The right to choose and the need to harness population dynamics:A reconciliation under sustainable development’s paradigm

Abstract

The world population has already surpassed the 7 billion mark and is projected to grow. In addition to this population growth, billions of people will continue to migrate from rural to urban and between different countries. Demographic changes influence every aspect of the world’s development. As a result, there is an overwhelming need to rethink the development equation and to further incorporate the population growth into global and national agendas.
This paper analyzes how population issues are crucial to sustainable development and, at the same time, how sustainable development can be a useful answer to maintain population levels sustainable. The main aim is to illustrate how sustainable development can reconcile individual rights and common necessity, it is necessary to recognize the deep links between fertility, sustainability and individual rights in a very dynamic process of mutual influence.

1. The world population

The world population reached 7.3 billion as of mid-2015, in other words: one billion people has been added to the planet over the last twelve years. 60% of the global population lives in Asia (4.4 billion), 16% in Africa (1.2 billion), 10% in Europe (738 million), 9% in Latin America and the Caribbean (634 million) and the remaining 5% in Northern America (358 million) and Oceania (39 million).[1] The two largest countries remain China (1.4 billion) and India (1.3 billion) and they represent respectively 19 and 18% of the world’s population.

Currently, even if more slowly then in the (recent) past, the world population continues to grow: even if less than ten years ago (1.24% per year), it is still growing by 1.18% per year (83 million people annually). Ten years ago, world population was growing by 1.24 % per year. According to the United Nations’ medium projection variant, the world population is estimated to increase by more than one billion people within the next 15 years, reaching 8.5 billion in 2030, and to increase further to 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.

In recent years, fertility has declined in all major areas of the world. In Africa, even if the total fertility has fallen from 4.9 children per woman in 2005-2010 to 4.7 in 2010-2015, fertility levels are still the highest. Over the same period, fertility levels have also fallen in Asia and Oceania: from 2.3 to 2.2 children per woman in Asia and from 2.5 to 2.4 children per woman in Oceania. Recent fertility declines have been slightly larger in Latin America and the Caribbean where fertility has fallen from 2.3 to 2.15 and in Northern America where fertility has fallen from 2.0 in 2005-2010 to 1.86 in 2010-2015. Europe that already had a general low fertility level, is the only major area that has increased slightly: from 1.55 children per woman in 2005-2010 to 1.6 in 2010-2015.[2]

On one hand, the 48 least developed countries (LDCs) have high total fertility (4.3 children per woman in 2010-2015) and fast growing populations and amongst those, 27 are in Africa. Although the growth rate of the LDCs is projected to slow from its current 2.4% annually, the population of this group is projected to double in size by the 2050. Furthermore, this population growth will make it harder for governments to eradicate poverty and inequality, to improve the provision of basic services, to combat hunger and malnutrition, to expand education enrollment and health systems and to implement other elements of a sustainable development agenda to ensure that no-one is left behind.

On the other hand, in sharp contrast, several countries are expected to see their populations decline by more than 15% by 2050, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine. Fertility in all European countries is now below the level required for full replacement of the population in the long run (around 2.1 children per woman, on average), and in the majority of cases, fertility has been below the replacement level for several decades. Fertility for Europe is projected to increase from 1.6 children per women in 2010-2015 to 1.8 in 2045-2050, but such an increase will not prevent a likely contraction of the total population size.[3]

2. Population matters to sustainable development

To be sustainable, development has to meet ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'[4]. It is indubitable that human beings, as recalled also in the 1992 Rio Declaration, and their needs are at the center of the paradigm of sustainable development.

Hence, it is impossible to not bring the important and substantial challenges generated by population transformation and fertility transitions into the equation of sustainable development. Global population explosion and general demographic reshaping are main concerns of every national and international agenda. Population growth, population ageing and decline, as well as migration and urbanization affect consumption, production, employment, income distribution, poverty and social protections, including pensions; they also complicate the task of ensuring universal access to health, education, housing, sanitation, water, food and energy.

