Optimum Population Trust

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The Optimum Population Trust is a registered United Kingdom charity, think tank and campaign group concerned with the impact of population growth on the natural environment. With respect to population growth, it researches climate change, energy requirements, biodiversity and other environmental factors. OPT campaigns for stabilisation and gradual population decrease globally and in the United Kingdom. It advocates full access to family planning, better education and rights for women and that couples "stop at two". For the UK, it advocates greater effort to reduce the high rate of teenage pregnancies and that immigration is brought into balance with emigration.

The OPT was drawn to public attention after its conference in Oxford in 2003 where it was suggested that the UK population might be optimised at less than 30 million people, or less than half of the current level. ^[1]

[edit] Patrons

Professor Paul R. Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University
Susan Hampshire, Actress and population campaigner
Professor Aubrey Manning, Professor of Natural History, University of Edinburgh
Professor Norman Myers CMG, Visiting Fellow, Green College, University of Oxford, and at Universities of Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, California, Michigan and Texas
Jack Parsons Lecturer and writer and former Deputy Director of the Owen Population Centre, at Cardiff University.
Jonathon Porritt CBE, Programme Director of Forum for the Future and Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission.
Professor Chris Rapley CBE, Director of the British Antarctic Survey
Sir Crispin Tickell GCMG KCVO, Chancellor of the University of Kent, Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin Institute, and former UK Permanent Representative on the United Nations Security Council.