How 'Population Connection' Advocates Progressive Action to Stabilize the World Population

Nicholas Hill: 0:00

You're listening to acts of impact the show where we interview those who are making a positive difference in the world around us. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill. And today's guest is Hannah Evans. Hannah is a Senior Analyst for population connection, a nonprofit that educates and advocates for action to stabilize world population at a level that can be sustained by Earth's resources. We'll talk about the dangers of unchecked population growth, the connection between sustained growth and women's rights and how population connection plays a role in driving long term solutions. Let's get started. Hannah, welcome to the show.

Hannah Evans: 0:55

Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah, we're so happy to have you here. Hannah. I want to just start by asking what even is our current population right now, I'm pretty sure the last time I heard about this, it was like 6 billion people. And I was I'm pretty sure in 11th grade or something. So what is our current state? Where are we? So currently, we have almost 8 billion people, right around 2019 99 2000 was whenever we had 6 million people. And as you can see, in a really short amount of time, around 23 years, we've added 2 billion people to the extent that the UN's population projections, which just recently came out, have shown that the global population is going to reach 8 billion by November of this year. So that means that we've added 1 billion people to the planet in 11 years, which is really unprecedented in terms of pace.

Nicholas Hill: 1:56

I think a lot of us when we try to wrap our heads around this, I feel like people used to have, like you hear about the baby boom, right? And all of the children that were being born after the baby boom, and I feel like that has slowed down. But you're telling me now that it's actually been kind of speeding up over the last, you know, 1015 20 years? What, how do we rectify that? Is that that certain countries are growing faster than others? Or what is that kind of look like?

Hannah Evans: 2:27

Yeah, and that's a good question. And this is kind of a complicated issue. Because globally, fertility rates have pretty much stabilized and so has have growth rates. So the world's population growth rate has been on a steady decline for some time now. But our world's population continues to grow and will likely grow into the next century. So we'll probably have around 10.9 or 11 billion people by 2100, even though fertility rates are essentially stabilized. And even though growth rates are falling, that's largely to do with the fact that globally, we have a really large proportion of young people, relative to older populations. So people are kind of coming of reproductive age, and, you know, reproducing in larger numbers compared to previous generations. We do know that globally, the population is going to stabilize likely around the turn of the century. The big questions for us are, when is that going to happen? How many people will be have? And will we be able to avert these kind of global crises that are being exacerbated by the continued growth of the population of the human population in time?

Nicholas Hill: 3:45

Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Why is unchecked population growth such a concern? Why is it what are some of the problems that come with that?

Hannah Evans: 3:57

First, I think it's really important to understand that the growth of the human population has essentially skyrocketed in a really short amount of time relative to human history. So humans have existed on this planet for around 200,000 years. And for most of that time, our impact on the planet was really insignificant, as was population growth because mortality rates were very high. Life expectancy was very low nomadic lifestyles and things but a lot of pressure on humans and sort of stabilized populations. This was the case pretty much until the Industrial Revolution, which occurred in Europe, the UK and the United States first and then emanated across the world. This revolution was really a huge turning points in human history relative to population growth, because through advancements in education and technology, food production, the provision of health care services and better public health. Airbus's death rates fell really significantly, and our population grew significantly in a really short amount of time. So for 10s of 1000s of years, the population of the world has grown really slowly and our impact on the planet has been really minimal. And now within less than 300 years, our population has mushroomed to 8 billion people. And again, while growth rates are falling, and have been steadily for some time, our population isn't projected to peak until the end of the century, at which point we're likely going to going to have 11 billion people. And that's a really hard number, I think, to even conceptualize, I don't even know if I fully understand what it actually means to have 1 billion people or one 1 billion of anything. But this is a really huge problem that we need to kind of look at more closely with regards to food production, natural resource scarcity, the equitable distributed distribution of resources, and also relative to you know, the climate crisis, which is increasing, you know, rising sea levels are increasing global temperatures are rising, extreme weather events are happening more frequently. But even from a social perspective, population pressures are also largely a measure of inequality. The fact that we have really high fertility rates and really low income settings, is an indication that people are being oppressed and aren't able to access basic human rights like reproductive health care, education, or the ability to increase their standards of living. All of this feeds into climate issues claim from a climate justice perspective. The fact that the world's poorest populations are growing the fastest means that there's more people who are exposed to climate impacts, who lack the ability or capital to readily respond to recover population growth and low in income settings really increases what's called Climate vulnerability. And this is a climate justice issue, because these populations have not really contributed at all to climate change, and are yet feeling the most severe impacts of it.

