Population Control: Why is not the United Nations campaigning to recommend a global one child policy as it would clearly present the most natural solution to many of the challenges we face as a species?

i dont know why the UN in particular is not adopting it but one of the problems with such a system i once read is ( as faced in China), the V formation. Imagine yourself placed in such a system. After your marriage, you and your wife would be expected to look after yourselves, your child ( as one in this case), your own and your wife's parents and grandparents, if they are alive ( mind the grandparents would be 4 for u and 4 for your wife) , total of 15(Max) to look after with income of you 2 ( assuming working wife). Which seems like asking a lot. This is a major drawback of the one child policy.

Increasing the education level of girls tends to naturally result in a drop in birth rate as well as improving outcomes for girls and women. The United Nations is campaigning (http://www.ungei.org/) to improve access to quality education on a basis of gender equality. This is a far more appropriate role for the UN (which isn't a government) and likely also to be more effective in reducing global birth rates.

Ethics aside, there is no way that the United Nations could do this. The People's Republic of China can implement a one-child policy because it is a state, because it has a functioning government more than capable of implementing this and other policies. The United Nations is not, by any means, a world government. It is an intergovernmental organization possessing only the power that its member-states grant it. The odds that its member-states would give the UN the ability to implement such a coercive policy on a global scale, especially in the absence of any other world government role taken on by the organization, are very distant at best.

The problem is not over-population as such, but over-consumption. And if you then realize that people in the western world (in particular the USA) consume 10 or 20 times as much per capita as in the developing world, you have to conclude that the problem lies in the industrial west. Maybe instead of a one-child policy we'd need a one-car policy? Meat-once-a-week?

Implementing a one-child policy is not a sustainable solution that works in the interest of our species. Sure, it might give short term gains for the next couple of decades. But keeping this up would end up creating an aging population and a rapidly depleting workforce. China is already facing this problem. Besides, there are a lot more sustainable solutions available to us. Implementing them would not only eliminate these problems, they would let us thrive even further, letting the earth sustain an even higher population. For example, right now, only the habitable places on earth (along the tropics) are highly populated. There are extremely vast swathes of land on this planet that are completely unpopulated; areas like Siberia, Sahara Desert and Artarctica could well be colonized and thriving civilizations built up, if only humans learn to conquer harsh conditions on earth. From the rate at which we humans research extra-terrestrial colonization, this is surely possible. Plus, we have lots of space above the ground and under the water. Right now, imposing population control to solve current challenges of humanity, is like burning the house down to kill bed-bugs when fumigation will do.

A one child policy - as a cursory glance at China's demographic problems would tell you - would create more problems than it would solve. The issue is the dependency ratio - one child per couple plus increasing longevity inevitably leads to a point where each couple in the working population has to support four non-working parents plus a non-working child. And then you get a gender imbalance because boys are better able to support their parents than girls, and female infanticide becomes an option some couples consider. In the West, we have plenty of countries where the fertility rate has fallen below the replacement rate of 2, and even these countries are facing severe economic problems in the next 50 years. You would need a completely different economic model for a one-child policy to achieve anything other than huge social and humanitarian issues.

