The recently concluded United Nations’ climate change conference in Copenhagen presented a rare opportunity for China to cast its stringent three-decade-old, one-child policy in a positive light.
Population tends to be the elephant in the room of climate policy debate, but not so for China. Beijing made sure that members of the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC) were part of China’s large official delegation to Copenhagen.
Zhao Baige, vice minister of the NPFPC briefed foreign journalists and held press conferences in which the message was loud and clear: China’s one-child policy has been a boon to the earth’s environment.
At a press conference, Zhao said that China’s birth rate was reduced from more than 1.8 per cent in 1978 to around 1.2 per cent in 2007, resulting in an estimated 400 million fewer births in total.
“Such a decline in population growth converts into a reduction of 1.83 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in China every year,” Zhao claimed.
China was thus able to take its often coercive family-planning policy to Copenhagen as an example of its efforts to combat global warming, a strategy that throws into relief the complicated but increasingly discernible points of intersection between population and climate change.
These are intersections that will have major repercussions for a country like India, with its enormous population and heavy reliance on the per capita argument that is one of the major fault lines between the developed and developing world in the global climate change discourse.
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India contends that although it may be the world’s fifth-largest emitter of green house gases in absolute terms, its per capita emissions are far lower than that of the majority of countries at one-twentieth the United States’ and one-tenth the European Union’s. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made per capita convergence (of the developed and developing world) Indian climate change policy’s underlying principle, saying that while India’s emissions will grow, they will never cross the per capita levels of the rich world.
But the per capita argument is already raising questions of why countries with smaller populations should have to bear the climate brunt of the failure of population control in countries like India. The United Nations predicts India will have 1.7 billion people by 2050, vastly overtaking China which will by then have a population of only 1.4 billion
Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh nodded in the direction of this line of reasoning when he said in a speech to Parliament last year that India’s vast population was “not a credit for us”, adding that “our single-biggest failure in the last 60 years is our inability to control our population growth rate”.
Away from the climate change discussion, the manner in which population tends to be framed today is dramatically different from that of a couple of decades ago. In India itself, the linking of population to increased and unsustainable competition for resources is no longer in vogue. The talk is instead of India’s “demographic dividend”.
According to Morgan Stanley, by 2020 the average Indian will be 29 years old compared to 37 for a one-child-policy China. The argument is that while the world’s richer nations and China confront the burden of caring for an army of retirees, India will continue to have more and more workers entering the highest producing/consuming phase of their lives, ostensibly representing a boon for the economy.
But not only does the demographic-dividend school of thought not address the issue of the lack of education and employment opportunities for this new, huge pool of young people, it also leaves unaddressed the linkage with climate change.
This is a link, however, that has begun to be made elsewhere, and not just in China. In a recent New York Times blog, climate correspondent Andrew Revkin commented on how he found it strange that the “P” word was missing from all the draft agreements floating around the Copenhagen negotiations. If population is poised to increase sharply in regions already vulnerable to the effects of climate change and climate change is at least partly the result of human actions, “how can population be excluded from any discussion of ways to limit exposure to climate risks”, he asked.
And while this is a question that may not be a mainstream one yet, it’s certainly not confined to the loony fringe either. Even reputable organisations like the Optimum Population Trust, whose patrons include the eminent naturalist David Attenborough, the scientist Jane Goodall and professors at Cambridge and Stanford, essentially argue that more people equal more greenhouse gases, suggesting that rigorous population control is the only way to save the planet going forward.
Calling for “fewer emitters, lower emissions”, the group offers members the chance to offset the pollution that they generate through the purchase of family-planning devices in poor countries.
The climate discussion is likely to grow even more contentious in the years ahead as the effects of global warming progress from being paper-threats to experienced reality. It is then conceivable that population, despite political difficulties, will become more of a directly addressed part of the debate.
The per capita argument, when framed as failure of population control, loses some of its moral weight. In that situation, India will find itself at a particular disadvantage. New Delhi seems to have pinned its colours to Beijing’s climate-strategy mast for the moment, but given their divergence on population policy, cracks in this unity are foreseeable.