Nicholas Hill: 7:14

I'm curious, is there such thing as the right number, a sustainable number or a sustainable amount of population that the planet cam support? What are your thoughts there?

Hannah Evans: 7:28

That's a really good question. And I think it's really difficult to answer because it's quite conditional. So overall, we don't actually know how many people can sustainably live on the planet right now. Because societies and people are using and consuming and producing waste at different rates throughout the world. While there's a consensus that humanity's population growth trajectory is unsustainable. It's also true that a really small proportion of the planet's population consumes the majority of the Earth's resources and produces a really disproportionate amount of co2. The United States represents about 5% of the global population, but uses around 24 25% of the Earth's natural resources. So it's fair to say that, you know, if everyone lived, like the average middle class American, we couldn't sustainably host nearly as many people as if you know, everyone lived like the average subsistence farmer in Nigeria. I think this question also has a lot to do with the current world economic order. And this is true for many reasons, but largely because I think monetary value isn't placed on nature or the viability of ecological systems. So a lot of this question has has to do with the way in which we are operating, the way that we're producing food, the way that we're producing energy, what it relies on the fact that we run our entire economy essentially based off of fossil fuels, all of this can and needs to change. And we also need to shift our economic structuring away from viewing growth through consumption, which therefore perpetuates the need for sustained population growth as well.

Nicholas Hill: 9:13

Can you tell me what, in your opinion are some of the best ways to tackle this problem? What what where should we go next?

Hannah Evans: 9:21

Yeah, so one of the really encouraging things about this issue in my opinion, is that the the best and most effective solutions and slowing population growth lie actually in the expansion of human rights, gender equality and reproductive freedom. So gender inequality actually really exacerbates many of our social, economic and environmental issues, even aside from being morally unjust and you know, representative of oppression and marginalization, fertility rates and unmet need for contraception are highest again, as we were talking about, and the world's lowest income settings, which often means that girls and women are marrying earlier, they're having more children over overall. And so fertility rates are high as a result, all of this is happening in lieu of people being able to access things like modern contraception, health care, education, and so on. So when women can access resources, like health care, education and economic opportunity, they gain more power in society and have more discretion when it comes to their life and the choices they make. Statistically speaking all across the world, women who are educated tend to have fewer healthier children overall. So really what we're focused on and the answer to the population issue is to expand opportunity for women and girls across the worlds.

Nicholas Hill: 10:48

It sounds like humans have kind of been the victim of their own success in a couple of ways in that we've increased life expectancy, we've decreased mortality in a lot of different areas, we've increased the number of resources. But on the other side of that, not everyone is reaping the benefits of that in the same way. And because there are now so many of us were facing a wide variety of problems that that brings. And something that you mentioned was that in areas of the lowest income, you're seeing the highest rates of growth? Can you tell us why that is?

Hannah Evans: 11:31

Yeah, so poverty is directly linked to fertility rates for several reasons. From a developmental perspective, societies that are low income and you know, pre industrializing or in the face of industrialization tend to have lower levels of life expectancy, the status of women is lower access to resources, again, like health care, education, economic opportunity, are more scarce. And so people's overall standard of living is not as high as it would be in a more sort of affluent or industrialized state. So in settings where like this, life expectancy is lower, and fertility rates are higher to account for higher rates of infant mortality, maternal mortality, and so on. In addition to that, and most prominently I think for right now, women who are in low income settings have higher fertility rates overall, because they, frankly, lack access to vital resources that would allow them to control their fertility and really choose when whether and with whom to become pregnant.

Nicholas Hill: 12:43

So it sounds like if we can kind of paint a picture here, if I am a woman or girl in one of these countries, I don't have as many options when it comes to making my own decisions for things like contraceptives, birth control, fertility, being able to plan my family in the way that someone in a more developed country might Is that Is that true?

Hannah Evans: 13:11

It is true. Largely, we can see that there's a direct correlation between access to resources and lower fertility rates. i And that's still true, I just want to make it clear that despite affluence and despite levels of industrialization, unmet need for contraceptives, and assaults on reproductive rights and access to reproductive health care is pervasive. So even in the United States, as is pretty evident at this point, we're an industrialized nation and quite affluence but unmet needs for contraceptives are high. So we're unintended pregnancies, and you know, a person's access to vital resources, such as these is really contingent upon socio economic status. So poor places have higher levels of unintended pregnancies, higher rates of maternal and infant mortality and so on.

