We must sever the link between economic growth and environmental degradation

For all the talk of literal fire and fury at COP27, one issue remains conspicuously absent: population. Despite the world's population currently exceeding eight billion, delegates at the Egypt conference failed to address the heart of the climate change debates.

Delegates need to adopt policies to advance decoupling, an environmental strategy that would sever the real-world link between economic growth and environmental degradation.

We must shun dangerous political ideology

Over the last 30 years, 33 countries have managed to cut emissions while maintaining population growth, while research from the Oxford Martin Programme at the University of Oxford indicates that transitioning to decarbonised energy systems could save the world $12 trillion – demonstrating that climate change can be solved through economics, not population. This win-win approach to climate change protects both individual incomes and the planet.

But dangerous political ideologies which advocate for manipulating population size – either to increase or decrease it – threaten to derail our ambition, putting the decoupling magic bullet at risk. We must shun these dangerous political narratives and double down on decoupling.

Population has been politicised by dark ideologies for centuries, and has historically been used to rationalise withholding support from the poor and disadvantaged. In the late eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus argued that food production would fail to keep pace with an exponentially increasing population, causing shortages and ultimately starvation. For Malthus, poverty was inevitable, and spending money alleviating it was a waste. Later, inspired by the post-WWII environmental movement, Paul R. Ehrlich predicted an apocalyptic societal collapse caused by overpopulation.

Could more people lead to more innovation?

Now, the issue of population has been hijacked by ideologies which threaten to weaken our commitment to decoupling. Originating in Silicon Valley, a new cornucopian movement is gaining traction that's dedicated to the idea that material abundance supports a higher population. The key idea of the utopian ideology is defined in Gale L. Pooley and Marian L. Tupy's book Superabundance: more people means more innovation which leads to more, cheaper stuff.

Cornucopians point out that the collapses predicted by Malthus and Ehrlich never happened. In fact, as the world's population has increased, nearly everything has become more abundant.

But this movement has ulterior motives. Cornucopians are an offshoot of 'progress studies': a burgeoning techno-optimist discipline which seeks to reverse a supposed stagnation in innovation. Decoupling is therefore irrelevant to cornucopians. If the ingenuity of Silicon Valley can be trusted to deliver prosperity, why would we risk fundamentally changing how the economy works? It is telling that 'decoupling' is only mentioned once in Pooley and Tupy's 500-page tome – in the appendix.

'We're terrified our obsession with stuff will kill the planet'

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, degrowth activists argue we must abandon growth and reduce population if humanity is to survive on a planet with finite resources, rejecting the premise of decoupling.

Supporters of degrowth argue that cornucopians' criticism of Malthusians is an anachronistic straw man. 'We're not worried we'll run out of stuff', they say, 'we're terrified our obsession with stuff will kill the planet'.

The post-materialism of degrowth activists has moved from the extremes of the deep green environmental movement to mainstream public opinion, as polling shows. Meanwhile, academic Tim Jackson, who for seven years was Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, believes that decoupling is a "myth".

But decoupling is not a myth. It's one of the most important initiatives in our lifetimes and is now within reach, but it's at risk. Cornucopians' naïve optimism would have us believe no action is required to respond to climate change, while degrowth activists try to persuade us poverty is good for us. As these dangerous ideologies proliferate, debunking them ought to be a primary goal of COP.

When it comes to decoupling, we can make it we try – but only if we try.