An often overlooked aspect of reducing one’s environmental footprint is having no children or having fewer children. It’s the only ethical form of population reduction for obvious reasons, and less people means that humanity’s collective environmental impact is reduced.

To my knowledge, China is the only country to have national legislation limiting the number of children people can have through its one-child policy, which has recently been changed to allow two children per family to reduce the risk of having a population where the elderly massively outnumber young people. Of course, this policy needs to be combined with sex education, easy access to contraception, etc in order to actually work.

What would your opinion be on other countries, especially other developed countries, adopting policies like this? Do you think the environmental benefits outweigh the issues caused?