Nicholas Hill: 14:08

Do we see that when these mechanisms are put in place, so when we allow women and girls to have access to medical care, education, more family planning resources, do we then see in turn that that helps when it comes to that kind of rapid population growth in those areas?

Hannah Evans: 14:28

Yes, absolutely. We know across the board, and all societies pretty much that whenever women gain access to resources like health care, education, economic opportunity, and so on their role in society, the power that they have the autonomy increases and fertility rates naturally drop in a way that's voluntary and live through empowerments worldwide, the biggest indicator or have lower fertility rates in comparison to, you know, religion or political influence or anything else, the biggest indicator is access to resources. So even in heavily religious societies like that of Iran, for example, are many places throughout Latin America, because access to contraceptives and voluntary family planning have been afforded, fertility rates have dropped despite those sorts of cultural norms or influences.

Nicholas Hill: 15:35

So, Hannah, something else that I want to talk about is the reality for women in developing countries that might not have access to this type of education and care. For example, I read on your website that there are over 121 million unintended pregnancies worldwide. Can you just tell me a little bit about the reality on the ground for these women?

Hannah Evans: 15:58

Yeah, so worldwide, there's 218 million women in developing regions alone, who would like to avoid pregnancy but are not currently using modern forms of contraception. But there are movements around the world and many different places. Rwanda comes to mind as a as a an example of a great success story. Thailand's, Iran did this, but I hesitate even to, you know, go into too much depth with that one, because they've recently reversed their policies to try to boost growth rates again. But all of these countries have successfully implemented rights based voluntary actions to help people gain better access to contraceptives and bodily autonomy. This is done largely by government support of the provision of social services, like again, contraceptives, family planning services, education about the benefits associated with small families. So obviously, because cultural norms are heavily embedded in many places, especially more rural low income settings, this is a slow moving process. This is something that's incremental, and again, you know, might work well and quickly in some places, and might be slower moving, and others just totally depending on a variety of factors. But what we know is that once these benefits are included within societies, and adopted as sort of societal principles, then these benefits are passed down from generation to generation. And so they ended up compounding over time.

Nicholas Hill: 17:40

I think it can be easy for someone to throw up their hands and say, well, the cultural influence the religious influence, the political influence, you know, nothing, nothing's going to change. And what your organization has found is that that's not true that if when you provide the access the education that those those changes do come despite other factors that may be influencing that. What are some of the ways that population connection works to advocate and fight for some of these changes?

Hannah Evans: 18:13

Well, I'd like to say first, that a lot of these shifts to these paradigm shifts and cultural norms and attitudes, really comes from community led organizations that are living and working in affected communities, an American organization going into a at risk community and just providing access to services is not nearly as effective as many of these community led grassroots movements. So it needs to be approached sensitively and culturally, in a culturally appropriate way. That's why as an organization that is located in the United States, we partner with different organizations around the world that provide direct service, and that implements developmental strategies that focus on women's empowerment, and the broader provision of family planning services. From a domestic perspective, we have a population education program, which trains teachers, on population studies and demography, in ways that helps teachers implements population studies back into the mainstream curriculum. So we do this as a way to help raise awareness and the United States and, and other so called industrialized nations, about the impacts of population growth and, you know, just sort of what demography and population dynamics mean within these broader context of the environment of social justice of the global economy and so on. We also have an advocacy program that As advocates for increased us funding for family planning programs internationally, we also work on either opposing or uplifting certain policies that influence the way that aid is distributed globally, especially in a family planning context.

Nicholas Hill: 20:17

So, Hannah, I want to talk a little bit about some of the legislation that population connection supports. And I know that one of the areas of legislation you support is the abortion is health care everywhere act. Can you just tell us briefly what that is?

Hannah Evans: 20:35

Sure. So this is legislation that has been proposed but has not been implemented yet. And we are working to try to get it passed. It's a bill that authorizes the use of certain foreign assistance funds to provide comprehensive reproductive health care services in low income countries. This includes abortion services, training and equipment. So it's essentially a provision that would really help expand not only our mission, but most importantly, access to voluntary family planning services, including that of abortion. So it's something that we are really advocating for, despite the somewhat precarious political climate here in the United States as of late.

