There is nothing ‘unsustainable’ about having children – ‘Green scaremongering about overpopulation is based on misanthropic myths’

Thursday 1 August this year marked ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ – the moment when humanity had supposedly used all of its natural resources for the year, and has started to consume those ‘belonging’ to future generations.

This is a dubious calculation at best. To come up with the date, which changes each year, you divide the planet’s biocapacity (how many resources the Earth can generate each year) by humanity’s so-called ecological footprint.

Regardless of how accurate it is, Earth Overshoot Day allows various green groups to promote their favoured solution to this supposed cataclysm. If you look at the Earth Overshoot Day website, you will see that this mostly involves advocating for a smaller global population. Or, in the words of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, ‘investing in smaller families’.

Sadly, green campaigns like the risible Earth Overshoot Day seem to be getting precisely what they have wished for. Last year, a report by Eurostat warned of the serious demographic crisis facing Europe. According to estimates, the European population will shrink by six per cent, or by 27.3million people, by 2100. At such a date, the report states, those over the age of 80 will be a similar percentage of the population as those under 20.

The United States is also facing population decline. The US Census Bureau estimates that the country’s population will peak at 370million people in 2080, before dropping to 366million in 2100. In fact, the world over, all evidence suggests that we ought to be far more worried about depopulation than overpopulation.

Environmental concerns are far from the biggest driver of people having smaller families, of course. There has been a much broader cultural shift in recent decades. It’s hard to deny that singleness, and the independence it affords, is seen as more attractive than the restrictions of marriage and children to a growing number of people, particularly the young. Headlines that ‘Childfree, single women are among the happiest’ are increasingly common. US academic Bella DePaulo recently celebrated her ‘Golden Anniversary’, or 50 years, of single life. Her books sell by the thousands, her TED Talks attract packed audiences and videos featuring her have more than one million views on YouTube.

How many children someone has should, of course, be a matter of individual choice. But the idea that having larger families will take a catastrophic toll on the environment is pure nonsense. The Simon Abundance Index – an annual report produced by think tank Human Progress – shows the Earth’s raw materials do not actually decline as population grows. In fact, the opposite is the case. ‘The Earth was 509.4 per cent more abundant in 2023 than it was in 1980’, the report finds, owing precisely to the increase in population. In fact, with the exception of the 2021 and 2022 pandemic slump, the abundance of resources is actually increasing at a much faster rate than population growth. This demolishes many of the commonly accepted theories about humanity’s supposedly unsustainable ‘ecological footprint’ and the dwindling of the Earth’s scarce resources.

When faced with a demographic crisis and an overabundance of resources, having more children is an entirely sensible and logical thing to do. After all, resources are worthless without humans to harness them.

Some world leaders are trying to do just that. In her most recent budget, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni announced that women with at least two children would be exempt from paying social-security tax for two years. In Hungary, policies introduced by prime minister Viktor Orbán similarly offer tax cuts for families, as well as ‘baby grants’, generous maternity leave and even subsidised mortgages. These policies are far from perfect. Indeed, it’s yet to be proven if they have even led to any discernible improvement in the birth rates in their respective countries.

Still, we need more bold ideas – and leaders – to push back against the miserable, anti-human, degrowth mindset. And to realise the full potential of the most precious resource of all – human beings themselves.

Itxu Díaz is a Spanish journalist, political satirist and author.