Creating Socially Just Population Policies Advances Global Equity AND Mitigates Climate Change

According to Oregon State University academics, socially fair strategies to reduce the world's human population have an enormous capacity for advancing justice and trying to mitigate climate change.

Improving schooling for girls and young women, ending child marriage, and increasing the provision of voluntary, rights-based family planning programs that empower all people, especially poor women, are examples of desperately needed population policy interventions, according to the researchers.

Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Kenya are three countries where better schooling for girls and young women could have led to major fertility rate decreases, according to Ripple. "Specific education initiatives in those countries included instituting classes in local languages, the education budgets, and eliminating school fees. In addition, Ethiopia launched a school lunch scheme, Indonesia built large-scale schools, and Kenya extended primary school by one year."

Human rights are enhanced and future migration, unemployment, and violence are reduced by taking measures to stabilize and eventually steadily decrease overall human numbers within a socially just system, according to Wolf and Ripple. Contraction and convergence is one possible framework, which calls for reducing net pollution (contraction) while equalizing per capita emissions (convergence). This is fair in the sense that it equalizes global per capita pollution, which is in stark contrast to current trends.

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