According to the latest official projections, the number of people in Britain will rise by 4.9 million in the space of a decade. From a base level of 67.6 million in 2022, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) forecasts a UK population of 72.5 million by 2032.
The ONS puts the number of births in this 10-year period at 6.8 million. However, that’s cancelled out completely by 6.8 million deaths. In other words, the whole of the 4.9 million population increase is accounted for by immigration.
Think about what that means in terms of housing, transport, jobs and consumption. Typically, the immigration debate centres on the economic, social and political ramifications, but what about the environmental impact?
Through its Net Zero target, Britain is committed to reducing its CO2 emissions from 300 million tonnes a year to the best part of nothing by 2050. Moving millions of people from low-carbon economies to a higher-carbon economy obviously runs counter to that objective.
Consider the additional demand for housing. The average number of occupants per UK dwelling is 2.2 — on that basis, an extra 4.9 million people means over two million extra homes will be needed. The Government has plans to drastically reduce the emissions from domestic heating and hot water, but that won’t help with the issue of embodied carbon — i.e. the amount of CO2 emitted in the process of constructing and providing the materials for each new home.
Studies show that two-thirds of all the lifetime emissions from our homes come in the form of this upfront cost, with estimates in the range of 0.4 to 0.85 tonnes of CO2 per square metre. Assuming an average dwelling size of 100 square metres, the embodied cost of two million extra homes comes to between 80 and 170 million tonnes of CO2. Sadly, few environmentalists will address these unwelcome facts.
And it’s not just about emissions: there’s the land taken too. Just how much countryside we’ll need to sacrifice depends on multiple factors such as housing density and use of brownfield land, but think about the overall impact this way: 4.9 million is very nearly the population of Scotland. If it takes all of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and hundreds of smaller communities to accommodate that number of people, then that gives us an idea of the scale of development needed across the UK to house just 10 years of immigration-fuelled population growth.
So what does the green Left have to say on this issue? Not a lot. George Monbiot’s weekend column in The Guardian is a prime example. He lays into Labour’s “build baby, build” housing policy, but doesn’t mention immigration once.
Of course, progressives can still make the case for a liberal immigration policy on humanitarian grounds. But that doesn’t change the fact that making room for five million extra people will mean a lot less space for nature.
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SubscribeIt is great to see Unherd care so much about the environment and global warming. Can we expect further articles discussing the environmental impact of “Drill, baby Drill!”, removing fuel efficiency regulations for cars, or the rise of crypto? Or do you only think of the environment as a handy way of bashing your opponents?
The article is about blind-spots and contradictions within the movement to reduce carbon emissions.
The extent that carbon is inescapably baked-in to any kind of growth or even sustaining current living standards – the tensions and outright contradictions between various elite orthodoxies, such as mass immigration and Net Zero.
This article is about the impact of mass immigration on the UK. Did you read it?
All we would ned to do to off set that would be to expel all the illegal immigrants
Making West deindustrialised and poor is not going to solve global warming issue.
It is just moving pollution to China, India etc.
Main problem for the world is overbreeding in useless countries.
What is sustainable level of Africa population without Western science, technology and medicine?
Probably about 300 million.
I am all better technologies replacing inferior ones.
But IPhone did not replace Nokia because of government dictat.
Very few people want electric cars and grid investments required to do it is too high.
If you take into account that 75% of petrol price is tax, electric cars are not cheaper to run on equivalent basis.
If people want to pursue their woke, green dreams good luck.
Just do not ask me to subsidise it.
What a ridiculous article. Ignore all the real consequences of mass immigration but treat it as a Net Zero problem. Unherd you are pathetic.
Instead of focusing on independence, the SNP should consider constructing a parallel Scotland
The far-left (woke) has trapped itself. For decades, they’ve screeched “racist!” at anyone opposing mass immigration. To them, it’s an immaculate phenomenon—floating outside the laws of physics, with no real impact on society or the environment.
Asking a leftist to criticise immigration is like asking
AmpleforthParsons to denounce Big Brother—if it ever happens, it’ll be muttered in a fevered, sweat-soaked dream.Ideologically possessed zombies like Monbiot can’t solve the problem because they are the problem. Actual environmentalists should stop looking sideways at what the far-left is saying and just get to work.
What is it with daft headlines with ‘The Left…’ and ‘The Right….’?
Presumably to keep up the subterfuge of balance.
Unherd, it doesn’t work. We are not stupid.
Why would this be at all surprising when we know the key characteristics of many lefties include a) the inability to hold two contradictory thoughts in their heads at one time, and b) the inability to countenance any kind of pragmatism in the pursuit of their (frequently unrealistic) ideals, or that said ideals might actually clash and entail a trade-off.
a) needs edit to ‘ability’
No, I definitely meant “inability”. Bit unrelated, but the example that springs to mind is the inability to understand that it’s possible to see Churchill as both a hero and a villain. A discussion that rocked on over 2 hours at a dinner party blighted by leftists that I almost left on a stretcher.
Climate Change is real.
No human is illegal.
Black lives matter.
Love is Love.
Kindness is everything.
Is this a satirical comment? Or just a very dumb one?
