Jacques Véron

Biologists and environmentalists have long accused the human population and population growth of being largely if not solely responsible for environmental deterioration. Demographers, meanwhile, have been reluctant to venture into a debate that seemed outside the scope of their discipline. That is no longer the case. Specifically, the issue of environmental or climate migration has taken on great importance in their disciplinary remit. But one of the great difficulties is that we need to reconcile macroscopic and microscopic perspectives on relations between population and the environment. Given the diversity of the world’s ecosystems, what seems to have been proved at a local scale does not lend itself to generalization. What’s more, population distribution across the earth is highly uneven, meaning that issues and problems vary from one place to another. 

Nonetheless, the international community must address the challenge of rising demographic pressure, and the primary means of doing so is to campaign for lifestyles that will be less aggressive toward the environment. Given that the impacts of population, human consumption, and technological progress compound each other, if the world’s population did stabilize, it would be important for consumption to remain stable too rather than “taking over” from population and rising in turn. And while technological progress does provide solutions, it also creates new problems by working to further artificialize the world. Regarding the relationship between population and the climate, more investigations are needed. 

It does seem misguided to think that world population growth could be curbed in a top-down voluntary way. Population policies designed solely to limit births are largely ineffective. The history of family planning in India is there to prove it: the first programs date from the early 1950s, and India’s population has not been stabilized yet. Without genuine development, we cannot expect a significant fall in fertility in high-fertility countries. As I see it, development should give priority to health and education matters, particular for women. 

So what is the role of demography in all this? If we go back to the essentials, every human being puts some degree of strain on the environment, a degree determined by their level and type of consumption—especially the issue of how easily the goods they use can be recycled. In this respect we are profoundly unequal. Climate injustice is simply a fact. In theory, the soon-to-be 8 billion human beings should be weighted by how much each furthers deterioration of the environment. But this would require utterly impossible breakdowns as many types of environmental damage—deforestation, for example—cannot be “distributed” among individuals. The world’s population is not one and indivisible! 

Nonetheless, demography, through its scientifically informed demographic projections, does offers a general frame. To proceed further, we need specify the connections between population dynamics, the environment, and development. Here, demographic study of extreme environmental events has much to teach us because it brings to light contrasting “responses” to such events in terms of fertility, mortality, and population movements. Rather than a particular phenomenon, we need to conceive of what can be called demographic systems and how they are related to development (but what kind of development?) and the environment (but what, really, does that last term cover when more than half the world’s population live in cities?).