China Says One-Child Policy Helps Protect Climate
Date: 31-Aug-07
Country: AUSTRIA
Author: Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
But delegates at UN climate change talks in Vienna said on
Thursday birth control is unlikely to find favour as a major
policy theme, partly because of opposition by the Catholic
Church and some developing nations trying to increase their
population.
Some scientists say that birth control measures far less
draconian than China's are wrongly overlooked in the fight
against climate change, when the world population is projected
to soar to about 9 billion by 2050 from 6.6 billion now.
"Population is clearly an important factor," said Yvo de
Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, at UN talks
trying to plan a new deal to combat climate change after 2012.
China, which rejects criticism that it is doing too little
to confront climate change, says that its population is now 1.3
billion against 1.6 billion if it had not imposed tough birth
control measures in the late 1970s.
The number of births avoided equals the entire population of
the United States. Beijing says that fewer people means less
demand for energy and lower emissions of heat-trapping gases
from burning fossil fuels.
"This is only an illustration of the actions we have taken,"
said Su Wei, a senior Foreign Ministry official heading China's
delegation to the 158-nation talks from Aug 27-31.
He told Reuters that Beijing was not arguing that its policy
was a model for others to follow in a global drive to avert ever
more chaotic weather patterns, droughts, floods, erosion and
rising ocean levels.
But avoiding 300 million births "means we averted 1.3
billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2005" based on average world
per capital emissions of 4.2 tonnes, he said.
GERMANY
A country emitting 1.3 billion tonnes a year would rank just
ahead of Germany on a global list of emitters behind only the
United States, China, Russia, India and Japan.
Beijing introduced its one-child policy in the late 1970s.
The rules vary across the country but usually limit families to
one or, at most two, children.
"Population has not been taken seriously enough in the
climate debate," said Chris Rapley, incoming head of the Science
Museum in London.
He favours a greater drive for education about family
planning to avoid unwanted births and slow population growth.
But tougher birth control runs into opposition from the
Roman Catholic Church, and from some developing nations which
favour rising birth rates and have per capita emissions a
fraction of those in rich nations.
Harlan Watson, the chief US negotiator, said that high
immigration to the United States makes it harder to slow its
rising emissions.
"It's simple arithmetic," he said. "If you look at
mid-century, Europe will be at 1990 levels of population while
ours will be nearing 60 percent above 1990 levels. So population
does matter," he said.