“Hey we have to keep up the pretence we are a politically neutral site. what shall we do?
I know let’s headline half the articles ‘The Right…’ and the other half ‘The Left….’
Great idea. All those AI sites will confirm we give equal attention to both sides.
Nice.”
Dolts.
Not politically neutral but neutral from the point of view of platforming the free exchange of ideas from the left right political spectrum.
Think an upside down triangle with neutral at the bottom supporting a range of views from the top left to the top right.
“Hey we have to keep up the pretence we are neutral from the point of view of platforming the free exchange of ideas from the left right political spectrum. But here’s the clever part. We’ll lay down the narrative!
Wow. Which narrative?
Starmer’s of course!
I know let’s headline half the articles ‘The Right…’ and the other half ‘The Left….’
Great idea. All those AI sites will confirm we give equal attention to both sides.
Nice.”
Dolts.
“Look at the latest Starmer-Unherd article. Rudakubana is an incel! Anyway that’s what we’ll get the Unherd sheep, sorry, subscribers to talk about!
Ha ha ha ha…”
I just read the article – no mention of Starmer whatsoever!
That’s why Dicky Littletodger is kicking off. He wants every article to be about Starmer for some reason, he’s fixated by the man. Maybe it’s because Starmer is the only person in the world with less personality than himself
A characteristic detail – in the illustration for the article, in a demonstration about climate there are only women with a completely meaningless slogan “Climate Justice = Human Rights”. Not one of these stupid cows will ever be able to explain to you what “Climate Justice” is, but they are quite capable of driving you crazy with their self-confident narrow-mindedness. These are the same cows who fight for the rights of “migrants” and the rights of “trans women”, including their right to rape women.
I don’t know if there is a cure for this kind of mental clouding.
Ironically, Islam would probably solve the problem of the shrill, over confident middle class women.
Totally agree !
We have quite a number of those ‘cows’ (an insult to these most useful and gracious beasts by the way) as MP’s / party leaders on the left in France: listening to their mindless drivel definitely feels like travelling in a parallel universe.
“When reality does not conform to your totalitarian ‘bien pensant’ ideology, just stick to your ideology” seems the sum total of their philosophy…
When are we going to stop listening to these idiots? It’s clear to anyone with a brain that more people need more infrastructure, yet these pillocks chant for open borders, block construction then wonder why our rivers are full of sh*t.
I quite like what little green space we have left. Close the borders to save the environment.
Close the borders and remigrate savages to save Western Civilisation.
Environment is secondary.
The political ideology drives a lot of the climate ideology.
Climate science is clear. Man made climate change is happening and needs to be dealt with by decarbonisation.
Even if we were to accept that a negative climate change is due to anthropogenic activity, how would you reconcile an increase in the UK population to the level stated in the article with a commitment to decarbonise, in the same timescale. It’s already proving extremely difficult with a stable population.
Wow, you sound like you’re reading verbatim from the climate hysteric’s manifesto!
Could you please tell everyone your credentials as a climate scientist.
There is one factor above all that drives anthropogenic ‘climate change’ (an utterly meaningless concept), if it is a truism as distinct from natural climate change. Human over-population! It is as simple as that.
And yet, no activists are engaged in developing workable strategies to deal with this nightmare. Our population impact on the environment is as obvious as it is catastrophic – e.g. the vast areas of rainforest cleared to allow cattle ranching to expand to feed us.
Africa has the highest birth and fertility rates of any continent, with more than half of its people of child-producing age. So why is nothing being done to curtail and halt its out-of-control population explosion?
At the end of WW2 the global population was c.2.2 billion. In 80 years it has surpassed 8 billion, as joyously celebrated by the United Nations when it announced milestone in our existence on Planet Earth. The collective madness of the world’s political elites knows no bounds. Their wealth and position shields them from the consequences of their insanity.
The billions of dollars spent annually on climate change research and related projects would be better spent on mass programmes to reduce the exponential rate of human infestation of the Planet.
Well said and I am in total agreement. Human overpopulation is, or will be, the biggest problem for the planet. Not ‘climate change’. In nature, populations are controlled by the available resources, be it food supply, size and suitability of appropriate habitat etc.
Planet Earth also has a maximum carrying capacity for the human population for sustainable living without drastically depleting it’s resources. This point may have already passed.
Thanks for your endorsement, Kevin. The over-population reality is almost totally ignored by politicians and the scientific community. It is not politically correct, especially as the biggest problem in the making is in Africa – which cannot be criticised or portrayed in any negative way. And of Course black Africans are all innocent victims of western capitalism and greedy colonialism. They are not the architects of their own woes!
Rather strange logic. People in less developed societies should stay there because that helps reduce the world’s carbon footprint. It’s glorious to be poor. Very easy to say if you’re not.
There are cases for immigration but everything needs to be considered. Not all immigration is from low carbon to high carbon economies and some people migrating may have a high carbon status in their generally low carbon economy. However the green left is often hypocritical as they believe in less aviation yet also believe in unlimited immigration which will create demand for more aviation as people need to visit family back home & elsewhere especially for weddings, funerals and Christmas. The far-right however is not taking into consideration the impact of climate change on the potential for mass movements of people. Warmer climate = more droughts = monsoons = higher sea levels etc..
