World Population Growth: A Once and Future Global Concern

The challenge posed by global population growth has been clear to most scientists since at least the 1950s. In the 1970s, it became conventional wisdom that “the population explosion” constituted a threat to humanity and to sound social, economic and ecological development. This conviction was clearly demonstrated at UN conferences on the environment (1972) and population (1974). It was also confirmed in the important UN report Our Common Future, presented by the Brundtland Commission in 1987. Since the 1990s, international interest in population issues has decreased dramatically and has even become a taboo in certain academic and political discourses. This paper will try to analyze some of the reasons for these changes in attitudes and will present proposals on how to push the population issue back on to the international agenda.