Cyclone Pam (2015) flooding in Vanatu, Port Vila seafront on 14 March -- Public domain/wikipedia

By Kirsten Stade
SAINT PAUL, Minnesota, USA, Aug 1 2025 (IPS)

While recent heat waves were causing thousands of deaths, the Trump administration was busy dismantling policies that regulate greenhouse gases on the theory they don’t harm human health.

Meanwhile, the international community appears to be getting serious about climate change, as evidenced by a new ruling by the International Court of Justice that countries harmed by climate change can sue those responsible.

The ruling, triggered by a group of Pacific Island students facing inundation of their homes from sea level rise, opens a pathway to financial compensation from countries that emit the most greenhouse gases, as well as assistance in restoring ecosystems and infrastructure damaged by climate change.

The ICJ ruling comes amid the planned evacuation of the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu, with 80% of its 11,000 residents seeking climate visas to emigrate to the Australian mainland. Island nations like Tuvalu and Vanuatu, which led the ICJ case, stand to suffer the most from climate change.

The ruling is an acknowledgement that those who bear most of the responsibility – especially the richest 1% of humanity who generate 66% of GHG emissions – should share more of the costs.

Reparations from high-emitting countries are a first step toward climate justice, a partial remediation of wildly uneven distribution of the wealth and harms of global economic growth, which has caused emissions to skyrocket. Billionaires’ net worth climbed by $2 trillion in the past year, while the number of people in poverty has changed little since 1990.

Climate change compounds the misery of those left behind in this system. They will comprise many of the one to two billion displaced or killed by climate change this century.

Globalization and endless economic growth was sold with the promise of alleviating poverty for billions of people. Yet the majority of the benefits flow to the few at the top, leaving less than 10% of wealth for the bottom 50%. The rest flows to the global middle class, set to grow to 5.3 billion by 2030, with most of that growth concentrated in Asia.

This rapidly growing class of consumers means rapidly growing demand for fossil fuels, transportation, appliances, processed and packaged foods, and meat-centric diets, all of which spell enormous increases in greenhouse gases.

This explains why population growth and accompanying global consumption growth account for most of the increase in carbon emissions since 1990, according to the International Panel on Climate Change. It cancels out most of the reduction in emissions from clean energy, efficiency, and alternative technologies.

The hundreds of millions of people emerging from poverty deserve a better standard of living. But the middle-class lifestyle marketed to the world through globalization spreads at the cost of diverse, traditional, more Earth-centered lifeways. Its spread is not a simple “development” success story; it demands redressing unsustainable levels of consumption across all socioeconomic classes and the vast inequalities that remain.

There is no greater inequality than ecological overshoot, where we use resources faster than Earth can regenerate, and our pollution, including climate pollution, surpasses what warming oceans, disappearing forests, and degraded ecosystems can absorb. This year, July 24 marked Earth Overshoot Day, the date past which that capacity is exceeded for the rest of the year. It comes earlier each year as our consumption and waste accelerate, signifying we are increasingly stealing from future generations by destroying planetary life support systems they and all other species need to survive.

Climate reparations are a step toward climate justice for people alive today, but do nothing about the profound intergenerational and interspecies injustice of ecological overshoot. To address that, there is no escaping the need to scale back our economies, our consumption, our waste production, and our numbers.

Finally, after decades of economic and population growth at the expense of the future, contraction may be on the horizon. Unrestrained extraction has brought our economic system to a point of diminishing returns. From fossil fuels to fresh water to trace minerals used to build renewable energy systems, resources are running short, and we can expect this to limit future economic growth.

Given these realities, global fertility declines should be cause for celebration, yet recent news about record low fertility rates of 1.6 children per woman in the United States has been met with alarm by political leaders and wealthy interests who benefit from perpetual growth.

But those who care about the well-being of humanity and the planet ought to welcome declining population growth in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. It is a partial reprieve for the climate, and a relief valve for growing inflationary pressures from resource scarcity.

Climate reparations and broader conversations about climate justice are necessary but not sufficient. Protecting and restoring our planet’s climate and ecosystems will require fundamental re-ordering of our economic system, away from endless growth, ecological overshoot, and enriching a few, towards rational contraction, operating within Earth’s limits, and providing for the basic needs of all.

Kirsten Stade is a conservation biologist and Staff Writer and Editor for the NGO Population Balance.

