20120430_GN

Source: The Guardian

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2012/apr/30/science-weekly-podcast-sleep

Date: 30/04/2012

Event: Sir John Sulston on depopulation and the People and the planet report

People:

• Alok Jha: Science and environment correspondent at the Guardian
• Sir John Sulston: Biologist, Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation (iSEI) at the University of Manchester
• John Vidal: Environment Editor, The Guardian

Alok Jha: There are more than 7 billion people living on Earth today. In some way, it shows the success of our species in the face of hunger and disease, though there’s plenty of room for improvement in both those areas. But the world’s increasing population also brings problems, specifically ecological ones. This week the Royal Society published a report People and the Planet. This brought together a working group of 21 experts from around the world under the stewardship of the biologist and Nobel laureate Sir John Sulston. The Guardian's Environment Editor John Vidal met Sir John to discuss the report's conclusions. He began by asking Sir John for a quick run-down of the report's main points.

Sir John Sulston: What we conclude is that people have been leaving population off the agenda, but in particular, what's been happening is that population and consumption have been treated separately. And let me immediately define consumption in these terms: we can consume economically so that, for example, we can play games or write software or something that takes little or no resource, or we can consume materially, for example digging up coal and burning it, driving our cars and so on, and it's the second sort of consumption that's of concern here - material consumption. And what’s been ignored for the last twenty years is that this total material consumption is a product essentially of the number of people and the amount they each consume. I mean, it's not exactly a product because there are variations depending on the number of people, there can be something on the other side of the equation, but roughly it’s the two multiplied together. And so we have to consider both, and we must not any more get into the situation where one bunch of people in the world are saying "It’s all your fault because you’re having too many babies" and the other side is saying "It’s all your fault because you’re emitting too much carbon dioxide." Both in a sense are right, but both are certainly wrong if they don’t bring those two observations together and say "What are we collectively going to do about it?"

John Vidal: That’s a very big global overview of the situation, but what your report shows very clearly is that there are some countries, especially the least developed countries, the 32 in Africa and elsewhere, where population pressures are still enormously high, have not come down, and you mention for instance Niger, where populations are doubling every twenty years, now these countries, presumably, it's not about resources or about consumption, this is just about numbers, you need to get those numbers down. Are you saying that there is an urgency to stabilise numbers of population?

Sir John Sulston: Well it would be enormously helpful, and having Eliya Zulu from Nairobi who, because of his position as ...

John Vidal: As what?

Sir John Sulston: As director of the African Institute for Development Policy, is acutely aware of this, and considers passionately that it’s not a question of waiting for development to bring down fertility, but quite the reverse, that countries like Niger do need to reduce their fertility, reduce their family size in other words, and increase the spacing of children in order to allow economic development to occur. So yes, in these cases, it's very clear that population is growing too fast for the resources available, and you know, people are stuck in a situation of dire poverty and indeed starvation, as we’ve seen recently with the droughts in the Sahel, unless the family sizes are reduced.

John Vidal: But you're not arguing, I'm saying, you’re not arguing that there's one carrying capacity of the world, or that there's one optimum population size for the world.

Sir John Sulston: Well, the thing is there's no, people are very welcome to define optimum population size, but each person would choose their own, it would depend entirely upon the lifestyle assumptions they make, how many people is appropriate to support. Now, I mean, in a certain sense, you can say, well we need enough food for everybody, but then with enough technology undoubtedly you could grow more food, you know if you sort of have hydroponics everywhere and so on, there’s all sorts of things you could do. But, so, if you, you can drive the numbers very high, if you look at it in that way, or alternatively you can say: look, I need so many square miles of wilderness for myself, and if everybody takes that view, then of course the numbers will be very low, so you cannot say that one is right and the other's wrong - it's a choice.

John Vidal: But some people today, looking at the reactions immediately afterwards, some people were arguing, well actually, the number of people is better. The more you have, in a country, the more you can actually develop your economy. I mean, this is quite a good argument isn't it?

Sir John Sulston: It’s a very popular argument isn’t it in the current, I think it’s the current mainstream school of economics that says that, it says that cities like New York, where people rub up againt each other all the time, they quote the patenting rate, for example of such a population, and I think the evidence is not good. I mean, for example, as far as that goes, I mean the number of patents produced is not necessarily a good measure of serious innovation. It means that people are actually scared of each other and keep trying things in order to keep the others off their patch, so it's a kind of defensive way of doing it. So what I’m saying is I think the evidence is limited, and it's certainly not obvious to me that, or to anybody I think, to be honest, that that view is correct. So we do not have to be scared of having fewer people. And I mean you know, if we want to look at very successful economies, like for instant some of the Scandinavian countries, where the population is very sparse, and yet they’re extremely innovative, and have a very high quality of living.

