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  Half a year before I published A Planet of 3 Billion, Rob Harding proposed the creation of a United Nations Framework Convention on Population Growth. You can find the original post here at Stanford’s Millenium Alliance for Humanity & the Biosphere. The proposal was also published at the Overpopulation Project which you can find here.
In previous posts, I have rallied behind the concept of creating an 18th Sustainable Development goal which is focused on curbing runaway population growth and bending the global population curve to achieve a lower, more sustainable population plateau. Whether the SDG process might be reopened to add this 18th SDG is anyone’s guess. Certainly if they do not, we will overshoot all of our SDGs. Sigh. Rob’s approach would serve a similar purpose. It would allow us to recognize that we (e.g., humanity) have exceeded our planet’s carrying capacity, and are accruing long term ecological debt that is threatening our planet and our species. And, it would allow us to collectively set goals for bending the global population curve in a particular timeframe. After all, what are goals with out due date! I have argued for a goal of 1.5TFR by 2030, but we could negotiate that within the UN process. Rob’s proposal is modeled on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has negotiated targets for carbon emissions. Yet, it completely failed to appreciate the role of runaway population growth in fueling climate change. History will look back on this failure with contempt. So, why not just add discussion of runaway population growth to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change? Well, as I have said elsewhere, climate change and our collective carbon footprint is only one small part of our larger human footprint. And, to properly grapple with runaway population growth, a substantial agreement with many moving pieces would be required. It is not as simple as setting targets. Population issues touch every single Sustainable Development Goal, and every aspect of human rights discussions across the UN and its member nations. We have it at our fingertips to embrace just, ethical, and empowering strategies - particularly focused on women and girls - that can help us bend the global population curve. But, all nations would need to agree to them. As such, I completely endorse Rob’s proposal to establish a UN Framework Convention on Population Growth - as an update and friendly amendment the Cairo Consensus established in 1994 during the UN’s International Conference on Population and Development.
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