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Yet, even at a geo-political level, population control is rarely discussed. Today, however, marks the publication of a new report on population by the United Nations Environment Programme. Perhaps this could be the spur we need.
If debate is started, some will say that we need to stop the world's population booming, and to do so most urgently where the birth rates are highest - the developing world. Others may argue that it is in the developed world, where the impact of individuals is highest, that we should concentrate efforts. A third view is to ignore population and to focus on human consumption.
Programmes that seek actively to reduce birth rates find that three conditions must be met. First, birth control must be within the scope of conscious choice. Second, there must be real advantages to having a smaller family - if no provision is made for peoples' old age, the incentive is to have more children. Third, the means of control must be available - but also to be socially acceptable, and combined with education and emancipation of girls and women.
The human multitude has become a force at the planetary scale. Collectively, our exploitation of the world's resources has already reached a level that, according to the World Wildlife Fund, could only be sustained on a planet 25 per cent larger than our own.
Confronted with this state of affairs, there is much discussion about how to respond to human impacts on the planet and especially on how to reduce human carbon emissions. Various technical fixes and changes in behaviour are proposed, the former generally having price tags of order trillions of dollars. Spread over several decades, these are arguably affordable, and to be preferred to the environmental damage and economic collapse which may otherwise occur.
But by avoiding a fraction of the projected population increase, the emissions savings could be significant and would be at a cost, based on UN experience of reproductive health programmes, that would be as little as one-thousandth of the technological fixes. The reality is that while the footprint of each individual cannot be reduced to zero, the absence of an individual does do so.
Although I'm now the director of the British Antarctic Survey, I was previously executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere programme, looking at the chemistry and biology of how Earth works as a system. About 18 months ago, I wrote an article for the BBC Green Room website in which I raised the issues: "So if we believe that the size of the human footprint is a serious problem (and there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed.
"In practice, of course, it is a bombshell of a topic, with profound and emotive issues of ethics, morality, equity and practicability. So controversial is the subject, that it has become the Cinderella of the great sustainability debate - rarely visible in public, or even in private. In interdisciplinary meetings addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are usually notable by their absence. Rare, indeed, are the opportunities for religious leaders, philosophers, moralists, policy-makers, politicians and the global public to debate the trajectory of the world's human population in the context of its stress on the Earth system, and to decide what might be done."
The response from around the world was strong and positive - along the lines of "at last, this issue has been raised". But after that initial burst of enthusiasm, I find that little has changed. This is a pity, since as time passes, so our ability to leave the world in a better state is reduced. Today's report from the UN provides an opportunity to raise the debate once again. For the sake of future generations, I hope that others will this time take up the challenge.
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