Curbing population growth will do little to solve the climate crisis | Letters

In the short time that we have to prevent catastrophic global heating, population rises are irrelevant, writes Ian Brown, while Daniel Rodriguez says the problem is overconsumption in the west

I am hugely disappointed to see John Vidal suggesting that slowing population growth can help solve the climate crisis, when he fully acknowledges that the rich generate orders of magnitude more emissions than the poor (It should not be controversial to say a population of 8 billion will have a grave impact on the climate, 15 November). Population growth will cause many problems, not least increased resource consumption, but our ability to solve" climate change in the here and now has nothing to do with future population growth because of the relative timescales involved. To argue otherwise is not controversial, it is merely wrong.

We have less than 10 years to bend the curve downwards on emissions, whereas doing the same with population is impossible. As the late Swedish academic Hans Rosling made clear, global heating is the fault of the overconsumption of the richest billion people on Earth and the next richest billion trying to adopt the same way of life. It has very little to do with the poorest billions, where future population growth is concentrated.