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Subject: UNEP Cairo Conf. Feature


Attached is one in a series of UNEP features being issued leading up to the
International Conference on Population and Development, which begins on 5
September in Cairo.

The attached feature is taken from the current issue of UNEP's bi-monthly magazi
ne
"Our Planet" and is written by Mr. Fred T. Sai, President of the International
Planned Parenthood Federation.

We would kindly request any feedback on the usefulness of such features either
by your office or any other media in your area that may be interested in using
them.

Thanks for your assistance.


UNEP FEATURE 1994/8

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Cairo, 5 - 13 September 1994

TOO MANY RICH PEOPLE --  Weighing Relative Burdens on the Planet

by Paul Ehrlich 


Concern about population problems among citizens of rich countries
generally focuses on rapid population growth in most poor nations. 
But the impact of humanity on Earth's life support systems is not
just determined by the number of people alive on the planet.  It
also depends on how those people behave.  When this is considered,
an entirely different picture emerges:  the main population problem
is in wealthy countries.  There are, in fact, too many rich people.

The amount of resources each person consumes, and the damage done
by the technologies used to supply them, need to be taken as much
into account as the size of the population.  In theory, the three
factors should be multiplied together to obtain an accurate
measurement of the impact on the planet*.  Unhappily, Governments
do not keep statistics that allow the consumption and technology
factors to be readily measured -- so scientists substitute per
capita energy consumption to give a measure of the effect each
person has on the environment.

Using and consuming
This makes sense.  All human activities require the use of energy,
and the most environmentally destructive of those activities for
the most part require a great deal of it.  Human beings use energy
to obtain resources, process them into useful items, and then use
or consume them.  At every step, environmental damage is done.

In traditional societies -- more or less in balance with their
environments -- that damage may be self-repairing.  Wood cut for
fires or structures regrows, soaking up the carbon dioxide produced
when it was burned.  Water extracted from streams is replaced by
rainfall.  Soils in fields are regenerated with the help of crop
residues and animal manures.  Wastes are broken down and
reconverted into nutrients by the decomposer organisms of natural
ecosystems.

At the other end of the spectrum, paving over fields and forests
with concrete and asphalt, mining the coal and iron necessary for
steel production with all its associated land degradation, and
building and operating automobiles, trains and aeroplanes that spew
pollutants into the atmosphere, are all energy-intensive processes. 
So are drilling for and transporting oil and gas, producing
plastics, manufacturing chemicals (from DDT and 
synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to chlorofluorocarbons and laundry
detergents) and building power plants and dams.  Industrialized
agriculture uses enormous amounts of energy -- for ploughing,
planting, fertilizing and controlling weeds and insect pests and
for harvesting, processing, shipping, packing, storing and selling
foods.  So does industrialized forestry for timber and paper
production.

Paying the price
Incidents such as Chernobyl and oil spills are among the
environmental prices paid for mobilizing commercial energy -- and
soil erosion, desertification, acid rain, global warming,
destruction of the ozone layer and the toxification of the entire
planet are among the costs of using it.

In all, humanity's high-energy activities amount to a large-scale
attack on the integrity of Earth's ecosystems and the critical
services they provide.  These include control of the mix of gases
in the atmosphere (and thus of the climate); running of the
hydrologic cycle which brings us dependable flows of fresh water;
generation and maintenance of fertile soils; disposal of wastes;
recycling of the nutrients essential to agriculture and forestry;
control of the vast majority of potential crop pests; pollination
of many crops; provision of food from the sea; and maintenance of
a vast genetic library from which humanity has already withdrawn
the very basis of civilization in the form of crops and domestic
animals.

The relative impact
The average rich-nation citizen used 7.4 kilowatts (kW) of energy
in 1990 -- a continuous flow of energy equivalent to that powering
74 100-watt lightbulbs.  The average citizen of a poor nation, by
contrast, used only 1 kW.  There were 1.2 billion people in the
rich nations, so their total environmental impact, as measured by
energy use, was 1.2 billion x 7.4 kW, or 8.9 terawatts (TW) -- 8.9
trillion watts.  Some 4.1 billion people lived in poor nations in
1990, hence their total impact (at 1 kW a head) was 4.1 TW.

The relatively small population of rich people therefore accounts
for roughly two-thirds of global environmental destruction, as
measured by energy use.  From this perspective, the most important
population problem is overpopulation in the industrialized nations.

The United States poses the most serious threat of all to human
life support systems.  It has a gigantic population, the third
largest on Earth, more than a quarter of a billion people. 
Americans are superconsumers, and use inefficient technologies to
feed their appetites.  Each, on average, uses 11 kW of energy,
twice as much as the average Japanese, more than three times as
much as the average Spaniard, and over 100 times as much as an
average Bangladeshi.  Clearly, achieving an average family size of
1.5 children in the United States (which would still be larger than
the 1.3 child average in Spain) would benefit the world much more
than a similar success in Bangladesh.

Closing the gap
Professor John P. Holdren of the University of California has
generated an "optimistic" scenario for solving the population-
resource-environment predicament.  This envisages population growth
halted at 10 billion a century from now, and rich nations reducing
their energy consumption to 3 kW a head.  His population target is
feasible with modest effort, 
and the reduction in energy consumption could be achieved with
technologies already in hand -- given the necessary political will
-- and would produce an increase in the quality of life.  This
would provide room for needed economic growth in poor nations,
which could triple their per-person energy use to 3 kW.  Thus the
gap between rich and poor nations would be closed, while the total
world impact would increase from 13 TW to 30 TW (10 billion x 
3 kW).

Will the environment a century hence be able to support 2.3 times
as much activity as today?  It's questionable, but perhaps with
care it could, at least temporarily.  Success would require a
degree of cooperation, care for our fellow human beings, and
respect for the environment that are nowhere evident now.  But
society has shown it can change rapidly when the time is ripe; let
us hope that the United Nations International Conference on
Population and Development will help ripen the time.

* * *

*  The relationship is summarized in the classic I=PAT identity:
Impact is equal to Population size, multiplied by per capita
consumption (Affluence), in turn multiplied by a measure of the
damage done by the Technologies chosen to supply each unit of
consumption.

Mr. Paul R. Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies and
Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University in the
United States.  His most recent books, both co-authored with his
wife Anne, are "The Population Explosion" (Simon and Schuster,
1990) and "Healing the Planet" (Addison-Wesley, 1991).  The feature
originally appeared in Vol. 6, No.3, 1994 of "Our Planet".  The
views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of UNEP.

UNEP Feature 1994/8