I still can’t quite work out why the liberal Left champion mass immigration from the undeveloped world.
Doubtlessly, the best answer is that they prefer the so-called ‘wretched of the Earth’ to the indigenous working-class. The former open curryhouses and keep their cornershops open at convenient times after work, while post-industrial areas are blighted by unemployment and other social problems.
There’s also probably an aesthetic reason to, as well as what they take to be a moral one in their Marxist tradition. But then the liberal Left do not usually have immigrants from the developing world as their neighbours.
Unfortunately, many of the original family-owned curryhouses have been taken over (sometimes using threats) by mafia-style Asian gangs, employing their own staff. Standards have, of course, gone downhill. I’m sure the police know about this.
Where is this great ‘lefty’ demand for mass immigration? I don’t see it anywhere. Compassion yes, empathy yes (even though it’s now a sin in the USA) but open borders? – only called for by a few outliers as there are in any discourse.
Additionally there is all the imports that an extra 4.9 million people will need.
The UK already uses foreign land equivalent to 88% of the UK’s land area between 2016 and 2018, to fulfil the country’s demand for just seven agricultural and forest commodities.
https://www.wwf.org.uk/riskybusiness
Thus not only will population growth reduce the amount of agricultural land in the UK, population growth will need an increase in foreign land to support the necessary imported consumption. This will also increase carbon emissions from transportation and deforestation along with the embodied emissions from housing, infrastructure and increased public services.
Perhaps the main reason why the environmental left are in denial about the dynamic between population, energy, consumption and the environment is that population growth and the increased need for foreign land, energy and materials often results in forced displacement of indigenous communities to turn smallholding land into industrial agricultural land or mining land. This of course is a primary source of internecine violence and conflicts and refugees.
The current orthodoxy is densification whether urban densification, wildlife densification, agricultural densification thus expect the easier transmission of viruses, more congestion and bottlenecks, increased interpersonal and intercommunity competition, more mental health issues, more extreme violence, more sophistry to divert from the actual existing impacts of unsustainable population growth.
As well as the impact of mass migration on the environment, there is also the impact on the countries left behind by the migrants of losing their (mostly) young men and their skilled staff who move to the West. Is it ethical of the West to take the most able?
I was a Green in the 1970s and this issue was talked about quite a lot. This was when we were concentrating on reducing the use of the earths precious resources and protecting our beautiful countryside. The agenda has changed.I remember a statistic that just by moving into Europe a person multiplied their ecological footprint by 7. Probably still true.
Housing is just the beginning.
All these additional people will be working somewhere. So more offices and factories will have to be built.
They’ll also have children, so we’ll need more schools. They will need health care – more GPs and hospitals. They will need to be able to go to school, to work, to shopping – more roads and transport infrastructure.
All of these are matters that are already today overstretched and underinvested.
Factories, in the UK, more like a McDonald’s on every roundabout bypassing the ever expanding towns!
It’s almost like they don’t have well thought out feelings.
Environmentalists ignore a lot of things, including the science they claim to worship, on a regular basis. For example, it’s a commonly accepted fact fossil fuels are somehow less sustainable than the much rarer elements and minerals used in EV batteries. In reality, both are finite in quantity, but the latter takes much more energy to process into its final form and the mining and processing of those materials also leads to much more local environmental destruction. We never hear about that because it happens mostly in China where we don’t hear anything negative about anything because their government controls information. Nuclear energy is also unacceptable because they understand the dangers and long life span of nuclear waste but have no concept of how little of it is actually produced.
Environmentalism is mostly nonsense, political sloganeering and dogmas piled on top of a highly romanticized version of nature and how humanity is in a conflict with it, a conflict that that they are somehow winning because technology destroys nature and losing because destroying nature will somehow destroy us and our technology. None of this is ever sufficiently justified by actual science. The underlying scientific numbers and observations may be sound science derived from empirical research, but the moralizing about what we ‘should’ do to respond comes entirely from their own set of dogmas. It doesn’t help that many of the ‘scientists’ engage in the moralizing themselves and blur the lines between science and propaganda. They’re not being responsible scientists but they are being typical humans.
The notion of saving the planet is absurd. It doesn’t need to be saved and if it did it’s doubtful we could do much. In fact, ‘nature’ as we know it has survived and recovered from a meteor impact that was orders of magnitude more powerful than all the nuclear weapons ever made if they could all be gathered together and detonated at once. Supervolcanoes also make our nuclear weapons seem like so many firecrackers. There’s nothing man can conjure that’s anywhere near as destructive as what the natural world already does. There are already organisms adapting to the conditions of the great Pacific garbage patch and scientists debating whether we should clean up the pollution because it would possibly destroy such life. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is essentially a wildlife preserve, with many of the animals there already adapted to higher levels of radiation. Nature can easily handle whatever humans can throw at it and more besides.
The deep greens used to be anti population growth even before global warming.
Now they are for population growth if it comes through open borders, etc.
Perhaps it has something to with skin colour: maybe it was only white population growth they were against. In which case , they have succeeded. The environment must have colour bar.