the world has already passed ‘peak child’. According to statistics compiled by the United Nations, the number of children in the world peaked in 2017vi and is now falling. Take a moment to think about what that means: there may never be more children in the world than there were in 2017. Global population growth will peak when all these children

(1) Improve crop yields across the world

At the very least, the world is near the peak of agricultural land. And yet we continue to produce more and more food each year. There has been a global decoupling of agricultural land from food production.viii That is a momentous moment in our environmental history.

We extrapolate exploding population numbers and panic that they will never stop growing. At least, until they crash. We see rising CO2 emissions and assume that they’ll just keep rising. Fertilisers, coal, pesticides, air pollution: we’ll just produce more and more. If you’re sceptical that things can change, then this is a natural position to fall

The total impact of our hunter-gatherer ancestors might not be comparable to ours today, but the notion that they lived in perfect balance with other species is a fantasy.

Many people think that the way to stop plastic pollution is to stop using plastic entirely. But this is an unlikely – and undesirable – solution. Thankfully, we have the tools we need to solve it. Many countries have implemented them already.

That is why conversations about whether the world should go organic or not get so messy. The reality is that the world cannot go organic. Too many of us rely on fertilisers to survive. As we’ll see later, many countries can reduce the amount of fertiliser they use without sacrificing food production, but we can’t do this everywhere.

If you believe people have the right to the truth, then you should be against these exaggerated doomsday stories.

Every day, 300,000 people get access to electricity and a similar number get clean water, for the first time. This has been the case every day for a decade.