climate crisis. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah, sure. So the Minneapolis 2040 was this larger measure that tried to reshape how Minneapolis would do zoning and land use policy for housing in the future. And it spurred a bunch of changes that would make it easier to build more affordable-housing-type smaller houses, build more densely, near transit, things like that, and led to the elimination of parking minimums, so things that a lot of environmentalists had been really pushing for for a long time.

A lot of environmentalists in the area, including the local Sierra Club, had been very in favor of this. But then a few groups that were led by a newly formed group called Smart Growth but accompanied by two bird groups, including the local Audubon chapter, sued under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act in order to stop the Minneapolis 2040 from taking effect.

And so when I first wanted to write the story, I was kind of like, OK, there’s this problem of people saying they’re environmentalists but, obviously, they’re not. And then I’d been doing a lot of reading of this law professor, Jedediah Purdy. And as you mentioned, Jake Anbinder has written about this a lot, too. And I started thinking a lot about how these individuals, it’s not that they themselves are lying about environmentalism, but the definition of environmentalism has changed around them.

So what I mean by that is that I kind of classify people into two groups, this idea of crisis environmentalists and cautious environmentalists. And if you’re like me, and I think like you, Ezra, you grew up with environmentalism as really meaning the climate crisis. You learned about deforestation, and you learned about wildfires and hurricanes and polar bears, all of these things under the blanket crisis of, we need to reduce carbon emissions to stop all of this from happening.

Younger folks also grew up in a more pro-technological version of this, too, where we were saying, OK, we need to ride our bikes. We need to get solar panels on our roofs. It was very technical. It was return to the city, as well, too, many people who were urbanists. But that’s a very different culture than what environmentalism was for a lot of people in the cautious space.

So cautious environmentalists grew up there in the ’60s and ’70s. And those are the people that really populated these groups that are suing to stop this housing legislation. And for them, what they were thinking about when they thought about environmentalism was the changes to their local places, whether there would be less literal greenery around, whether there would be knock-on effects of specific developments. And also this real commitment as part of environmentalism to slow, to process and to distrusting government when it tried to do big projects because of the legacy of what big government had done with knocking highways through and urban renewal in the mid-20th century.

And so when I think about that kind of tension, what I realized really clearly when talking to them is that, while I think that they’re wrong — I think there’s a better version of environmentalism, and I think that it helps more people and that their version hurts more — that they have very clear values that they view as very much in line with their version of environmentalism.

And that makes it, actually, much more difficult because it’s not a simple question of saying, well, don’t you realize that the net carbon emissions if everyone was going to live in a single-family home versus living in a more densely packed area are higher? That’s not the answer. They’re not going to be won by facts. It’s about a values shift that we’re seeing happen as generations trade over.

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah. I don’t even love the language of lying or wrong or right here because there are genuinely different visions about how life should work. This is a bad coinage for my side of the argument, but I tend to think of this as gray and green environmentalism.

There is an environmentalism that is largely about living in a greener space. Don’t let anybody build over the park. Don’t let that much building happen at all. This environmentalism is often associated with fears of overpopulation. There’s simply too many humans. The humans are consuming too many things. The Earth cannot carry this much. Do not let anybody bulldoze these trees. And there’s a lot to that. And I am, emotionally, very sympathetic to it.

And then gray environmentalism, the environmentalism of New York City, where the carbon footprint per person is extraordinarily low, if you want to be low carbon, low emissions, what you want to live in is a very large, probably gray building, not that the building has to be gray. It can be any color. But a lot of them are gray.

And the city doesn’t feel green at all. The city does not feel like environmentalism. It doesn’t feel like living a life in harmony with nature. And there is, I think, a difference of class here. I do think one of the problems is a lot of people want to protect a green life they have been able to afford but that other people now need to live somewhere, and they don’t really have an answer for that.

The lifestyles the two sides are thinking of, I think, actually feel like different lives. They live in different houses. That’s also, again, a financial question. But there is a question of values here that I think can’t be waved away.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Well, I’m going to push back again against this gray versus green thing, I think, for a couple reasons. One is one thing you said about, well, it doesn’t feel environmental to live in New York City, I think that people who ride their bikes to work and who are living in a downtown city and don’t have a car, I think they very much feel themselves like they’re living in a very environmental way, that they are able to take the train and go out into the suburbs if they want to.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m using the term differently, not to go too far down this road. I mean when I lived in a leafy part of Oakland for a while, when I walked around, there were a lot of trees. I lived for 10 weeks in Half Moon Bay on the shore. I woke up, and I saw the ocean.

And now I live in a five-story building. And there are very few trees around me. And there’s no wild space. I actually do feel like I’m a better environmental citizen now, for all those reasons. But I don’t feel the connection with nature I felt when I’ve lived in places that just, literally, my carbon emissions and my electricity usage were higher.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah. There’s no contesting that. Of course, if you’re in the middle part of New Manhattan, you’re not going to see — or in Brooklyn — you’re not going to see the ocean in the same way on the coast.

But I also will say this, that the sense that you have of feeling connected to nature or feeling close or in harmony with nature, as you said, these things are socially determined. The way you feel about your life and how it is — the reason I’m slightly pushing back on this is not because I don’t recognize the difference but because I think that it’s socially constructed in a way that we can actually change.