First of all, population’s growth poses a difficult challenge in terms of resources: it increases the already high pressures on the planet’s resources (water, forests, land and the earth’s atmosphere) contributing to climate change and challenging environmental sustainability. Economy teaches that we always operate choices in scarcity and by augmenting the people on earth, the scarcity can only be aggravated. Out of the 7 billion people that currently inhabit the world, more than 1 billion continue to live in extreme poverty. Poverty reduction, employment creation and food security depend on rising economic output (in agriculture and outside agriculture) and rising economic output will further increase pressures on all natural resources. More and more countries are suffering from a rapid degradation of land, a high rate of deforestation, and water shortages. Climate change further contributes to an increasing intensity and frequency of natural disasters, changes in precipitation and droughts. Efforts to meet a rapidly growing demand for water, food and energy, for example, will affect all countries. The pressure, though, is not only exercised on the environment, but also on other areas of human activities. Likewise, failure to meet people’s needs, reduce poverty, raise living standards and ensure greater equity will threaten stability, security and sustainability throughout the world.

Demographic dynamics have completely changed in the past decades and, if not correctly monitored, different scenarios could easily degenerate. On one hand, we are experiencing an increase of longevity around the world: in Europe, 24% of the population is already aged 60 years or over and that proportion is projected to reach 34% in 2050. Globally, the number of persons aged 60 and above is expected to more than double by 2050 and more than triple by 2100. Although the populations of all countries are expected to age in the next future, the population will remain relatively young, at least in the short-term, in countries where fertility is still high. In fact, on the other hand, a major demographic challenge is the rising number of young people from developing countries who enter the labor market with high aspirations, but with limited opportunities to find productive employment. If a chance for a full life is not given, these masses of young people without much hope for the future may represent a serious threat to social and political stability. Instead, if provided with proper education and jobs, young people can make use of enormous potential for innovation, including the ability to adopt new technologies that accelerate economic progress and thus, making the transition to a green economy feasible. With a long life ahead, it is likely that young people have a genuine interest in sustainability information as they will experience for themselves the impact of unsustainable trends.

There is a profound reconfiguration of population distribution, due to the heavy internal and international migrations. The world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in history: over half the world’s population is today living in towns and cities and by 2030 this number will reach to almost five billions. This is one of the most important demographic changes in the coming decades. Today, the share of urban population in the world’s LDCs is still relatively low (30% of the total population) but the rate of urban population growth is very high, at about 4% per year. At this rate, the urban population in LDCs will double in less than 20 years. The levels of mobility, urbanization and education also differ substantially between and within regions and there are also persistent inequalities between rural and urban areas in the LDCs. Almost the entire world population growth will occur in cities and urban areas in the poorest countries (mainly because of the rural-urban migration and the with high growth of the national population). Since 2007, more than half of the world’s population has lived in urban centers and it is estimated that the proportion will have exceeded 70% by 2050. About 1 billion people still live in slums lacking access to basic infrastructure and services such as water, sanitation, electricity, health care and education and this number might triple by 2050 if no policy framework is established to address this issue.

Nevertheless, urbanization can improve economic productivity and facilitate access to education, health and other services; for this reason the growth of the urban population presents challenges for planning and good governance In Asian and African countries, where urban growth is faster, reduce vulnerability will require to achieve urban transition without creating undue or without generating social inequality environmental risks as cities are environmentally fragile places.

Hence, population and sustainable development are bounded together by highly dynamic tights. Not only population matters to sustainable development, but also, sustainable development influences population dynamics. These aforementioned determinants are recognized by the international political declarations and by the scientific literature, but, despite this recognition, past policies and the current debate have not adequately addressed these determinants and their inter-linkages. According to many scholars and also to the United Nations, efforts to address population growth continue to receive little attention in the discussion and other aspects of population dynamics, including changes in age structures and spatial distribution of people, have received even less attention. According to UNFPA, in order to bring back the population agenda into the sustainable development discussion, there is a need to recognize that: population dynamics have a significant influence on sustainable development; efforts to promote sustainable development that do not address population dynamics have, and will continue to, fail; and, population dynamics are not destiny.[5] Steps have already been taken on the international agendas but still need to be implemented.

