Impact of increasing world population

doi:10.1136/bmj.39479.508530.3A

BMJ 2008;336:292 (9 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.39479.508530.3A

Letters

Doctors and climate change

Impact of increasing world population

It goes without saying that climate change will have a dramaticimpact on health—personal, global, and planetary. YetI disagree that climate change is the defining issue for publichealth in the 21st century.¹

What can be done to promote sustainable population growth? Reducingpoverty, eliminating gender inequalities, and increasing accessto education and family planning are essential. The diversityof these endeavours teaches us about the need to employ a multidisciplinaryperspective when addressing population growth. Failure to achievesustainable population growth by concerted action will leadto population policies such as those implemented by China. Theone child per family policy, draconian though it was, resultedin 400 million fewer people in a country whose current economicgrowth (driven in large part by the needs of the 1.3 billionpeople currently living in China) is causing enormous environmentalharm. Had the one child per family policy not been implemented,one can only imagine the greater negative impact that 400 millionadditional people in China would have had on individual healthand on the environment (and not just in China: pollutants releasedinto the atmosphere by coal burning plants in China travel aroundthe world).