#MoveTheDate
49
Days
If every other family had one less child and parenthood was postponed by two years, by 2050 we would move Overshoot Day 49 days.*
*NOTE: If we continued as now, we would be at 9.7 billion. This is the UN medium variant estimate. If each mother or father had on average 1.8 children (= 0.9 children per person), compared to 2.3 currently, and parenthood was delayed by 2 years, we’d be at 7.7 billion in 2050. Assuming humanity’s Ecological Footprint per capita stays at 2020 levels (2.47 gha per person), the difference in 2050 would be 49 days.
What is the solution?
Supporting women’s and girl’s reproductive health with trusted, affordable, and easy to use contraceptives. This helps empower them (and their partner) to choose when to start families.
This solution improves our resource security in the population category.
How does it #MoveTheDate?
Starting a family later in life creates a larger gap between generations, and older parents tend to have fewer children. These factors contribute to smaller family sizes, which in turn decreases demand on the planet.
How is it scalable?
More than 200 million women of reproductive age do not have consistent access to effective family planning. This creates abundant opportunities to improve these women’s lives and help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies through reproductive healthcare access.
What is the solution?
Supporting women’s and girl’s reproductive health with trusted, affordable, and easy to use contraceptives. This helps empower them (and their partner) to choose when to start families.
This solution improves our resource security in the population category.
How does it #MoveTheDate?
Starting a family later in life creates a larger gap between generations, and older parents tend to have fewer children. These factors contribute to smaller family sizes, which in turn decreases demand on the planet.
How is it scalable?
More than 200 million women of reproductive age do not have consistent access to effective family planning. This creates abundant opportunities to improve these women’s lives and help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies through reproductive healthcare access.
Every person needs food, shelter, clothing, and energy. With each additional person, demand to provide these needs goes up. There are huge differences in consumption among people. Both the number of people and how much they consume affect the total resource demand of a population.
In the US, nearly half of pregnancies are unintended, according to the Guttmacher Institute. This aligns with global trends, where, according to the World Health Organization, almost half of pregnancies are unintended, and 214 million women of reproductive age who want to avoid pregnancy are not using a proven contraceptive device. There is also a huge socio-economic divide with people living in lowest income regions being three times more likely to face unintended pregnancies than those living in high-income regions.
Access to safe, affordable, and easily manageable contraceptives would serve particularly the 214 million women and their partners mentioned above.
Bringing these topics into standard curriculum would help demystify the topic. One possibility is to include demographic topics in math and science classes.
The population section on this website offers context and content for discussion. It also includes a (free) spreadsheet based “cohort” model that allows users to estimate the impact of higher or lower reproduction rates, higher average age of mothers, or lower mortality.
Beyond offering an opportunity to teach math through basic spreadsheets, and linking math to topics of interest, such explorations also show how small changes now have dramatic implications over longer time periods.
It is important to note that changes to population size will have little impact on our ability to totally decarbonize before 2050, as the range of possible global population values by 2050 is narrow. But by 2100, it is conceivable to have 4.5 billion people, or over 11 billion, with vastly different implications for the biocapacity available per person.
There’s no benefit in waiting!
Acting now puts you at a strategic advantage in a world increasingly defined by ecological overshoot. Countless solutions exist that #MoveTheDate. They’re creative, economically viable, and ready to deploy at scale. With them, we can make ourselves more resilient and #MoveTheDate of Earth Overshoot Day. If we move the date 6 days each year, humanity can be out of overshoot before 2050.