Population, Environment and Development

In one line

More people need more of everything, and how much more depends on what each of them consumes and on what the law allows.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the relationship between population, environment and development runs in more than one direction. Population growth increases the demand on environmental resources; environmental degradation reduces the resources available to a population; and development changes both, because it raises consumption per person while reducing the rate at which population grows. The legal question is not how many people there should be but what a legal system may and should do about the resource pressure that population and consumption together create.

The three-way relation

Population on environment. More people need more land, water, energy, food and shelter, and produce more waste. Every one of the five forms of degradation in the chapter on that subject is aggravated by numbers.

Environment on population. A degraded resource base makes people poorer, and poverty is associated with higher fertility, so degradation feeds the growth that caused it. It also drives migration, which relocates the pressure rather than reducing it.

Development on both. Development cuts in two directions at once, and this is the point most answers miss.

It reduces the rate of population growth. Falling infant mortality, rising female education, and access to health services and contraception are what carry a society through the demographic transition. Every country that has developed has seen its birth rate fall.

And it raises consumption per person. A person in a developed economy uses many times the energy, water and materials of a person in a poor one. So development reduces the number of people while increasing what each one takes, and which effect dominates is an empirical question rather than a matter of principle.

Why this is a law paper's question

Four reasons, and a candidate should give them because they justify the module.

Because the international instruments treat it as one. Stockholm's proclamation paragraph 5 says that the natural growth of population continuously presents problems for the preservation of the environment and that adequate policies should be adopted, and immediately adds that of all things in the world people are the most precious. Stockholm Principle 16 permits demographic policies without prejudice to basic human rights and as deemed appropriate by the Governments concerned, where growth or excessive concentration is likely to have adverse effects. Rio Principle 8 asks States to reduce unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and to promote appropriate demographic policies, in that order.

Because the constitutional questions are real. A measure to reduce fertility engages Article 21, Article 14, Article 25 and the right to reproductive autonomy, and the leading Indian case on the two-child norm is a constitutional case.