IPS UN Bureau

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Indonesia’s largest coal mining company in operation. Even "green" energy requires destructive mining for trace minerals. Credit: Dominik Vanyi

By Kirsten Stade and Alan Ware
SAINT PAUL, Minnesota, May 23 2025 (IPS)

As the United States lurches toward isolationism and authoritarianism, its political problems are now bleeding into pocketbook anxieties that Trump’s policies will torpedo economic growth, both domestically and globally.

The UN forecasts a slowdown in global economic growth due to Trump’s destructive tariff and trade policies. Though stocks rallied as the US suspended some tariffs, and some analysts are spinning the numbers positively, economic growth signals have turned decidedly negative.

US GDP shrank 0.3% in the first quarter. Moody’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating citing burgeoning US debt and an unfavorable debt-to-GDP ratio.

In most countries, GDP is an indicator of a society’s success — even though it includes things like military expansion, oil spill cleanups, and prison construction. Growthism goes mostly unchallenged and passes for a rational guiding principle for governance and proxy for human well-being.

Yet it ignores important things like climate change, biodiversity collapse, and pollution which are the consequences of endless economic growth, and which threaten the survival of humanity and the millions of species with whom we share this planet.

Economic growth is not just failing as an indicator of human progress. It is failing as an indicator of economic health. The vast majority of economic growth in recent years has accrued to the top 1%. Meanwhile rates of growth in rich countries have been slowing for decades while global debt continues to rise more rapidly.

Understanding why requires understanding the central role of cheap energy in modern civilization. Roads, bridges, sewers, airports, and the electrical grid were all constructed on the back of cheap energy and materials.

With the discovery and extraction of fossil fuels 200 years ago began the modern industrial era, and a frenzy of human enterprise that would not have otherwise been possible.

Now maintenance of all this infrastructure has come due. Those roads, bridges, sewer and water systems are disintegrating and require expensive and ongoing maintenance, on top of new construction to provide for growing populations and economies. But the energy and materials required for all this are no longer as easy to come by.

Skyrocketing debt is a claim on future resources, as all economic activity is dependent on minerals, wood, clean water, and of course fossil fuels that are increasingly scarce and expensive.

Growing risks of climate catastrophes add further to escalating costs, as skyrocketing homeowners insurance adds to the cost of housing. Against this backdrop, prospects for continued economic growth look bleak indeed.

These realities are largely absent from mainstream discourse about economic growth, suffocated under endless proclamations of faith in human ingenuity. Growth proponents are fond of invoking a seamless “green energy transition” without acknowledging that electricity is only 20% of global energy demand, and essential building blocks of growth – steel, cement, fertilizer, and plastics – are manufactured using fossil fuels in processes that cannot be decarbonized at scale.

Renewable technologies themselves require vast amounts of these materials in their construction, along with trace minerals like lithium, cobalt, and other metals whose mining ravages ecosystems, pollutes water, exploits child labor, and requires massive inputs of fossil fuel energy.

Renewables boosters fail to acknowledge that with constant population growth there has never been an energy transition, only energy addition. Even as uptake of “renewable” technologies has expanded since 2000, global coal use went up by 80% over the same period.

Rather than deal with this, growth enthusiasts espouse boundless faith in human innovation. But innovation is slowing according to many measures, and has done little to change the cost of life’s essentials: food, housing, transportation, health care, and education have proven remarkably resistant to breakthroughs that would lower prices or improve quality. As one of Donald Trump’s favorite growth proponents, Peter Thiel, argues, we’re seeing innovation in bits, not atoms.

AI is perhaps the last bastion of hope for continued economic growth, with allegedly unlimited potential for finding new sources of energy and driving production while minimizing capital and labor costs. For all the hype, though, real breakthroughs in materials and energy remain to be seen from AI, which is simply a means to turbocharge extraction of finite materials that will still run out, only sooner.

Meanwhile, AI data centers guzzle fossil fuel energy and require billions of gallons of water to cool all that frenetic digital activity.

No doubt there are still some ways we can squeeze a bit more economic growth out of a system already in ecological overshoot and demanding more of the planet than it has to give or can regenerate. But further growth will require further ravaging nature and the world’s poor, already pushed to the brink.

Is that truly the best path to improve human well-being, especially for the most impoverished who are the most directly impacted by further exploiting and depleting the land, water, trees and minerals?

Ultimately, the question is not how we can tweak the growth system to prolong it indefinitely. It is whether we will face disaster brought on by economic and environmental collapse and all its consequent human suffering, and to make the choice to shrink our population and economy.

It’s whether we are wise enough to choose simplicity over excess and relationships over commodities. Continued economic growth benefits the few already at the top, but conscious, gradual contraction enables the basics of a good life for all. The choice should be clear.

