Improve the environment - move to Scotland
Posted by DavidM in Pollution | 16 February 2011
In it's last report before being abolished, The Royal Commission on Environment Pollution has warned that the UK's increasing population, growth of elderly and single person households will put intense pressure on infrastructure and the environment in the most populated areas. The problem will be most acute in south-east England and other urban centres, with water supplies, air quality and waste management struggling with the growth in demand.
The population in Great Britain is expected to grow from 61.9m in 2009 to 71.6m in 2033. The Department of Work and Pensions expects nearly one in five of the people alive today to reach 100 and the number of households is forecast to grow from 21.5m to 27.8m by 2031.
Given the scale of the impact of the existing population and the difficulties the government is already having in reducing our emissions, these figures present a dire warning that we must change radically to not only avoid a worsening of damage to the environment but also reverse it.
"We don't think government is giving anything like enough attention to demographic change," Lawton said. "And critically if it doesn't, the problems which emerge will cost more in the long run."
The report urges the government to create jobs in less populated areas to encourage the population to spread away from the high-density areas.
Disappointingly, the Royal Commission didn't recommend compulsory water metering where water is in scarce supply. It's been shown that water meters reduce usage by 10-15% and it seems an obvious decision to make this compulsory throughout the country.
The Optimum Population Trust has claimed that our best hope of achieving environmental sustainability is to reduce the population by more than half to 30 million people. This was dismissed as "absolute nonsense" by the Royal Commission's chair, Sir John Lawton. Even if it was desirable, he says, there is little that could be done to reduce the size of the population over the next 40 years.
He is probably right that, barring a major war directly affecting the population, we may not be able to stop population growth let alone halve it. However, I think he misses the point. It's not whether reducing the population by half is desirable or easy. The key question is, are The Optimum Population Trust correct in their assessment that the population needs to be that low to be sustainable and, if true, that shows how big a problem we have.
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