TY  - JOUR
TI  - How population growth relates to climate change.
AB  - Currently, around 7.5 billion people live on our planet and scenarios for the future show a plausible range from 8.5 to over 12 billion before the population will level off or start to decline, depending on the future course of fertility and mortality (1, 2). These people will also have to cope with the consequences of climate change that may be in the range of 1.5 °C to more than 3 °C, depending on the scale of mitigation efforts. The paper by Scovronick et al. in PNAS on the “Impact of population growth and population ethics on climate change mitigation policy” (3) links these two global megatrends and asks how different population scenarios change the rationale for mitigation policies and vice versa. The paper shows convincingly that the answers depend on a rather abstract philosophical choice: namely, whether the goal is to maximize total utility (TU) or average utility (AU). 
DO  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1717178114
SP  - 12103
EP  - 12105
UR  - http://www.pnas.org/content/114/46/12103
PY  - 2017-01-01
JO  - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
AU  - Lutz, Wolfgang 
ER -