Population growth will make it harder to meet EU climate goals, while stable or declining populations will help cut greenhouse gas emissions in the EU

In the following exercise, we demonstrate how different migration and fertility-influencing policies can lead to large differences in future annual greenhouse gas emissions, and in cumulative emissions throughout the century in the European Union. We present nine scenarios representing migration and fertility policies leading to stable, declining, or growing populations. The scenarios leading to decreasing populations have great potential to reduce total greenhouse emissions in the future, and to meet ambitious climate goals. On the contrary, scenarios leading to continuous population growth make it much harder to meet climate goals, requiring substantially larger reductions in per capita emissions and potentially leading to much greater total greenhouse emissions in the future.

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