The Rio Declaration[6], adopted in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as the Program of Action agreed at the International Conference on Population and Development[7], held in Cairo, Egypt, in 1994 place humans at the center of development and they both suggest policies that promote more sustainable patterns of production and consumption, which is the hallmark of the green economy, and policies that address population dynamics. Those two texts refers pretty openly to the necessity of harnessing population growth.

In 2011, an international panel consisting of over 20 populations and development experts convened at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, to discuss how population factors promote or impede sustainable development. They developed the Laxenburg Declaration on Population and Sustainable Development which describes the following five actions as necessary to achieve sustainable development:

1. Recognize that the numbers, characteristics, and behaviors of people are at the heart of sustainable development challenges and of their solutions.

2. Identify subpopulations that contribute most to environmental degradation and those that are most vulnerable to its consequences.

3. Devise sustainable development policies to treat these subpopulations differently and appropriately, according to their demographic and behavioral characteristics.

4. Facilitate the inevitable trend of increasing urbanization in ways that ensure that environmental hazards and vulnerabilities are under control.

5. Invest in human capital—people’s education and health, including reproductive health—to slow population growth, accelerate the transition to green technologies, and improve people’s adaptive capacity to environmental change.[8]

In the very recent 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, there are many points that evoke the necessity of elaborating policies in order to harness population dynamics. In the preamble it recalls the precedent declarations reaffirming the necessity to find sustainable consumption and production patterns.[9] Moreover, in article 34 of the preamble, the Agenda states: ‘We will also take account of population trends and projections in our national, rural and urban development strategies and policies.’ The necessity to follow sustainable population growth patterns is pretty disguised throughout the Declaration of the 17 goals and this probably reflected the fear to induce governments to enact heavy birth control policies. Included in the third goal is the need to ensure, by 2030, ‘universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes’; while in the fifth goal is embodied the necessity to ‘ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences’. This last declaration seems to relocate the harness of population dynamics from the policies of “birth control” to the individual choices of empowered women. Including it into the fifth goal (gender equality) is quite a strong signal that eradicating any kind of gender inequality and empowering women could be a key to control population growth.

In order to meet those goals it is necessary to implement efficient policies, and to do so it is imperative to understand how fertility works and how gender equity is related to it.

3. Fertility

In demography, fertility refers to the production of offspring. To estimate how quickly a population is growing, it is necessary to know how frequently people are added to the population by being born. Fertility rates can be measured in a variety of ways, such as the crude birth rate, general fertility rate, age-specific fertility rate, total fertility rate, gross reproduction rate, and net reproduction rate.

Future population growth is highly dependent on the path that fertility will take, as relatively small changes in fertility behavior, when projected over several decades, can generate large differences in total population. In the medium-variant projection, global fertility is expected to decline from 2.5 children per women in 2010-2015 to 2.25 children per women in 2045-2050 and 2.0 children per women in 2095-2100.[10]In order to harness population dynamics, it is necessary to understand how fertility works, what influences it and which actions are efficient in controlling it.

Human fertility depends on a wide range of factors, including physical health and nutrition, sexual behavior, culture, instinct, endocrinology, timing, economics, way of life, and emotions, and it also varies among cultures and countries.[11] The fertility transition generally starts in a country when there is at least 10% decline in fertility which begins an irreversible trend downwards and it is said to be ‘completed’ when replacement levels are achieved. The classic demographic transition theory as described by Thompson and Notestein attributes fertility decline to changes in social life that accompany, and are presumed to be caused by, industrialization and urbanization. Furthermore, those changes produce first a decline in mortality that will secondly lead to an increase of the children’s survival and consequently there will be a fertility decline. The combination of an enlargement of the family size due to the decrease in children’s mortality with the increase in childbearing’s costs will result in fertility decline.