Kirsten Stade is a conservation biologist and Lead Writer at the NGO Population Balance. Alan Ware is a researcher and writer who cohosts Population Balance’s OVERSHOOT podcast.

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By Kirsten Stade
ST PAUL, Minnesota, USA, May 25 2023 (IPS)

A new study estimates that global heating will push billions of people outside the comfortable range of temperature and weather in which we have evolved.

While coverage of the study notes that rapid emissions cuts could greatly reduce the number of people forced to live amid unprecedented extremes, it fails to mention the obvious: that reducing our population would have the same effect.

Not long ago, the idea that human population growth drives both human suffering and environmental decline was considered common sense. That changed in the 1990s in the wake of several egregious population control programs, ranging from China’s one-child policy to forced sterilizations in China, India, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere.

Today, the mere mention of population growth in connection with environmental protection or human well-being gets demonized as “neo-Malthusian” or “eugenicist” – notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of efforts to lower fertility, whether to alleviate poverty or to reduce pressure on resources, have been rights-based and voluntary.

What is most troubling about this mischaracterization is that it deflects attention from the enormous violations of reproductive rights that occur in the name of increasing reproduction.

Pronatalism — the social pressures, religious doctrine, and government policies designed to induce people to have more children – has long been the most prevalent form of reproductive coercion.

Impressed upon people by family members, religious leaders, and politicians pursuing racist, nationalist, military, and/or economic agendas, pronatalism shows up through abortion bans and alarmist messaging that promotes childbirth for certain ethnic groups. The common thread is treating people as reproductive vessels for external agendas.

Over 218 million women worldwide who want to avoid pregnancy have an unmet need for contraception. This troubling reality is the result of both simple unavailability of contraceptives, and of deep-seated pronatalist attitudes–often held by husbands and other family members- that make it impossible for women to use them.

When women are expected to produce large families regardless of their own wants, pronatalism not only denies their reproductive autonomy; it also worsens poverty and damages the environment. A new study by the Swedish Research Council debunks the stubborn misconception that population growth has a negligible effect on climate change since it’s concentrated in low-consumption countries.

In fact, the study finds, population growth is the biggest driver of carbon emissions and is canceling out emissions reductions made through renewables and efficiency. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), population growth is one of the “strongest drivers of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the last decade.”

Population growth and resultant agricultural expansion drive water scarcity, soil depletion, deforestation, land degradation, and damage to ecosystems that humans depend on. The connection between population growth and environmental impacts is clear, yet frequently denied, and this denial has real consequences.

Since addressing population growth fell out of favor in the 1990s, international funding for family planning declined 35 percent and falls far short of meeting global need.

Population denialism is reminiscent of climate denialism in its disregard for science and its failure to acknowledge the suffering of millions. Population deniers invoke Malthus and Margaret Sanger to invalidate population concerns by associating them with infamous sources, while ignoring unimpeachable ones like the IPCC.

While Malthus’ doomism and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb failed to foresee new agricultural technologies that averted the famine and population crash they predicted, population denialists make the opposite mistake.

They adhere to a cornucopian faith that technology will magically solve our problems, and assume that new low-carbon energy sources and unproven interventions like carbon capture will fix everything.

They won’t.

In fact green tech raises serious environmental and social problems of its own. Solar and wind energy and the infrastructure for transmitting the power they generate requires far more land area than fossil fuel plants, with consequences for wildlife and its habitat. Lithium-ion batteries in electric cars and e-bikes use cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by low-wage workers subjected to toxic dumping and en masse displacement.

Population deniers are rightly concerned with equitable development of the world’s impoverished regions, but development will mean more emissions, more water use, more habitat destruction.

If current trends continue, the global middle class is projected to reach 5 billion by 2030. To enable all people to attain a reasonable standard of living without further straining natural systems, we must make access to family planning for all people a matter of urgent international concern.

The good news is that doing so reaps rewards not only for the planet but for human well-being. In every culture where fertility rates have declined, even staggering government investment in pronatalist incentives is insufficient to compel women to go back to the high birth rates they have left behind – an indication that women have a latent wish for low fertility.

This suggests that the path forward lies in acknowledging both the human and environmental toll of high birth rates and resultant population growth, and giving women the universal, free access to contraceptives and abortion care that will enable them to realize their reproductive wishes.

Kirsten Stade is a conservation biologist and communications manager of the NGO Population Balance

IPS UN Bureau

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