Nicholas Hill: 21:22

Yeah, and you and I have talked about that a little bit before. And in fact, when we previously spoke, you had mentioned that population connection is working to pass the global her act, and that that would permanently abolish the global gag rule. Can you tell us a little bit about that, and kind of its history, because it was something I had never heard of, and found it very interesting. Sure. So the global gag rule is a policy that we are really focused on as an organization. It's a policy that greatly influences and limits the way that US aid is distributed, and allocated for family planning services and organizations that provide direct service. organizations that receive us funding for family planning. Under this policy, could not even mention the word abortion, they couldn't talk about it as a service, they couldn't include it in education about, you know, reproductive health care, they weren't allowed to, you know, refer patients to other places where abortions were provided. This had really severe ramifications for many organizations around the world, which depend on us funding, because they had to decide whether or not they wanted to receive vital us funding and, you know, fully operate the scope of their work, or to deny or refuse funding, and be able to provide comprehensive reproductive health care, and in many cases, save the lives of women who are coming in. And, you know, asking for safe abortion care. If they chose that option, they were usually stripped of large amounts of money, and therefore their capacity to provide services was much lower. This, essentially, you know, was a policy that was passed with the sort of moral intention of preventing abortions from increasing over time, but it's had just the opposite effect. So whenever the global gag rule has been in place, abortions have gone up really significantly. But instead of occurring in, you know, safe and medically sanctioned places, they're now often occurring these backdoor back alley conditions that endanger the lives of women and often result in death. So the global her act is the health empowerment and Rights Act. It's a policy that would permanently repeal the global gag rule. So it make it impossible to have a president come in and reinstate this policy or expand it, it would just be permanently repealed. And in addition to that, there would be, you know, a more stable sort of structure in terms of international aid and family planning services that would be allotted through this pilot through this policy, and in terms of USAID. So you have these organizations that are having to choose between, do we cut off one of our major sources of funding? Or do we just cut all mention of abortion services so that we can continue to receive this funding? And then ironically, you have this rule that was supposed to save lives, which is now causing there to be more dangerous abortions, but not really reducing the number of abortions that are having Am I kind of receiving that right

Hannah Evans: 24:59

Yes, that's exactly right. And again, a lot of this is occurring in really low income at risk settings, where the status of women is already low, where access to health care in general, not even to mention reproductive health is precarious. And so it's really been a death sentence for many people, and for many places around the world that are very heavily dependent on us aids.

Nicholas Hill: 25:28

I'm curious, you know, we're talking about kind of US policy and its effect internationally, you know, we just had a pretty big event happen in the US with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, can you tell me has has population

Hannah Evans: 25:56

Yes. So obviously, what's happened domestically has been a major assault on reproductive rights. And therefore, we have turned our attention inward, looking at the connection had to adjust or change strategy in response to implications of, you know, Roe v. Roe v. Wade being overturned, and really focusing on domestic level advocacy and outreach to that? Or have you remained relatively steady in your course oppose this measure, and to do everything possible to secure reproductive rights again, even despite that being a, you know, of what you're focused on? uphill battle, to say the least.

Nicholas Hill: 26:33

So if I'm listening, and I want to support population connection in these goals, or just do something more to educate myself, like, what are some things that I could do to help?

Hannah Evans: 26:47

That's a great question. And in terms of making an impact, I think that as a lot of these global crises have shown us, you know, a lot of our the issues we face are quite interconnected. So we can recognize that gender inequality and that climate injustice, and that social injustice, and the oppression of women is intimately related to the cause and perpetuation of climate change. And I'm bringing this up, because I think in terms of, you know, making an impact as an individual, really, what it's about is figuring out what you're most passionate about, and then dedicating yourself to that movement or cause. in terms of how to get involved with population connection. We have a membership relations team that's constantly hosting virtual events, things like panels and book club meetings and different ways that you can become educated on, you know, the issue of population and how it relates to things like climate change and reproductive health. We also have an advocacy program that looks at and garner support for reproductive rights domestically in terms of policies at the state and more local levels, and also helps young people sort of become more engaged in the political process as it relates to reproductive rights and health care. We host an annual conference called Capitol Hill days, which brings together different advocates from around the world and educators and you know, organization heads and people who are working really actively in the spaces of reproductive rights and family planning. And so this is a really good opportunity for people to become engaged in the work that we're doing.

Nicholas Hill: 28:40

Well, Hannah, I just want to say thank you so much for volunteering your time, to talk with us and for everything that population connection is doing. I'm really excited to follow your organization and continue to see the impact that that your team continues to make.

Hannah Evans: 29:00

Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure to get to talk to you and I appreciate the work that you're doing as well. So thanks again for having me on.

Nicholas Hill: 29:23

Today's show was directed and produced by me with music from Alex Grohl special thanks to our guests for their time and insight. If you liked today's episode, please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, and consider leaving a review, as it will help us to spread the word about the show. You can view more information about today's episode online at acts of impact.com. Thank you for listening