What people often don’t recognize is that when you live more densely is that you are actually preserving a ton of that green space from development because when Minneapolis says, I’m not going to build enough for my new residents, when they say 30,000 people move here, but we’re only building 10,000, 12,000 new homes, those people don’t disappear. They still get those jobs. They still come here to live with their family or to visit with their friends or whatever it is. And where they need to stay goes to the outlying counties. They are taking up more and more wetlands or conservation areas that are very local, still, to these communities. And so that single-family home sprawl that exists and has continued to spread in major urban areas is the direct result of not allowing dense infill development to happen in our cities.

And so, to me, I think it’s really interesting, because I agree with you, it changes how individuals feel because if you’re someone who is used to having your single-family home, and you’re in Minneapolis, and you’re seeing all this greenery, and all these trees, and all these parks around you, and it takes 10 minutes for you to get to this wildlife preserve, and that changes because it becomes a more populated place, maybe your day-to-day feels less what you would call green environmentalism, as you’re saying, but your community is actually preserving a ton more of that greenery.

So I think there’s a lot of contradictions inherent in this that, I think, are often resolved in a way that it’s not logical. It’s just what we all decided it to be.

EZRA KLEIN: I agree with that totally. And I will say that one thing New York City does well, at least in certain parts of it, is the density has also permitted these tremendous public parks. If you pack more people together, you can also have just bigger parks. And Prospect Park is a remarkable institution. Central Park is a remarkable institution. There are things you can do here that, I think, can lead you to more of a synthesis than people recognize.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: And I was talking to someone in my story in Minneapolis, where he said he likes Minneapolis because of all of the parks and greenery. And he says, well, I don’t want to live in a place like D.C. or New York. But D.C. actually has a higher-rated park system than both Minneapolis and Saint Paul, which have great parks — I was there. And they do it while — here in D.C., we do it while permitting more homes than they do in Minneapolis. And I think that that’s something that’s really counterintuitive for people.

EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s totally right. But when you think about the broad sweep of liberalism here, for decades, this liberalism that was — and particularly, this environmentalism — that was much more about the cost of building too much. And it had real reasons to worry about that, as you said. That built a lot of structures. It built statutes. It built movements. It built organizations. It built local government processes.

And now you have this other thing emerging. And one thing I’m tracking is that it’s, actually, very hard to change. So when you look at California, they have passed a huge number of pro-housing bills, attacking all different levels of the system. And if you look at housing starts in California, you can squint and see a bit of an effect, but there’s not been any transformation.

I was looking at Colorado, where Jared Polis has been doing a lot of work on this. Same thing — you’re not seeing any transformation. I’ve looked at New York. Same thing — you’re not seeing any transformation.

So this stuff is actually pretty hard to unwind.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah. If we were having this conversation 10 or 15 years ago, Ezra, we would be having it in a diagnosing a futile illness sort of way. The way that political scientists talked about this problem, the way that activists or people talk about this problem, for decades before was in a very resigned tone. They’re like, this is just the way that it is. It’s over. We’ve lost this. This is going to be a problem for a really long time. That was the posture towards this entire problem.

And so the reason why I’m a little optimistic here is that I’m just shocked that, basically, any major legislation has been passed on this issue. And it happened pretty rapidly over the course of the last few years. 2020 was a real catalyst year, when the rest of the country began seeing the real impact of the run-up in housing costs. And their local restrictions became very relevant as they started experiencing that population growth.

And I do think that is the beginning of how change actually works, that you have environmental organizations, including Sierra Club chapters, that, historically, have been some of the largest barriers in certain areas to trying to get some of these laws changed, now on the same side as people who are trying to make it easier to build more housing and relax some of these environmental regulations. I think that there’s a real potential shift happening here.

Do I know that this is going to actually win out? No. I think there are a lot of strong forces arrayed against it. There’s just an asymmetry towards getting things done versus towards opposing it. In order to get something done on this question, you have to align so many different groups. You have to align so many different interests. You have to get real champions to take on political risks in order to do this and to work against the people that they’re usually in coalitions with.

It is not an easy thing to do. But given that the expectation just a few years ago is that very little would ever get done on this issue, I do feel optimistic.

EZRA KLEIN: All right. Here’s hoping. Always our final question — what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: So my first two books are very much on these questions of how we got here. How did we see all these regulations come up, and what changed within liberalism in the latter half of the 20th century?

The first is by Lily Geismer. It’s called “Don’t Blame Us.” And it’s a book that looks very closely at the Boston suburbs to see the changes that led to a lot of the regulations and opposition that is causing a lot of the sclerosis we see today.

And then there’s “The Bulldozer in the Countryside” by Adam Rome. It’s another really great book about environmentalism and really situates environmentalism in the United States as coming up as a reaction to changes in the urban core and suburbanization, that that is really the catalyzing force for how it gets so many adherents is that suburbanites really get concerned about the change in their communities.

The final book — I always like to recommend a fiction book on this — well, it’s not really fiction — but George Saunders’s book, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” is a book on writing. But all really great books about writing are, actually, great books about thinking. And so that one is one I read recently that has really helped change my writing process but also, I think, fortify some of how I think through problems.

EZRA KLEIN: All great books about writing are really great books about thinking. I love that.

Jerusalem Demsas, thank you for all your work here. It’s been a pleasure.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Thank you.

EZRA KLEIN: This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checked by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Aman Sahota. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thank you to Sonia Herrero.

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