Population and Consumption

Introduction
There are limited natural resources on Earth and when humans consume those resources, there are limited amounts of space to absorb the pollution we produce. Our impact on the environment is a product of how many resources we consume, how much waste we create, and how many of us are consuming and polluting at any given time. Environmental scientists have developed theories designed to project the environmental effects of various alternatives in population policy, research and development policy, and consumption trends. These scientists have recognized that the size of our population, the amount of our consumption, and the technologies we use are intrinsically linked. Multiplied together these three factors can determine the total impact a particular group of humans, or the collective human culture, has on the global environment.

Public policies that address population and technology concerns have been more common than policies targeted at reducing consumption practices. Most nations actively support the reproductive health programs and stronger educational systems that in the long run contribute to slowing population growth.¹ There has also been significant investment in the development of new technologies that are less harmful to the environment. In comparison, public policies to reduce consumption have been rare.

The Earth maintains a variety of natural processes—from the global nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen cycles, to hydraulic cycles, to unique, localized forest ecosystems. Some natural processes are being stressed by just one of the three factors of population, consumption, or technology, while other natural processes are being degraded by a combination of these three factors. To understand these environmental stresses, demographers, sociologists, and engineers track and study trends in population, consumption, and technology. A strong understanding of all of these trends is critical for understanding why, in most cases, human impact on the environment is becoming increasingly destructive.

The size of world population has a direct impact on certain natural systems. For example, increased population, especially in certain nations, leads to greater livestock farming, rice production, and landfill use, all of which produce methane, one of the gases known to contribute to the process of global warming.²

Of greater significance for natural systems is the relative size of local populations. In general, as human populations rise, the stresses on various ecosystems increase. For example, freshwater reserves within a watershed are depleted more rapidly as population grows. This depletion has little impact on watersheds that receive ample rainfall, but population growth can have greater impacts in drier regions, which can experience water scarcity when human populations swell.

Geographic location also affects human population. This is illustrated by the uneven distribution of population throughout the world. This difference in population density between high-density regions (e.g., Central Europe, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia) and low-density regions (e.g., Australia, the Artic, North Africa, and Central Asia) has been caused, in large part, by different supplies of natural resources (e.g., rivers, prime farmland) and different patterns of social development (e.g., the reduction of death rates in the twentieth century in some nations) throughout various historical periods. In more recent times, improved technologies have helped nations with large populations reduce some aspects of their environmental impact. Many nations with lower population densities, however, have experienced a relative lack of sustainable technologies that has led to widespread deforestation, water scarcity, and terrestrial pollution.

Educating women in methods of contraception, and educating men to support those methods, has historically helped to slow overall population growth. Quite apart from population-level issues, the availability of contraception also addresses an individual human right to make decisions about bearing children. The 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo stated that “[a]ll couples and individuals have the basic right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children and to have the information, education, and means to do so.”³ Various religious and cultural traditions hold different opinions on whether this freedom of making decisions about bearing children includes the ability to obtain an abortion. These differences have led to widely varied national policies regarding legal access to abortion services.

Movements seeking to assist individuals with contraception and efforts to aid societies with the process of controlling their population levels have been intertwined since their origins in Europe and the United States (US) during the late nineteenth century. Organizations in the international family-planning movement introduced the first birth control clinics in the early twentieth century. The most significant organization in this ongoing movement, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, was established in 1952 and has led in the expansion of government-funded contraception programs to most countries. Concern about population growth was revived by Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb (1968), which inspired a new movement of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as the US-based Zero Population Growth, to work toward new limits of population growth.⁴ Reflecting the development of more complex environmental and social theories, Zero Population Growth renamed itself the Population Connection in 2002 in order to emphasize connections “between population, the environment, and women’s empowerment.”⁵

Developed nations provide a large portion of the funding for family-planning programs in other nations, but the inclusion of abortion services or referrals for abortions in these programs has cut the flow of some foreign assistance grants. From 1984 to 1993, and again since 1999, the US government has limited or denied its grant funding to any projects initiated by NGOs that “perform or actively promote abortion.” Many members of the US Congress have required this policy in return for their support of other forms of foreign assistance as well as US contributions to the United Nations.

