Writing in The Journal of Population and Sustainability leading experts in environmental and climate science, reproductive health and rights, economics, law, and anthropology argue that population dynamics must be understood through a lens that considers the demographic, environmental, economic and reproductive-health perspectives.
“Pronatalism is increasingly shaping political debates and public policy as governments respond to declining fertility and population ageing; yet, these debates rarely consider demographic change alongside climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion and other planetary pressures,” says lead author Céline Delacroix, an Adjunct Professor in the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa and a fellow at the U.S.-based Population Institute. “We bring these issues together to ask what a genuinely sustainable response to demographic change should look like.”
Reframing the narrative around ageing societies
Pronatalist ideologies advocate increased birth rates as the answer to fertility decline, and that by maintaining fertility at or above replacement levels societies can avoid the social and economic challenges brought on by an ageing population. Planetary boundaries and their limits are largely absent from these discussions.
Delacroix and her fellow authors believe such discussions should be reframed around real assessment of claims of population collapse and declining fertility. This would recognise reproductive autonomy (women's ability to make free, informed decisions about childbearing) while addressing demographic change within planetary boundaries. With global family-planning funding collapsing just as reproductive agency is most needed, it is time to reframe population discussions from both a rights-based and planetary-health angle for policymakers, funders and advocates beyond academia.
Governments also tend to align population growth with economic prosperity, arguing that an increasing population can expand markets and corporate revenues, and drive GDP. This measure of economic progress is fundamentally misaligned with the physical reality in which the world is grounded in, they write, as it ignores the environmental costs of economic activity.
“By reframing the economic and social challenges of ageing societies as manageable, and pointing to measures such as progressive tax policy, stronger intergenerational safety nets, eased labour migration and the meaningful integration of seniors into society as rights-based opportunities, we can develop more just policies rather than resorting to pronatalist measures,” Delacroix says. “Governments need to develop policies that address ageing and demographic change without compromising reproductive rights or planetary health.”
‘Why pronatalism fails the planetary health test’ was published in The Journal of Population and Sustainability by C. Delacroix, M. Temmerman, N. Bajaj, A. Moore, P. Barnard, W. Ripple, W. Rees, M. Gerrard, D. Coole, R. Engelman, H. Kopnina, N. Owoo and P. Lindsey. DOI: 10.3197/whpjps.63887831800459
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