Population growth, climate policy, and sustainable futures

The silence at the core of contemporary climate policyA perplexing tension exists at the heart of contemporary climate policy.While scientific evidence identifies population growth as a primary driver of greenhouse gas emissions, international climate negotiations rarely address it directly.This gap reflects complex political and cultural considerations about discussing population -considerations that may affect our collective capacity to address the climate crisis comprehensively.The most recent full report (AR6) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear on the role of population growth where it comes to carbon emissions:Globally, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and population growth remained the strongest drivers of CO 2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the last decade (robust evidence, high agreement).(IPCC, 2023a: 217) However, this emphasis diminishes in policy documents.The 64-page Summary for Policy Makers, the document that shapes international negotiations, does not explicitly mention population growth as an indirect driver and acknowledges only obliquely that 'slow technological change, high levels of global population growth, and high fragmentation as in the Shared Socio-economic Pathway SSP3, may render modelled pathways that limit warming to 2°C (>67 per cent) or lower