Scholars have used this classic transition theory extensively but they have also harshly criticized it when applied to a decadal scale. According to Coale, Watkins and Bongaartz, both in Europe and the developing countries, correlations between level of urbanization or industrialization and the decade in which nations first experienced a fertility decline are weak. Even if, at the centennial level, the classic transition theory is successful, the demographic history of particular countries (underdevelopped that experienced fertility decline anyway) has proven that the theory is incomplete.[12] According to Mason, ‘The same can be said of virtually every other transition theory that has appeared during the past three decades’; all of them add some elements to the research trying to find the equation of fertility transition. In other words, as pointed out by the sociologist and World Bank’s Director of Gender and Development, it is virtually impossible to explain with one recipe how fertility transition occurs because, first of all, there are different trends in fertility around the world and then, not all the transitions have the same causes. The ability to do a good analysis is mandatory to develop efficient policies or enact social programs in order to monitor the different trends, it is therefore more accurate to speak about fertility transitions. Despite the difficulty of elaborating a global model, it is though possible to pinpoint some trends and major empirical aspects of the different fertility transitions. Moreover, it is helpful to review important facts about fertility that demographers have established.

First, fertility transitions occur under a variety of institutional, cultural and environmental conditions and when combinations of those are sufficient to motivate or to enable a substantial portion of the population to adopt birth-prevention measures. Second, within a given geographical or cultural region, the first country to undergo a fertility transition is likely to have experienced cultural, social or environmental changes that encourage fertility limitation; this doesn’t imply that other countries in the region are immediately experiencing the same fertility decline. In fact, the influence that a country can exercise on another depends on a variety of factors, including the quality and population coverage of communications and transportation infrastructures, the extent to which a common language is shared, the nature of social networks, the power and influence of local and national leaders, and wether state policy promotes birth control. Fourth, mortality decline is usually a necessary condition for fertility decline, and doesn’t have to be forgotten even though is not a sufficient condition on its own for that decline. Fifth, the number of surviving children that families can accomodate varies. Sixth, when the number of surviving children exceeds the family’s capacity to accomodate them, the parents will recur to some kid of birth control even though, in absence of family planning programs, those recurs are usually postnatal. Seventh, the type of postnatal controls depends not only on the survival index but also on the forms of control that are culturally, environmentally or structurally available or acceptable (e.g., whether abortion or infanticide is morally acceptable). Last but not least, when the number of surviving children exceeds the family’s capacity to accomodate them, changing conditions that effectively close off the preexisting postnatal controls will encourage a switch to prenatal controls, especially if aided by state policy and programs.[13]

Fertility transition has to be understood as a set of complex changes related to factors that interact in between them and that can correspond both to causes and effects. For the purpose of this paper it is now essential to have a glance at the governments answers and at some theories that study how gender equity interacts with fertility transition.

3.1 Gender, choice and policies

In the past decades, because of the population explosion, the issues of population, fertility and reproductive control where at the center of national and international debates. In response, some heavy-handed government intervention took place, as occurred in China. Nonetheless, recent studies have demonstrated the (total or partial) inefficiency of those policies and, instead, express concern with improving women’s rights and sexual and reproductive health. Many empirical examples demonstrated through the years the effectiveness of women empowerment on tackling this global and national population ‘problem’.

In sociology, the gender system can be seen as ‘the socially constructed expectations for male and female behavior that are found (in variable forms) in every known human society'[14], and can be divided into gender stratification (inequality between male and female members in industrialized society) and gender roles (the division of labor between men and women). During fertility transitions gender stratification and gender roles can become inconsistent with each other in different social institutions (within a given society).

McDonald identifies considerations that need to be taken into account when integrating gender equity into fertility transition theories. First, ‘fertility in a society falls as a result of cumulative actions of individual women and men to prevent births'[15]. Thus, a theory must elaborate upon how the levels of gender equity in social institutions manifest themselves in individual-level decision making. Choices are generally made in base of the social rewards they will acheive, therefore, when the rewards for market production far exceed the rewards for social reproduction there is an inevitable change in individual choices that will concur for a fertility transition. This also implies that individuals have the knowledge and the social permission necessary to control their births. The second consideration is the alter-ego of the first and states: ‘sustained lower fertility in any society will lead to fundamental changes in the nature of women’s lives.’ In other words, the total of individual choices, not only can influence the society (cause), but can also be influenced itself in return (effect). Hence, according to this vision that confers dynamic role to gender equity in fertility transition, women may elect to have a smaller number of children in order to change the nature of the rest of their lives, not necessarily because social changes have already occurred.