John Vidal: On the other hand, you’re getting people like Paul Ehrlich who today are coming out and saying, well actually the optimum capacity of the world is 1.5 or two billion, and he says it's almost inevitable that we will cross that line, that threshhold when there will be no going back, and disaster of one sort or another - a virus or a nuclear war or something - will come and shrink numbers dramatically. You’re presumably not of that order?

Sir John Sulston: Well, our message is, that that's exactly the situation we want to avoid, and by taking a forward look, and taking the right policy decisions, which are not actually that hard, so long as they’re taken in a long-term way, and not drastically and suddenly - then we should be able to avoid those kind of catastrophes. But we certainly are saying - and that’s why of course some of the commentators are already saying our report is gloomy and awful and miserable - it's because we’re pointing to a need to readjust. We don't see it as a hairshirt policy, a hairshirt report at all. We see it as an advice to use science and technology, but not to assume that that alone will deliver everything. We're saying science and technology must be based in a framework, to some degree a new framework, for example we need to have an economic system that doesn’t use our existing GDP measure that simply looks at the balance sheet, but that it should also be pricing items you draw from the natural environment and damage you do to the natural environment. We should be pricing the effect of given actions on human well-being so that positive things for example get counted better than negative things and so on and so on, and we're saying if you embed science and technology in that framework, then you can have a really good result. What we're in disagreement with are the people who say: just let it all rip, the science and technology, and very dense populations of people in cities will solve everything.

John Vidal: At this point, I asked Sir John about potential critics of the report. One of the most prominent is Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist. He argues that population growth is not a problem. He says the rate of global increase has been falling for fifty years, and in developing countries has nearly halved. Sir John Sulston is familiar with Ridley's work:

[Vidal’s question is omitted at this point. It is available here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/audio/2012/apr/26/audio-population-john-sulston

John Vidal: I saw this morning that Matt Ridley, the sort of, the conservative commentator was arguing well, this is absolutely absurd, because there is no lack of resources, the world is not running out of minerals or any of these things, and therefore, you know, how dare the Royal Society even question, the, you know, his and others' right to be rich. I mean, you’re questioning that, you’re saying it can't go on like this

Sir John Sulston: No, well, I mean obviously I mean Matt's book The Rational Optimist is very much along these lines. I mean, I think, I mean obviously there are points in there, but...]

Sir John Sulston: The thing is, optimism alone is not enough. I think he’s not a rational optimist, personally, I think as he lays out his programme, he's an irrational optimist, because he’s saying Ah! you know, people and the market will take care of everything. I don’t think that for a moment. I mean, after all, I mean, if you look at the history of the financial services of this country, which Matt was involved for a while, you can see very clearly that we need regulation in order to have an equable life. We know that this recession was engendered through financial services that were not adequately regulated. We take it for granted that we regulate important things. One of my favourite little anecdotes or examples is air traffic control. It's taken for granted by everybody, even Matt Ridley, that you control where aeroplanes fly. Isn't that an enormous infringement of his human rights to fly his aeroplane wherever he wants? No, people accept because it's pretty bad when aeroplanes collide, it's sort of certain death. You know that's a sort of an easy one to sort of agree on. What’s more difficult is to get agreement on the slow-burning long-term issues, the ones we’re talking about, where we can see problems down the line, but actually not in his lifetime or mine probably, you know, not the real bad crash. We're looking at what will be for our children children's children.

And so I think we somehow have to move the sense that we do regulate in the short term, which we’re beginning to learn, because it used to be, people didn't even do that. And we’re beginning to get that idea, that we regulate in the short term, and we've got to move that into these larger things.

And you know what, I mean, one of the reasons I think for the disquiet of such people, is that they don’t really believe in the science, which is quite curious, because, you know, Matt obviously is scientifically educated. They don’t really understand or believe in, as I do - when I say "believe" that sounds like a faith, I don’t mean that, what I mean is that I know now that because our observations are getting so extensive all over the earth and the atmosphere, and because we’re building such really good elaborate models, it actually works, we actually could predict, it turned out, twenty years ago, what was going to happen to the earth's temperature, and it's happening. You know, the models were right.

Alok Jha: Thanks to Sir John Sulston and the Guardian’s John Vidal.