High fertility is driven by a number of factors including desired family size, low levels of use of modern contraceptives, and high levels of adolescent childbearing.
Discussions about climate change often skirt around the issue of population growth, but it is the main driver of rising carbon dioxide levels and many other environmental changes on a planetary scale.
The demands on land and resources from our fast-growing cities are unsustainable, as are the wastes they produce. Yet still our leaders act as if unlimited growth is possible.
The government wants more people to live in Australia’s north. So we looked at three scenarios to increase the population and the results don’t always look good for the north.
John Stanley, University of Sydney; Janet Stanley, The University of Melbourne et Peter Brain, National Institute of Economic and Industry Research
State and local governments can’t do much about the rapid population growth in Melbourne, but they can take steps to reduce the costs of growing disparities between the outer suburbs and inner city.
Population growth has pros and cons, and the Morrison government’s plan is less about a change in immigration numbers than about increasing the benefits and minimising the costs.
Capital city populations are growing twice as fast as the rest of Australia, because of the employment and business opportunities and lifestyle on offer to both new migrants and long-term residents.
Efforts by governments to redirect population growth to regional Australia have never worked. Even if such policies could be made to work, they probably wouldn’t be worth the costs.
It’s easy to over-estimate crowding and traffic in highly visible downtown cores and underestimate the vast growth happening in the suburban edges of our metropolitan regions.
Urban growth has had much less impact on commuting distances and times than media reports would suggest. The explanations include jobs being widely dispersed and residents’ adaptable decision-making.
Many people think a population policy is about control – like the one-child policy in China, for instance. But modern population policies are about population-well-being.