Community Alliance Party

Everyone agrees that the recent 2020 Summit was a highly stage-managed affair. But in an otherwise highly consensual set of outcomes, the population, sustainability and climate change group generated a fundamental, and very interesting, disagreement.

Some participants felt that it would be necessary to restrict population growth in Australia, if true sustainability were to be achieved. Others wanted the focus to remain on reducing per capita ecological impacts. This might seem a rather obscure disagreement, but in reality it goes to the heart of our current dilemma.

Clearly, it is the sum total of what we use up and mess up that is important. The environment does not know or care about our individual efforts. But whether we see that sum total as being a function of what each of us does, or a function of how many there are of us, has profound consequences for the way we conceptualise the problem, and the kinds of policies we produce.

In the basic arithmetical sense, of course, we are talking about the same thing. Taking the total water or energy use of a given population, and then dividing it by the number of people involved, gives you a per capita figure. But it's the way the figures are used that is important.

If we want people to think about what they themselves do (an individual decision), we will concentrate on the per capita figure. If we want to focus on the total impact they produce, we inevitably start to discuss how many there are doing the doing, which in Australia at least, because of the importance of immigration, is a collective decision.

The individual argument, at least as it is usually presented to us, is the moral one, while the collective perspective is more pragmatic. Thus, we are told, Australians per capita are among the world's most profligate generators of greenhouse gases. But in the aggregate, we contribute only a tiny fraction of the total.

But that's when we compare ourselves with the rest of the world. Within our own country, the effect is reversed. When governments want to clobber us, they talk about our aggregate consumption. The ACT Government, for example, tells us our aggregate daily water consumption, relative to a pre-set target. If the Government wanted to make us feel good about our water consumption, it would tell us the per capita figure.

This is because, when we want to measure how we are going, we prefer to talk about trends over time. If consumption rises less rapidly than the population does, we obtain a per capita decline. This leads some people to argue that we can ''decouple'' our consumption from our ecological footprint, despite the fact that our aggregate impact is greater than ever.

How far policy analysts go with this ''decoupling'' argument tends to depend upon how much they believe in the power of markets. Economists, by and large, believe that if we get the prices right, market forces will do the work of making us more sustainable.

We don't actually need to change the way we think, because we are all self-interested utility maximisers, and if we are given the incentives to change what we do, all will be well.

But that still leaves the population question hanging in mid-air. Economists tend to be wary of it, because of the complexity of the relationship between population growth, technological change and economic growth.

They point to the immense power of markets and modern technology to improve living standards in poor countries, and to the fact that, once people become sufficiently rich for children to be a net cost, they spontaneously lower their reproduction rate. When it comes to rich countries, however, economists are less comfortable about declining birth rates, seeing population ageing and eventual decline as a threat to further improvements in living standards.

The Greens are in several minds on the question of population. Most are well aware that population growth is detrimental to the environment. But most don't want to talk about it, because to do so in this country would mean cutting back on immigration, and immigration is a difficult subject to discuss publicly. It is less controversial to preach individual restraint. So the Greens want us all to cut back, to improve the insulation of our buildings, to put solar panels on our roofs, to recycle as much as possible, to use less. If we all do it, all will be well.

For its part, business appears to have no doubts about population increase: more people means more customers, and more customers mean higher profits. Business can afford to say this, because in general, business does not pay for the extra costs that high rates of population growth impose on society as a whole.

Governments, ever opportunistic, avoid the ''population'' word all together. Rather than managing population growth more carefully, successive federal governments prefer to use immigration as an on- off tap, increasing the flow when economic growth is strong, and reducing it when it falls away. The states, territories and local government have no choice but to try to accommodate the extra people as best they can.

So, that leaves the rest of us. We are not against immigration per se, but we do understand that more people means more stress on our environmental resources. And beyond that realisation, comes another. We appreciate the need to reduce water and energy use, to re- use and recycle, but if we do the heroic thing and reduce our consumption, how much of our sacrifice will be negated by population increase?

As a society, we need to think carefully, and much more honestly than in the past, about where our current growth models are taking us. Do we really believe that governments have the will, and the skill, to manage the myriad competing pressures involved?

Reducing population growth will not solve all our environmental problems they are much too complicated for that. But it will, at least, give us a little more time to sort out what we really mean by sustainability, as well as taking some of the pressure off our urban water, planning and transport systems.

Dr Jenny Stewart is associate professor of public policy at the University of Canberra.
This article was first published in th Canberra Times on 26 May 2008