icSolihull - Small families 'more eco-friendly'
Universal access to contraception is needed to help fight climate change, it has been claimed.
A spiralling global population, with an annual increase of 79 million people, is driving up greenhouse gas emissions, John Guillebaud of University College, London, and GP Pip Hayes of St Leonard's Practice, Exeter, said.
And in an editorial in the British Medical Journal they raised the question of whether people in the UK should be told that stopping at two children is "the simplest and biggest contribution" that can be made to saving the planet.
The doctors said every person born adds to greenhouse gas emissions, with demand for food, fossil fuels, water and forests outstripping supply. And they pointed to research from the Optimum Population Trust which said that each new birth in the UK will be responsible for 160 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a birth in Ethiopia.
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1 comment:
The CIA world fact book ( https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uk.html ) has the UK's fertility rate at 1.66 children born/woman (2008 est.) With a bit more convincing from articles like this, I am sure they could drop down to Canada's 1.57 level. Here is the whole ranked table:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html
They can always fix the economic difficulties in which a low birth rate results by increasing immigration perhaps from Ethiopia.
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