Climate of Our Future

Climate Crisis Coalition

China Says One-Child Policy Helps Protect Climate
By Alister Doyle, Reuters, August 30, 2007
“China says its one-child policy has helped the fight against global warming by avoiding 300 million births, the equivalent of the population of the United States. But delegates at U.N. climate change talks in Vienna said on Thursday birth control is unlikely to find favor 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 U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, at U.N. 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… Su Wei, a senior Foreign Ministry official heading China’s delegation to the 158-nation talks from Aug 27-31 [said that by avoiding 300 million births] ‘we averted 1.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2005? based on average world per capital emissions of 4.2 tonnes. 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.”