Population growth also affects economic relationships within certain societies. It can heighten inequalities between the rich and poor because large, impoverished households have less money to invest in each individual child’s education, health care, and nutrition. Many cities and even entire nations have failed to expand their schools, health systems, and other social services fast enough to meet the demands of rapidly growing populations. In rural areas, land holdings are split into smaller and smaller properties when several children must share a family inheritance. This can lead to even greater poverty through reduced per capita agricultural productivity.

Nations have tried many policies to decrease poverty. In terms of population issues, China’s “one-child policy,” developed in the 1970s, has been the most remarkable. Under this policy, the Chinese government has promoted having no more than one child as a social responsibility. Ethnic minorities and, to some extent, rural families have been exempted from this campaign. Couples violating the policy have faced large fines and, during the 1980s, some women were subjected to forced abortions and forced sterilization. The ratio of male children to female children remains high in China, providing further evidence that the one-child policy has violated the human rights of women to determine their own childbirth.

Consumption
Consumption is the second factor affecting the environment. Greater consumption leads to worsening environmental conditions, but a certain level of consumption is needed to fulfill basic human needs. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees that “[e]veryone has the right to a standard of living [that is] adequate for the health and well-being of himself [sic] and of his [sic] family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services.”⁶ In order to fulfill these basic needs, much of the world’s population will have to increase its consumption of certain goods and services.

Among more affluent people, many are finding it difficult to make environmentally sustainable choices that also enable them to obtain employment, a quality education, and a secure home. For example, many people drive long distances to get to their place of employement because they want to live in the safest residential neighborhoods with the best school systems that they can afford. Such lifestyles create unsustainable levels of pollution, yet reducing that pollution while also retaining the benefits of employment, a quality education, and personal safety, remains a difficult challenge. In some cases, the culture of “conspicuous consumption” drives unnecessary waste, but many consumption challenges require more than individual change. They require political and cultural solutions on a much larger scale.⁷

Political solutions that provide adequate consumption levels, as well as political liberty and environmental sustainability, are difficult to attain simultaneously. Many economists believe that free-market capitalism can lead to the production of enough goods for all the world’s people. They believe that the leading alternative to capitalism—centrally planned socialism—cannot achieve this goal. However, the consumption patterns established by free-market, developed nations cannot be replicated worldwide without severe environmental damage. If every adult in the world began to drive a gasoline-powered car, the resultant global atmospheric damage would be catastrophic. In this manner, even population growth in a large country with low carbon emissions (e.g., India) may lead to large increases in carbon emissions in the future if the country adopts the current consumption patterns of other developed nations. Ecological economists are currently developing economic models in which consumer choice and the elimination of poverty can be obtained in an environmentally sustainable manner.⁸

Technology
The third factor affecting the environment is technology. Governments around the world are focusing on the development of environmentally friendly technologies in an effort to maintain a cleaner environment. Advances such as flourescent light bulbs or hydrogen-powered automobiles can accommodate increased consumption while also significantly reducing environmental degradation. Even though these advances are helpful, they also carry risks and unintended consequences. The full impacts of risks are not always readily apparent. In many cases, these effects appear decades after the new technologies have been adopted. Additionally, the release of a new technology does not necessarily mean that consumers will migrate over to these new products. Furthermore, in many societies, excitement over technological improvements has overshadowed the benefits of stabilizing population growth and changing cultural values to curb excess consumption. Most technological innovations do not effectively reduce consumption practices.

Historically, the greatest impact on population levels has occurred when advancements in medical technology (e.g., vaccinations, pharmaceutical drugs, nutrition, and preventive care) have been promoted. Many medical problems that once killed many young adults (e.g., infections, smallpox) have been significantly reduced or eliminated in many regions, and this has led to an increase in the population of older adults in most nations.

