As people live longer, fewer babies can be good for the planet. Hong Kong can show how

A controlled and fairly managed global population fall is not only desirable but essential to our long-term survival
Hong Kong, with the world’s longest life expectancy and one of its lowest birth rates, can lead the way in sustainability policies

Quentin Parker

Published: 3:30pm, 16 Oct 2023

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As a scientist, I am intrigued and fascinated by the recent spate of articles in the local and global press on ageing populations. They include the impact and proposed solutions and the parallel, perceived problem of falling birth rates, and how the effects of these trends need to be dealt with.

Genuine concerns raised in the news articles range from aged care costs and the need for more specialised geriatric health infrastructure to the tax base needed to adequately support an ageing population. This is from a shrinking cohort of salary-earners as falling fertility demographics bite ever harder.

One thing we can do is to make better use of the experience, expertise and energy of our healthier-for-longer seniors. Indeed, many wealthy, developed counties are raising the retirement age beyond 65 while some sectors in Hong Kong set this at 60.

As fertility rates fall in Hong Kong and the mainland, the issues that arise include the closing or combining of schools due to lower enrolment and the shutting down of hospital obstetrics units. This has prompted much online discussion about China’s dramatically falling birth rate and what to do about it.

Last year, this reached a nadir of 9.56 million babies born, and China’s population shrank for the first time in 60 years. For most, this is an unwelcome trend that threatens China’s prosperity and growth. But does it have to be this way?

With careful management, increasing use of artificial intelligence, robotics, health advances, efficiencies, recycling, resource adaptation, re-employment and policy reconsideration, we can re-engineer society to become more sustainable, balanced and less destructive. Common prosperity is one thing, unrestricted growth is quite another.

A common thread across developed nations with falling birth rates is that they look for ways to encourage women to have babies. One serious complication is that it is no longer just about the desire (or not) to have babies but, increasingly, a physical impossibility for many.

This is due to a worrying decline in global male fertility. The reasons are unclear but some researchers think it is related to modern lifestyles and the ubiquitous man-made chemicals, including microplastics, found across every worldly environment. Are we the inadvertent architects of our fertility crisis?

Falling fertility, whatever the reasons, is a complex issue. It is understandably worrying when viewed from a Western-style development, consumer and lifestyle perspective, but less so when examined in the broader context of finite planetary resources.

Unchecked development will eventually break down within our finite ecosystem. Our current economic model, based on perpetual growth, is unsustainable in the long run but, to paraphrase St Augustine, “make us sustainable but not yet!”

The incontrovertible truth of an eventual reckoning is rammed home against the self-evident impact of climate change affecting everything. Climate scientists were, again, stupefied by global temperature charts after September went “gobsmackingly bananas”, as one of them put it, registering the warmest global average surface temperature not by a little but by a lot! Alarm bells are not just ringing, they are deafening. But are we listening?

02:26

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Perhaps we are arriving at a crossroads where events start to drown out other considerations in terms of what humanity needs to prioritise. This is despite the serious distractions of war in Ukraine and the Middle East, and other considerations like the cost-of-living crisis.

There will always be one crisis or another that needs dealing with, but ameliorating the encroaching climate catastrophe is a battle we need to fight every day. One massively contributing factor is our global population and how to manage it, if we can.

I believe a controlled and fairly managed global population decline is not only desirable but essential to our long-term survival. Fewer humans means fewer demands on everything from farmland and fish to the fossil fuel emissions contributing to climate change.

These issues are posed and explored largely from the perspective of our consumer-based, development-focused world. The problem is that much broader global perspectives are needed. We need to transition to a world of sustainability, not just in terms of consumption but in terms of our human population and lifestyles.

We need to stop degrading and start repairing, stop exploiting without limits and think longer term. We also need to do so locally.

07:48

Hong Kong has the world’s highest life expectancy, here’s why

So what about Hong Kong? Remarkably, we have one of the lowest birth rates in the world, lower than even Italy and Japan, according to the latest UN World Population Prospects, but unsurprisingly, higher than the Vatican City! Hong Kong also has the world’s longest life expectancy, a metric that is also high in Italy and Japan – these two factors seem to go together for developed countries for well researched and understood reasons.

Hong Kong is a rich, developed, self-contained and smart city ecosystem with excellent infrastructure. This makes it the ideal global city with the capacity and expertise to test ways to manage this confluence of factors.

Ageing Hong Kong can be Greater Bay Area’s pensions and healthcare hub

As most humans now live in cities, Hong Kong can be a test bed for world-leading sustainability policies and adept management practices for the twin demographics of an ageing population and falling fertility.

If we can find sustainable and benign solutions in Hong Kong, the city can be a beacon of hope – of humane, practical and implementable ways to tackle these two issues in ways that can help save our world.

Quentin Parker is an astrophysicist based at the University of Hong Kong and director of its Laboratory for Space Research