Population Control

On Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of listening to Mary Robinson deliver a key note address entitled 'Copenhagen: Delivering Climate Justice'. The event was organised by Oxfam Ireland in association with TIDI.

The audience who were lucky enough to be in attendance took the rare opportunity to pose some tough questions about the science of climate change, its proposed link to future conflicts over natural resources, the need for a perpetual recession and the current thorn in the side of development education and practice - population control.

Climate change has been recently targeted by commentators who believe that the current and projected future growth in the populations of the developing world is what stands in the way of true development. Indeed, the UN Population Fund recently pointed the finger at the projected rise in the population of the developing world by 2050 as a reason for why climate change could worsen dramatically.

These commentators refuse to take concepts such as consumption into account. If they did they would have a hard time excusing countries whose population growth is considerably less than many nations in the developing world but yet have ridiculously higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions. They also fail to appreciate that education leads to greater family planning within communities and that the provision of education and the creation of the appropriate structures to facilitate this is a long process that should not be replaced by some quick fix condemnation.

It is both dangerous and alarmist to link climate change or indeed poverty to population control. It is disgraceful to essentially propose enforced population control and is an affront to human rights norms. Change will happen from within. This internal change should be facilitated, not prescribed.

However, NGOs and others in the development sector better start addressing the growing obsession with the notion of population control and start putting forward a strong case to counter some of the fallacies that we are currently being forced to listen to.