These medical achievements, however, are tenuous as they are often effected by changes in the global environment. For example, as global climate change increases temperatures and changes climates throughout the world, it enables viruses to live in places where they were not previously found. These changes, therefore, may allow viruses to survive in new locations where they have not previouslly existed and/or manifest themselves as resurgent diseases in new geographic locations.⁹ If human life spans were to decrease due to an increase and/or change in disease patterns, global population growth would begin to recede. Most public-health scholars are confident that they have the tools to control existing diseases wherever they may occur. They are less sure, however, about how they will cure new diseases that may be incited by significant changes in global temperatures.

In developed nations, increases in average life span appear to have led to decreases in birthrates. As women, for example, become more secure that all or most of their children will survive well into adulthood, they tend to choose to bear fewer children. New rights and opportunities for women in employment also have an impact on the reduction of birthrates.

This process of high population growth due to medical advances, followed by lower birthrates due to an improving quality of life, is called the “demographic transition.” During the demographic transition, population levels soar, but once the transition is complete, population tends to stabilize. In some European nations, population (excluding the effects of immigration) has even begun to decline. Yet overall, the successful implementation of medical technologies has generally led to an increase in population levels that has placed additional stress on the health and well-being of the environment.

Environmental Impact Theory
Regional ecosystems are jointly facing several global environmental challenges, most notably: global climate change, nitrogen loading of the atmosphere, and the depletion of the ozone layer. Local ecosystems are also challenged by particular local circumstances. In addition to other global environmental stressors, each ecosystem also faces its own set of environmental issues (e.g., the scarcity of food and water, the loss of forests and topsoil).

Global IPAT Analysis
To determine the level of human impact on an environmental process, whether global, regional, or local, ecologists use a multiplication formula called “IPAT,” which stands for Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology.¹⁰ The environmental “impact” experienced in a particular location is a result of the human “population” of the area, the “affluence” in terms of the amount of material goods consumed by those individuals, and the “technology” in terms of the amount of natural resources and wastes consumed in the production of those material goods.

The IPAT model has both benefits and detriments. It serves to illustrate the forces driving individual processes (e.g., environmental damage from agriculture, greenhouse gas emissions, and water pollution) and can help uncover which type of change—population, affluence, or technology—would do the most to help reduce human impact on the environment.¹¹ The formula, however, is not able to successfully adjust to encompass every environmental process found on the planet. The analyses has proven useful, however, for understanding either global environmental process or local environmental systems.

One useful example of IPAT analysis at the global level is a study of the impact of global agriculture on freshwater supplies. Many agricultural products and technologies are traded internationally, so it is relevant to study the international environmental results of such activities, such as how global agricultural systems are affecting freshwater supplies throughout the world. Improved irrigation technologies have enabled farmers to produce more food with less water. Steady increases in population and consumption, however, have outweighed the benefits of the greater water efficiency that these new technologies have provided. Policy makers must now weigh the effect changes in each of the three factors might have on freshwater supplies. Would a marked slowdown in population growth have a significant effect? Is a reduction in food consumption in wealthy nations achievable, and would it have a major impact on freshwater availability? Are further technological improvements the policy emphasis that would best aid the environment? The IPAT model illustrates that any of these three solutions would help slow environmental degradation, but one of them may do more to restore freshwater supplies than the others. In their article “Bridging Environmental Science with Environmental Policy: Plasticity of Population, Affluence, and Technology,” US sociologists Richard York, Eugene A. Rosa, and Thomas Dietz provide an example of IPAT analysis. Their findings show that reducing food consumption (e.g., substituting soy for meat) will do relatively little to reduce environmental impact in comparison to slowing population growth.¹² Both efforts may be worthwhile, but policy makers with a scarcity of resources are choosing to emphasize birth control over vegetarianism.

