20130620_R4

Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme

URL: N/A

Date: 20/06/2013

Event: Danny Dorling on population: "we've had 40 years of slowdown in the rate of growth"

People:

• Professor Danny Dorling: Professor of Geography, Sheffield University
• Professor Georgina Mace: Professor of Conservation Science, Imperial College, London
• Justin Webb: Presenter, BBC Radio 4: Today Programme

Justin Webb: How will we cope, when the world's population reaches ten billion? Quite well, according to a new book. It's called Population 10 Billion and it's written by Danny Dorling, who's a Professor of Geography at Sheffield University and is here, as is Professor Georgina Mace, who's Professor of Conservation Science at Imperial College in London. Morning to you both. Your thesis, Danny Dorling, is that we can cope - not just that we can cope, it's a little more optimistic, actually, than that, isn't it, that we'll thrive.

Danny Dorling: It's very possible that we'll thrive. At the moment, we tend to think that the future's going to be terrible, and "How on earth are we going to cope, on a planet with ten or eleven billion people?" What we never look at - or hardly every look at, when we talk about that figure - is that it's a figure of success. World population growth, the actual rate of change, peaked in 1971 - that was the year of the highest growth rate. Peak baby was in 1990. We'll hopefully never have as many babies again as we had in 1990. We're probably around peak eighteen-year-old now. The world population growth is slowing, so ten or eleven is the kind of number - with a big margin of error, I have to say, but - the kind of number that we think we're going to be stable at.

Justin Webb: And that's at the end of the century?

Danny Dorling: That's at the end of the century. And we haven't been able to say, for 150 years, that we're approaching stability. If you were looking in the 1960s or '70s, there was no sign of slowdown, and then you could be apocalyptic, you could just say "this is out of control".

Justin Webb: And people were.

Danny Dorling: Yes. But we've had 40 years of slowdown in the rate of growth. This is good news, it's possible to plan for a stable world - doesn't mean we're going to get one, and doesn't mean we're going to behave particularly well, but we could behave well and we do know where we're heading, for once.

Justin Webb: Georgina Mace?

Georgina Mace: So I think it's important that we have some nice vision of what this world of ten billion people's going to be like, because inevitably we're going to get there, or something close to it. Um... If we took actions now on fertility reductions, we could reduce it, maybe to eight. And if nobody does anything, it could go up to twelve. So we need to think about how we're going to live in that world.

Justin Webb: But if we do, if we think about how we use water, if we think about transport, if we think about climate change and all the rest of it, then Danny Dorling's point is: we can cope, and cope rather well.

Georgina Mace: We - technically, we could do it. We could feed, find enough water and energy for a world of ten billion people. What the quality of those people's lives would be like remains to be seen. There are actions that we could take now about how we live our lives, how we share resources amongst people, and how we share resources between now and the future, that could make that world in 2100 a lot nicer than it would otherwise be.

Justin Webb: Yes, one of the things we've got to do, Danny Dorling, is to stop moving about at the rate that we do, at the moment. You know, we've got HS2 being planned at the moment, in this country, and all sorts of ways in which people can get from A to B faster. Have we got to stop doing that?

Danny Dorling: It's very hard to get people to stop moving around, when they get the chance to do it. We should certainly try to stop moving around on movements that actually don't make us happy. So, when we look at things like holidays, half the holidays we take actually don't increase our happiness, half do -

Justin Webb [laughing]: It's difficult to know which half, when we take it -

Danny Dorling: If only you knew. But a lot of our movement isn't necessary, a lot of our commuting movement isn't necessary. I mean, this city is a hub - massive in commuting, whereas lots of people could work from home much more, on Skype. But we can - the nice thing about the population slowdown is that we can now see a future where it's worth beginning to plan for these things optimistically and to say "How do we slow our movement down? How do we reduce unnecessary consumption, so that our grandchildren live in a better world than we do?"

Justin Webb: And where we do use energy, Georgina Mace, we use it efficiently.

Georgina Mace: Yes, we need to be reducing our own individual footprint substantially, as well as reducing the number of people. And that was the conclusion of a Royal Society report on People and the Planet, drew attention to both of those. Just doing one or the other won't work.

Justin Webb: There is a kind of - just briefly, to finish with - the pessimists have this kind of "rats in a box" notion, don't they, actually. As the world gets more crowded, our behaviour gets worse because we feel more pressure. And in these huge cities, Danny Dorling, the idea of us behaving well to each other is going to go out of the window, because we'll feel so...

Danny Dorling: Well, we've actually become behaving better - our levels of violence to each other, and so on, have reduced dramatically. The population of rural areas is going down. We are crowding into cities, but the crowding into cities is being led by women. More women are moving into cities than men, so it's a feminisation of the world going on, as well. And that could partly be how we do get a better future, is by more women being in control and fewer men fighting it out.

Justin Webb: Danny Dorling, Georgina Mace, thanks both.