Because contrary to popular thinking, it is both bad policy and totally necessary.The world is not overpopulated nor is it in any danger of being so any time soon (or ever).  This all stems from some Malthusian nonsense that resources on the earth are some sort of zero sum game and are perpetually running out (neither is true).  Every time a model has predicted the shortage or exhaustion of some critical natural resource, one of two things has happened; either we get much better at finding and extracting it, or we find a suitable, usually better, replacement, or both. (notice oil prices recently?  we were supposed to be running out of fossil fuels, now it seems we are drowning in them).  We once burned wood for fuel (most of western Europe used to look like the black forest), when that became scarce or expensive, we found coal, then oil; whale oil switched to kerosene then electricity.Environmental impacts are real, but when calculating for the future, people always tend to make the mistake of failing to consider changes in impact rates (either calculated per person or per Joule or per ton etc.).  Manufacturing and power generation becomes more efficient over time, and more to the point makes a smaller footprint for the same benefit.  The city of London consumes vastly more power than it did in 1890, but no longer has buildings (and people) coated in soot and choking smog.  As environmental science expands, and with it human awareness of different forms of impact (like run off or CO2 emissions), new technologies have, and will continue to develop to reduce the impact per person or per Joule.  Oil as a power source can be supplanted and possibly replaced in time by methyl hydrates, nuclear power, and eventually fusion, etc.  I know these are temporary solutions; all power sources are temporary solutions, that is not a bug, it's a feature.When one looks around the world, the wealthiest countries produce and consume the most resources, so one would expect them to be the most polluted, unhealthy places on earth, but this is not the case.  That dubious honor seems tightly correlated to places with large populations and low per-capita wealth.  And that is the gist of the matter, the world is not overpopulated, it is underdeveloped.  How much would China benefit if people heated their homes with piped in natural gas, or electricity generated from clean safe nuclear reactors instead of lumps of coal in stoves?  How much cleaner would the air be in Mexico City if everyone could afford a Tesla?Wealth, technology, and industry are not the problem, they are the cure.  And they require people....lots of them.This actually brings us to the real problem the human race is facing long term...under population.  As  some posters have correctly noted, in almost all countries, wealth is negatively correlated to native population growth.  As global wealth and standards of living continue to rise, it has been predicted that the world population will maximize at 14-20  billion and then begin to fall precipitously.  Unless automation and some limited AI are able to take up the slack, the human race may find itself faced with challenges in maintaining the rate of scientific and technological progress we have become accustomed to.  I cannot imagine why we would want to hasten this process by having the government (or anyone else) interfere in our procreative prerogatives.It was two centuries ago that Thomas Malthus first predicted declining standards of living as the ultimate and unavoidable consequences of over population and proposed preventative checks (population control measures) imposed on people from on high to avert this calamity. Two hundred years of predicted disaster have not only failed to occur but precisely the opposite effect has been incontrovertibly recorded (we are dramatically wealthier, healthier, better educated and more secure).  There has never been so thoroughly refuted a theory, and yet calls for fewer people and those people learning to live with less persist as loudly as  ever.  As a species we can afford almost anything except sloth, stupidity, and these well-intentioned but poorly thought out policies. Somehow it is ALWAYS the end of the world as we know it, and I still feel fine. *********************P.S. Sorry but I needed to add something more.....so much silliness is masquerading as wisdom on this topic....take the following:"In the long run, if adults create an average of x babies, we will ensure that (x-2)/x children will die. This is a simple fact of life, but scientists and the UN should ensure it is taught throughout the world, but it is nearly unknown."No, it definitely should not be taught throughout the world, as this calculation makes no sense whatsoever.  If we adults create on average one baby (x = 1), then the death rate will become negative and dead children will start popping back to life? If we adults create an average of zero babies (x=0), perhaps they should also teach how to divide by zero "throughout the world."

Let's assume that limiting couples to one child is a good idea for humanity.  Obviously, China's one child policy has been a disaster.  But the questioner is asking why the UN doesn't recommend it.  The answer is pretty simple:  few, if any, will make major changes to their lifestyle based on what the UN recommends.  

The UN is not campaigning because the scientists that provide the conventional wisdom that the UN depends upon are confused. The confusion starts with Malthus. He failed to comprehend the concepts he was so close to describing, and scientists ever since have made the same mistakes. Malthus should have said that when we average more than 2 children, we are attempting to grow the population at an exponential rate. That attempt causes child mortality, because we are on a finite planet. Population scientists ever since have failed to comprehend the difference between growth causing problems (e.g. vice, war, and famine) and attempted growth causing child mortality. Scientists, and generally everyone else too, thinks that excessive breeding results in famine, vice, and war. It doesn't. Excessive breeding results in dead children and only dead children. Our ignorance of this fact causes environmental destruction, poverty, and lower adult life expectancy that we see in proportion to horrid child mortality rates in some parts of the world. In the long run, if adults create an average of x babies, we will ensure that (x-2)/x children will die. This is a simple fact of life, but scientists and the UN should ensure it is taught throughout the world, but it is nearly unknown. If your descendants average more than 2 babies, they will overpopulate the planet even if everyone else has zero. The scientists that feed the UN have not only failed to comprehend what this means for morality, they have failed to comprehend what it means for the mathematic techniques they use to predict future population sizes. They sample, average and extrapolate fertility rates which is like using a ruler to measure voltage. Malthus lived in a time when it was not obvious whether the population depended upon the use of resources faster than they renew. Today it is blatantly obvious. Nobody should be confused about the fact that we depend upon fossil fuels to produce the 7.2b meals per day. That fact is indisputable, and yet population scientists are not screaming, begging, pleading for us to ensure we average less than 2 babies to get our numbers down to where we no longer require non-renewables. The UN is simply following the horrible advice of population scientists.