A second example of global IPAT analysis—studying the forces driving greenhouse gas emissions—provides a contrasting example of population and consumption processes. Developed countries currently produce several times more greenhouse gases per capita than developing countries.¹³ Slowing population growth in developing countries will do very little to help preserve global climate patterns, at least in the short-term. Thus the short-term emphasis has been on reduction of consumption (e.g., living closer to work to shorten commutes) and the implementation of technological improvements. Childbirth in developed nations is already near the steady “replacement” level, and many economists believe that decreasing national populations would threaten economic prosperity, so a policy of decreasing population in high-polluting nations has not been pursued. This analysis might change, however, in the long-term. Low-polluting developing nations may become, in just a few generations, high-polluting developed nations. Current population growth in developing nations could have a major impact on long-term increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

Local IPAT Analysis
IPAT analysis can be used on a local scale to study the factors leading to a variety of environmental challenges, such as:

1. depletion of freshwater supplies in a watershed
   
   
2. deforestation of a wildlife habitat or a forest traditionally used as commons for harvesting
   
   
3. pollution of land and water that causes extinction of local species
   
   
4. pollution of land and water driven by rapid urbanization, where municipal services (e.g., water, sewage, trash collection) fail to expand as quickly as sprawling settlement
   
   
5. pollution of land, water, and air from increased consumption, especially in wealthier nations

Local population levels, local resource use, and local technological implementation are primarily responsible for local environmental problems. International economic relationships, however, add to these local problems and can have significant detrimental effects on various local environmental issues. For example, in many localities, agricultural products are primarily cash crops for export to other nations, not food for local consumption. Environmental choices on these farms, such as permitting topsoil erosion or pesticide contamination, are often made by multi-national corporations and have little to do with the local population, their consumption choices, or the technologies they have developed. In many cases local production may increase significantly, but there is only a slight corresponding increase in local consumption. This introduces a new complexity into local IPAT analysis because “affluence” must also include local production for outside consumption.

Carrying Capacity and Ecological Footprints
The level of impact on a local watershed or habitat varies, depending on the susceptibility or resilience of that particular ecosystem. Various regions have different “carrying capacities”—the amount of environmental impact natural processes can withstand before rapid degradation occurs, such as the extinction of species or a loss of soil fertility. The impact of a particular human settlement can be described as an “ecological footprint”—the extent of land, water, and atmosphere required to effectively produce goods and absorb wastes for that community. The size of that footprint is determined through IPAT analysis.

Local societies facing local environmental challenges have a wider variety of options to preserve the Earth than the global community, because local societies can, to some extent, trade their environmental impacts. For example, China has decided to stop pursuing agricultural self-sufficiency, because in attempting to meet this goal, it was depleting its freshwater reserves too rapidly to succeed. China’s new strategy is to increase the production of goods that it can trade for food products from other countries. As the situation in China illustrates, local communities and individual nations have the option of trading with (or receiving assistance from) other communities in order to supplement exhausted resources. Local communities can even lower their population through emigration to other locations, an option that is closed to the global community.

In the case of some natural balances, such as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the entire planet may have a carrying capacity, a point at which the product of population, consumption, and technology causes global environmental degradation to accelerate. Even if every society on the planet was able to develop and implement new technologies while also cooperating in every way possible for mutual survival, planetary carrying capacities for key global cycles (e.g., nitrogen, carbon, ozone, etc.) and systems (e.g., hydraulic, atmospheric, etc.) would still remain. These carrying capacities cannot be exceeded without provoking grave environmental consequences for the entire planet.

 
Policy Initiatives
In this context, the pursuit of “population control”—policies that seek to reduce population levels—is one method among several that purports to address various environmental problems and social policy failures. Potential policy responses to these global social and environmental situations must include policies:

1. to decrease population levels
   
   
2. to reduce consumption among the current population
   
   
3. to decrease pollution and improve the efficiency of resource use through new technologies, and
   
   
4. to improve the efficiency and distribution of the necessities of life through human solidarity.

Each of these four methods has its benefits, detriments, supporters, and detractors. Different nations have put different levels of emphasis on each option. For example, there is a clear emphasis in China on slowing population growth, whereas some European nations have pioneered wide-scale use of energy efficient technologies and supported improved distribution of human necessities in poorer nations. The ability to limit the consumption of goods has been the least successful of these options.

