Family Planning mainly.
Empowering women to choose fewer children? That's a no brainer....
It's not just about women. Family Planning can and does target men too, since they often want large families, for a variety of cultural and historical reasons.
....but it's a no-brainer without even mentioning the environment. It's a no-brainer because women are people, and that's all we need to consider.
That there are other benefits does not make a particular one irrelevant, especially if it's the one we are aiming for, for good reason. For example, pedestrians are people, so we could say that if there were less vehicles on the roads, less pedestrians would get injured by them, but that doesn't mean that less vehicles wouldn't also mean less emissions, which we all agree is relevant to what we are aiming for in relation to the topic at hand, and which reduced population growth would contribute to, so we should consider it. There might indeed be more than one type of benefit to something, but they would in this case be slightly different issues.
Increasing efforts in that arena may have not entirely undesirable side effects, but the effect...
If the aim is to reduce population growth (and by extension emissions) then they would be effects.
...but the effect, in terms of climate change, is negligible
Not so, apparently, according to some studies.
...whether we reach peak population 15 years earlier or later, and at one billion more or fewer people, isn't going to change the fact that our current behaviour is not sustainable even if humans numbered only in the low hundreds of millions, or possibly in the tens of millions.
It would help our chances.
Anything beyond that (I've mentioned economic sanctions as a hypothetical, but feel free to suggest better ways how people like you, me or bilby in Northern Ireland, Austria, or Australia, can realistically effect birth rates in e. g. Uganda) is likely to have the opposite effect - even if population control itself is your primary goal. Ostracising societies, dampening their development etc. are more likely to slow the fertility decline that's already happening, than to slow growth.
First, it is not what you, I or Bilby can do to affect birth rates in other countries, it is what concerted efforts on the part of various organisations can do, and the answer is already proven. Population growth reduction strategies have worked in many countries and could be continued or stepped up. Even in our own countries, you, I and Bilby could not do much, but there are things that could be done, and given that each new child in our countries would it seems (a) cause a carbon footprint many times larger than that of a typical child in Africa and (b) cause more damage than a host of other actions its parents might take all added together, there is a case that more should be done if we (as a species I mean) want to improve our chances of surviving what is ahead. It's not a clear cut case, but there are aspects of it that are correct.
Second, given that Population growth control efforts are proven to work, and much evidence to suggest they could continue to work, and be relatively cheaper than some or many other measures, I think it's questionable to suggest either that they will not work or that they will have the opposite effect.
.. even if population control itself is your primary goal.
Well, it isn't, if you mean my primary countermeasure among all countermeasures. It is if you mean my primary goal for population growth reduction measures, yes. Just clarifying.
So, no. As part of a strategy to combat climate change, population control has no place.
Ok, so I guessed wrong about you.
Most measures in that direction are likely to be ineffective...
Moot. See above.
...those that aren't, we should be doing anyway
Slightly separate issue. See above comment on 'other benefits'.
...and focusing on
"overpopulation" (or even just "the population") carries the very real danger of raising false hopes that we can let the fossil fuel lobby off the hook and still get out unscathed. We cannot, so stop doing them the favor of helping pretend that we just might.
Well, on the one hand, we have the fact that population growth control measures have worked and there is no strong reason to think that they would not continue to, thereby reducing the problems we are talking about. And on the other hand you say there is a risk that the net effect would be lesser or negative overall because of for example letting the fossil fuel lobby off the hook. I think you would need to make a better case for the latter, which seems more speculative. The net effects might be additive.
Because we might say, in relation to what we are discussing at this particular point, that we have two ways forward. The first would be to address the crisis without addressing population and the second would be to address the crisis by various measures, including addressing population.
Incidentally, both are explicitly discussed in sections 2 & 3 (respectively) of this paper (also posted earlier) and the case is made for the latter being comparatively better:
https://www.academia.edu/19933914/Population_Engineering_and_the_Fight_against_Climate_Change
What is the extended (and ideally evidenced) case for the former being comparatively better?
