The concept of a ‘Population Bomb’ was made popular - primarily in the West - by the publication of a book with the same title by Paul and Anne Ehrlich (a title later regretted). 

The book focused on the link between population and world hunger and predicted worldwide famine due to ‘overpopulation’ fuelled by exponential population growth.

The book and the general arguments it represented were subjected to widespread criticism – for factual inaccuracies, for its many dire predictions (or ‘possibilities’ as Ehrlich described them) and for the ‘solutions’ suggested. 

On the numbers front, the world population's growth rate peaked a long time ago, reaching its highest levels in 1962 and 1963 with an annual rate of 2.2%. 

That was before the Ehrlich book was published. Since then, the growth rate has halved.

For more than half a century now, we have lived in a world of declining population growth rates. The UN projects (and most serious demographers) that this decline will continue (and even accelerate) in the coming decades.

The predictions of famine have not been borne out on anything like the scale suggested. In fact, hunger in absolute and relative terms has continued to fall regardless of periodic fluctuations. 

Despite the fact that the authors argued that ‘solutions’ should begin in the world’s richest nation – the US – public discussion focused predominantly on what poorer people and nations could or should do. This led, for example, to many involuntary interventions such as millions of forced sterilisations in India. 

In many policy proscriptions, in the popular imagination and in much lazy commentary, the ‘population bomb’ and by implication ‘overpopulation’ was transformed into a ‘Developing World’ problem.  As so often ‘they’ were the problem.

Many years later, Paul Ehrlich changed much of the focus and emphasis in his argument. Instead of concentrating on crude numbers, he talked more of equality, women’s rights, overconsumption and equity and the explicit countering of ‘racism’ (his ‘possibilities’ were consistently characterised as racist).  He argued strongly for the redistribution of wealth to end the over-consumption of resources, and his focus zeroed in on the rich as a ‘major threat’ to the future of humanity. 

He challenged the ideology of perpetual growth as the ‘creed of the cancer cell’. 

The population ‘bomb’ as predicted has not gone off and the latest population estimates - in a study commissioned by the Club of Rome - indicate a real change in population dynamics. The trend of current research suggests that human numbers will peak lower and sooner than previously forecast.

Based on existing trends world population will reach a high of about 8.8 billion before the middle of this century and then decline rapidly (UN figures in 2022 suggest a higher total population but concurred that rates were declining faster than thought). The peak could occur even earlier, if governments initiate progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels. 

While this amounts to ‘good news’ for people and planet, pressure on the world’s resources and on planetary boundaries continues to rise inexorably but not due to population growth.

The authors of the latest study warn that falling birth rates alone cannot solve the planet’s environmental problems, problems caused primarily by the excess consumption of a wealthy minority of the world’s countries and peoples.

Coupled with climate change, the challenges remain both difficult and urgent.  Instead of being about overpopulation, our problems are now primarily about overproduction and overconsumption.  But this is a message the rich world does not want to countenance because it shifts the focus from ‘them’ to ‘us’. 

We are far more familiar and comfortable with the idea that their ‘overpopulation’ is the primary issue.  We have bought into this fallacy for so long, we find it hard to discard. ‘Overpopulation remains the watchword of the denialists, the lazy and the ethnocentric.

Intriguingly, the authors of the Club of Rome study argue that if governments around the world adopted a range of progressive, social justice-focused strategies - raising taxes on the wealthy to invest in education, social services, and improved equality - human numbers could hit a high of 8.5 billion as early as 2040.  After that date, they could fall by more than a third to about 6 billion in 2100.

Despite this evidence and analysis ‘overpopulation’ equations remain popular for political and cultural reasons precisely because they seek to let ‘us’ off the hook - once again.