Population
In some nations low childbirth levels are slowing or reversing national population growth. Economic and social factors play a large role in reducing childbirth. Families living in poverty are generally more likely to have more children in order to increase their prospects for economic security. Sub-Saharan Africa, the most impoverished region in the world, also has the highest population growth rate of any region, at 2.4 to 2.5 percent.¹⁴ According to the United Nations Population Fund, “Surveys show that the percentage of sub-Saharan women in a marital or consensual union who have an unmet need for family planning is the highest in the world, totaling over twenty percent in over twenty sub-Saharan countries and over thirty percent in six of them.”¹⁵

There are political and cultural reasons for the inability of many African women to make their own choices about bearing children. Wars and political instability have marginalized community organizations that could provide necessary health care services to impoverished communities. The funds needed to fully support these services have not been forthcoming from wealthier nations. The United States, for example, has recently cut international funding because of its opposition to funding organizations that perform abortion-related services. The cultural acceptance of violence against women and the cultural opposition to contraception have both been historically present in Africa but these culturally accepted ideologies are now undergoing rapid change. The traditional role of religion in governing sexual practices has also diminished, therefore there is currently little remaining correlation between the religious composition of a nation and its population growth rate.¹⁶

Many nations are finding that raising the social status of women, and providing women with opportunities outside of child-rearing, helps to reduce childbirth levels. For these reasons, fostering social equality for women in education and employment is currently a leading policy initiative for slowing the rate of population growth in developing nations. These initiatves are present in places such as Indonesia where there are now new regulations banning gender discrimination in employment. Other countries also seem to be moving in this direction albiet in other ways. In Pakistan, for example, a recent court ruling revealed that a woman must agree to her own marriage. Many other nations have increased educational opportunties for girls.¹⁷

Consumption
Policies to reduce overconsumption have been the least prominent among the four policy areas. As corporations support greater consumption to increase profits, the political power of corporations in capitalist economies has helped prevent the development of significant national policies to reduce the growth in unnecessary consumption. Policymakers do not wish to be seen as curtailing consumer choice, even though many people might choose more sustainable lifestyles if they saw opportunities to do so that maintained their safety and well-being.¹⁸ Potential consumption policies could then include campaigns to encourage consumption of basic necessities but discourage the consumption of luxury items.

Taxation policies do affect the consumption of environmentally degrading goods and services, though many of them are not primarily designed with this goal in mind. All developed nations have taxes that affect the consumption of environmentally degrading goods and services. For example, taxes on automotive fuels exist primarily because they generate very significant revenues, but they also marginally reduce fuel use. Of all environmentally related tax revenues in industrialized nations, approximately ninety percent stem from transportation taxes (e.g., gasoline taxes).¹⁹

Taxation policies that clearly promote environmental benefits are modest. There are, however, well-publicized proposals for new environmental taxes in most developed nations, making environmental taxation central to policy debates because they curtail human consumption in relation to environmental limits. Various taxes on carbon, electricity, light fuel oil, waste treatment, packaging, sulfur, and other materials and processes were pioneered by Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium in the early 1990s. Austria, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, and France have since implemented their own broad-based environmental taxes.²⁰

Technology
For many governments of developed nations, technological change has been the primary strategy for addressing environmental challenges. Governments have created anti-pollution regulations, taxes, and incentives to spur industries to develop and implement more environmentally friendly technologies. Though there has been progress in this area, ecologists argue that the energy savings produced by technological change has not yet reached its maximum potential.

