OPT's Green Planet Petition - the Really Big Ask

With world population set to rise 40 per cent by 2050, human numbers are a crucial element of ecological sustainability and the biggest underlying cause of many environmental problems. In the UK, population is projected to increase by a sixth - 10 million people - in less than 25 years. Yet population has become the issue no one wants to talk about - ignored by governments, politicians, environmental groups and the media because it's too 'sensitive'. OPT believes the planet can't take any more people. It wants the UK to set an example to the world by adopting a national population policy - aimed, first, at stabilising and decreasing our numbers to what is environmentally sustainable and, second, maintaining them at that level (zero population growth).

For further details of how this might be managed see OPT Population projections, Fertility, and Migration. OPT's 2003-based population policy would have allowed UK population to decrease from from 59.55 million then to 53 million by 2050. Opt for a sustainable population policy: better family planning services, greater efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies and a policy of balancing emigration and immigration so that migration causes no further increase in the UK population. Based on ecological footprinting studies (see Sustainable numbers) OPT believes a genuinely sustainable population for the UK may eventually be lower than 30 million.