The third and the fourth considerations focus on the necessity of tackling the institution of the family as major scenario for gender expression. Nevertheless, family organization varies from society to society, and women’s place in it is also highly variable. Even if this complicates the use of standard variables, it is possible to make some broad consideration on the methodology. ‘In pre transitions societies, high fertility was (is) socially determined, not naturally determined.'[16] And ‘the transition from higher fertility of fertility around replacement level is accompanied by an increase in gender equity within the institution of the family.’ There is a large literature on the social supports to high fertility; typically, it is a part of the established family ethos and is supported by the institutions of morality, principally religion. Hence, fertility transition requires changes not only to the social-structural supports but also to the moral support. In developed countries, the assertion of individual’s rights may have gradually filtered down to the rights of women within marriage, while in the past half-century, in developing countries, traditional moralities have had to contend with the increasingly powerful force of westernization. As Folbre underlined, ‘women’s freedom of reproductive choice is often constrained by forms of patriarchal oppression.'[17] The shift of power over the means of production from the parental generation to the generation of the young couple and the decline of parentally arranged marriages are indicators of changing rights for women within a modified family organization.[18] Moreover, family is a fundamental cultural institution and consequently it is generally a conservative institution. Changes within family structure is therefore a very long procedure. The fifth and last consideration states that ‘when gender equity rises to high levels in individual-oriented institutions while remaining low in family-oriented institutions, fertility will fall to very low levels.’ By very low it is meant a total fertility rate below 1.5 births per woman in average, and it is what it has been experienced in the majority of the most developed countries. Moreover, The increasing demand for individual rights and freedoms has led to the development of strongly individual-oriented institutions.

Recent empirical studies confirmed the impact of women empowerment on population growth. In Asia there are the best known examples of government-imposed population control initiatives: concerned about the impact of population growth on the efforts of development, China adopted the famous one child policy and India the five year plan. Even if in the ’50, India’s population initiatives were promoted as bringing ‘health and happiness’ to the family, by the ’60, as population control was viewed as an essential element for development, the language changed drastically and by the ’70 coercive population-control methods were pervasive. Both in India and in China these polices led to national sterilization campaigns and forced abortions and the consequences, because of the strong male preference, are well known: an increase in infant-mortality rates (most frequently due to female infanticide) and the severe neglect of female children.[19] This brought the society to be extremely imbalance in terms of gender ratio: it was estimated to be 118:100 (usually 105:100) and six provinces had sex ratios of over 130:100 in the 1-4 age group in 2010.[20]

In India, studies conducted in states that made reasonable progress with fertility decline through non authoritarian methods proved that women empowerment affects fertility. While experiments with authoritarian interventions have had disastrous results, female education has demonstrated to play a key role in the social development approach and ‘a large body of Indian and international evidence points to the role of rising female education in lowering fertility.’[21]

China’s national fertility dropped below replacement level(2.1) in the early 1990s and it has continued lowering until reaching the current level of 1.7.[22] Despite the general thought that this policy was efficient in lowering fertility, some evidence prove that China’s current low fertility is not simply a prescribed result of the one-child policy: policy alternatives to the one-child policy existed and that might have produced an even more rapid fertility decline. According to Yong Cai, China’s drive to below-replacement fertility might have been jump-started and accelerated by a heavy-handed government policy, but policy is not the key factor behind the very low fertility that has emerged: institutional supports from the Chinese government’s active participation in and relentless propaganda on population control, rapid socioeconomic development and globalization have brought about an ideational shift from resisting to embracing the “small family” ideal[23]. At the national level, ideal family size has declined to around 1.7 children and the number is even lower in more developed areas where one child is now the dominant mode of ideal family size. Below-replacement fertility in China, as in other societies, is driven to a great extent by the increasingly global forces of social and economic development, and, as explained above, a change in ideals and of the family institution are more likely to have driven the fertility transition.

4. Individual rights for a better common future

The objective of sustainable development demands a focus on three principle policy levels: to promote more inclusive economies, to ensure greener economies and to address and harness population dynamics. We are generally led to think that change can only be influenced through population control policies that violate human rights, as shown above. But, on the contrary, population dynamics are the result of individual choices and opportunities and to address and harness population dynamics for sustainable development, countries should seek to enlarge, not restrict, individual rights.