Poverty and Solidarity
High consumption levels and the resultant environmental degradation produced by this consumption exist side-by-side with dire poverty in much of the world. In many ways, poverty is dangerous for the environment because sustainable actions become unaffordable options for impoverished communities. Global poverty could be eliminated by spending just a small percentage of the world’s wealth on basic social services and income support for people throughout the world. The United Nations estimates the cost of providing basic public health and nutrition services, essential clinical services, reproductive health services, safe water and sanitation, and primary education to all people that currently lack them to be eighty billion US dollars per year.²¹ To bring all people above the basic global poverty line of one dollar income per day would cost about forty billion US dollars per year.²² Thus the cost of eliminating “human poverty” (the lack of basic social services) and “income poverty” (the lack of basic income) is about 120 billion US dollars per year, or about $120 per year from a billion people who are not poor and live in a developed country.²³ The wealthier citizens of developing countries also hold wealth that could greatly assist their impoverished neighbors. Public policies to eliminate poverty would greatly aid in the decrease of childbirth rates and the slowing of population growth.

 
Conclusion
As population growth continues in most nations, governments and NGOs are implementing a variety of programs — from increases in the availability of contraception to the greater social empowerment of women—to slow its increase, because they realize that large populations have a damaging effect on local, regional, and global environments. Consumption of environmentally damaging goods and services continues to rise throughout the world as well, with too little attention paid to strategies for slowing consumption while simultaneously alleviating poverty. New technologies, both environmentally destructive and environmentally sustainable, continue to be developed. Ecologists study these three trends as the factors in assessing human impact on the environment.

Many debates about environmental protection arise among groups that disagree on policy priorities and their implications for human rights. These debates fall into four areas: population, consumption, technology, and international cooperation. One example of a population debate is the abortion issue. Slowing population growth through greater access to abortion is opposed by those who see abortion as a violation of the human right to life. Consumption policies are relatively rare, but decreased consumption among the wealthy is promoted by a social movement to “live simply.” Technology policies are vital to the relationships between corporations and governments, as corporations seek to obtain government subsidies for their own research while opposing new technologies that could negatively impact their profits. Finally, international cooperation through transfers of wealth is opposed by many leaders of governments and corporations who believe increased competition is a better means of reducing poverty because higher levels of overall wealth will “trickle down” to the poor.

Over the last few decades, governments and NGOs have increasingly studied and sought to address the many connections between population, consumption, technology, and anti-poverty policies. Rather than narrowly focusing on decreasing childbirth rates, the population-control movement now sees population as one step in a downward cycle that must be broken. James Grant, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), called this cycle the “Poverty-Population-Environment” spiral. Noting that the instability and disempowerment of poverty leads to high childbirth rates, Grant wrote “poverty forces growing numbers of people into environmentally vulnerable areas and the resulting environmental stress becomes yet another cause of their continued poverty. . . .”²⁴ In summary, many ecologists emphasize that all the factors outlined above must be addressed in order to stop the downward cycle of environmental degradation.

Additional Information
For additional information on population and consumption, consider consulting the resources listed in our Population and Consumption Links section.

