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Achieving the 21st Century ‘Depopulation Dividend’. Japan as the World’s Research Laboratory for a More Sustainable Future

Depopulation is almost certainly good news. Current rates of resource consumption considerably exceed nature’s capacity to reproduce itself sustainably. Indeed, in 1997 humans burned fossil fuel energy equivalent to greater than 400 times the annual net primary productivity of the earth’s current biota (Dukes, 2003); and the rate has been accelerating since then.

Most resource consumption is taking place in rich countries, whose populations and economies had been growing more or less continuously for hundreds of years. Fortunately, the 20th century trend towards exponential population growth has slowed, and in some countries gone into reverse, as fertility rates decrease to below population replacement throughout most of the developed world. Fertility is dropping rapidly in developing countries too. UN Population Division data show that only 9 per cent of the world’s population now live in a country with a high rate of fertility (UNPD, 2013).

Depopulation is good, especially if it starts with CIC.