The realization of fundamental human rights, including sexual and reproductive health and rights, enlarges the opportunities and choices of individuals. To date, because of discrimination and lack of rights, many adolescent girls have seriously constrained choices and opportunities. The freedom to postpone or decide against marriage and children; access to family planning information and services; the empowerment of women; the education of children; and the assurance of comprehensive sexuality education will benefit people and societies. Together these measures help to reduce infant, child and maternal mortality; reduce teenage pregnancies and other unintended pregnancies; eliminate the risks of unsafe abortion; and arrest communicable diseases. Beyond this, they will help girls to stay in school longer and to find better jobs and women to live a more self-determined life.[24]

The disparity between men and women is often attributable to discriminatory laws and practices: early marriage and child birth, as well as the need to care for the elderly and the sick, and support subsistence work at home. It is education beyond the primary level, together with access to sexual and reproductive health information and services that is essential for the empowerment of adolescents. Girls with secondary education typically postpone childbearing and have fewer children, and they invest more in each child. Therefore, these measures also contribute to lower fertility levels and slower population growth, and enlarge the possibilities for sustainable development. As confirmed by the Agenda for the Sustainable Development, the availability of services and information must be go hand in hand with the protection of fundamental human rights and freedoms, and the fight against discrimination and coercion: the equal treatment of women and must be firmly established in law and practice, and must be actively promoted through policies and programs.

According to the United Nation Population Fund, there are two fields of action in which States could play. ‘First, countries can direct individual choices and opportunities through incentives rather than controls, and can address population dynamics by enlarging, rather than restricting, individual choices and opportunities. Better access to health care services, including sexual and reproductive health care and education beyond the primary level not only contribute to falling infant, child and maternal mortality and help to arrest the spread of communicable diseases, but also contribute to the empowerment of women and falling fertility levels.

Second, countries must empower women not only to decide on the number and timing of their children, by providing adequate access to sexual and reproductive health care, but also to promote their active participation in economic, social and political life.’[25]

Today, about 222 million women continue to lack access to modern methods of family planning. In the LDCs it is estimated that the unmet need for family planning is 24% compares to the 11% in developing countries. However, even within the LDCs, differences are large. Data from Demographic and Health Surveys undertaken in 1998 and again in 2008 in a total of 17 African LDCs show that women with a secondary or higher education, women in urban areas, and women from the wealthiest households are less likely to become mothers as adolescents, to have an unmet need for contraception and more likely to use contraceptives than women with no or little education, women in rural areas, or women of poor households.[26] Countries should work to expand people’s choices, resourcefulness, creativity and resilience, by adopting policies that are human rights-based and gender-responsive.

The decline in fertility would make many of the problems tackled by Sustainable Development Agenda easier to solve by implementing exactly one of its goal. This change is possible through a set of policies which respect human rights and freedoms and contribute to a reduction in fertility, notably access to sexual and reproductive health care, education beyond the primary level, and the empowerment of women.

The differences between the medium-term variant of the United Nations population projections and the high variant of its population projections is but half a child per woman. If we follow the high variant the population is estimated to grow to over 10 billion by midcentury and to about 16 billion by the end of the century. This depends on policies that countries pursue today.

CONCLUSION

Uncontrolled population growth affects many areas of human activity and reconfigure the demographic dynamics and distribution. To meet the goal of ending poverty and improving living standards will become harder and harder to reach as the population growth continues. Moreover, the environment will bear the highest costs as the more people there are, the more resources will be needed and the more pollution will be released. Those are the main effects of population explosion, but there are many others as the ageing, the proliferation of urban slums and the constant need to create employment. In this sense population matters to sustainable development, an uncontrolled growth of the population will exacerbate actual problems that are its centre of concern.

Nevertheless, influencing fertility is possible, and it is possible by applying one of the major principles of sustainable development: to eradicate gender inequalities. It has been proved over the years that policies that empower women and promote sexual health and education can influence fertility trend.

This demonstrates how individual rights and common global necessities are not in conflict as suggested by some human rights activists but are, on the contrary, the two faces of the same coin.