Endnotes
1 For additional information see: United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and Population Reference Bureau (PRB), Country Profiles for Population and Reproductive Health: Policy Developments and Indicators 2003 (New York and Washington, D.C.: UNFPA and PRB, 2003). This document is available online at: http://www.unfpa.org/upload/lib_pub_file/200_filename_profiles2003_final.pdf.
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2 David I. Stern and Robert K. Kaufmann, “Annual Estimates of Global Anthropogenic Methane Emissions: 1860–1994,” Trends Online: A Compendium of Data on Global Change, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., USA, updated 31 August 1998, http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/meth/ch4.htm (cited 4 June 2004).
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3 United Nations, “Report of the ICPD,” A/CONF.171/13, 18 October 1994, Chapter 2, Principle 8, updated 18 October 1994, http://www.un.org/popin/icpd/conference/offeng/poa.html (cited 28 June 2002).
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4 Peter J. Donaldson and Amy Ong Tsui, “The International Family Planning Movement,” in Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption, and the Environment, ed. Laurie Ann Mazur (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994) 111–21.
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5 Population Connection Home Page, updated n.d., http://www.populationconnection.org (cited 28 June 2002).
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6 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10 December 1948), para 25, updated n.d., http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html (cited 13 July 2003).
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7 See the Forum on Religion and Ecology’s “Energy, Transportation, and Consumer Culture” page.
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8 For additional information see: Rajaram Krishnan, Jonathan M. Harris, and Neva R. Goodwin, eds., A Survey of Ecological Economics, Frontier Issues in Economic Thought, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995).
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9 For additional information see: Pim Martens and Anthony J. McMichael, eds., Environmental Change, Climate, and Health (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
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10 For additional information see: Paul R. Ehrlich and John P. Holdren, “The People Problem,” Saturday Review (4 July 1970): 42–43; Paul R. Ehrlich and John P. Holdren, “One-Dimensional Ecology,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 28, no. 5 (May 1972): 16–27; Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf, 1971); Barry Commoner, Michael Corr, and Paul J. Stamler, “The Causes of Pollution,” Environment 13, no. 3 (April 1971): 2–19. For more information on technology, see the Forum on Religion and Ecology’s “Technology” page.
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11 Richard York, Eugene A. Rosa, and Thomas Dietz, “Bridging Environmental Science with Environmental Policy: Plasticity of Population, Affluence, and Technology,” Social Science Quarterly 83, no. 1 (March 2002): 18–34.
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12 Ibid., 23–24.
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13 Most developed nations have per capita carbon dioxide emissions of two to six tons per year. In contrast, most of the world’s low-income households live in nations that emit less than one-half of one ton per year of carbon dioxide per capita. For additional information see: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group III, Climate Change 2001: Mitigation: Contribution of Working Group III to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 81. This document is available online at: http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg3/pdf/1.pdf.
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14 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 2003: Millennium Development Goals: A Compact Among Nations to End Human Poverty (UNDP, 2003) 240 [This document is available on-line at: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2003/pdf/hdr03_HDI.pdf]; United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Making 1 Billion Count: Investing in Adolescents’ Health and Rights (State of World Population 2003) (UNFPA, 2003) 74–77 [This document is available online at: http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2003/pdf/english/swp2003_eng.pdf]; United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), “Overview: Sub-Saharan Africa,” updated n.d., http://www.unfpa.org/profile/overview_africa.htm (cited 5 March 2004).
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15 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), “Overview: Sub-Saharan Africa,” updated n.d., http://www.unfpa.org/profile/overview_africa.htm (cited 5 March 2004).
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16 George Moffett, “The Population Question Revisited,” Wilson Quarterly 18, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 54–77.
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17 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Lives Together, Worlds Apart: Men and Women in a Time of Change (State of World Population 2000) (UNFPA, 2000), updated n.d., http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2000/english/ch07.html#1d (cited 6 March 2004).
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18 United Kingdom Sustainable Development Commission, “Policies for Sustainable Consumption,” report (20 May 2003), updated n.d., http://www.sd-commission.gov.uk/pubs/suscon/pdf/suscon.pdf (cited 26 February 2004).
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19 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Environmentally Related Taxes in OECD Countries: Issues and Strategies (OECD, 2001) 55. This document is available online at: http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/9701101E.PDF.
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20 Ibid.
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21 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Bank, Implementing the 20/20 Initiative: Achieving Universal Access to Basic Social Services (1998), updated n.d., http://www.unicef.org/publications/pub_implement2020_en.pdf (cited 2 July 2002).
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22 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 1997 Human Development Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 112. This document is available online at: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/1997/en/pdf/hdr_1997_ch6.pdf.
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23 In 1999 the population of the thirty developed countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was 1.12 billion. One hundred thirty million people in these countries live in income poverty, defined as below fifty percent of the nation’s equivalent median disposable household income, leaving approximately one billion people living above the poverty line in OECD countries. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 2001 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 9, 153, 157. This document is available online at: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2001/en/default.cfm.
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24 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), The State of the World’s Children 1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 29, quoted in Laurie Ann Mazur, “Beyond the Numbers: An Introduction and Overview,” in Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption, and the Environment, ed. Laurie Ann Mazur (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994) 1–20.
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