Overpopulation has been a threat to the planet since long before anyone heard of climate change.
English economist Thomas Malthus first sounded an alarm about the potential for population growth to overwhelm the planet’s natural resources in 1798. The alarm rang again in 1968 with Paul Erlich’s doomsday treatise “The Population Bomb,” and has reverberated since in the background of the climate crisis: All else being equal, more people means more emissions, more hungry mouths, more potential victims of natural catastrophes.
If that’s the case, the collapse of the global birth rate should be encouraging for the fight against climate change: A new set of population projections published on July 14 by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) found that global population will peak in 2064, at 9.73 billion. By 2100, at least two dozen countries—including China, Thailand, Japan, and Spain—will see their populations fall by about one-half.