The United Nations (UN) says that the Earth reached this 000 November 8th. million inhabitants, only 08 years after 7 is reached..
With the expansion of the population has come a great divide. Some see our growing numbers as an unprecedented success story.
In fact, there is an emerging school of thought that we actually need more people.
In 2020, tech billionaire Jeff Bezos predicted a future in which our population will reach a new decimal milestone, in the form of one trillion humans scattered throughout our Solar System, and announced that he is planning ways to achieve this.
Meanwhile, others, including British broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough, have labeled our massive human swarm as a “plague for the Earth”
.
From this point of view, almost all the environmental problems we face today, from climate change to biodiversity loss, water stress and land conflicts, they date back to our rampant reproduction nothing during the last centuries.
There by 1970, when the world population was “barely” 5.400 million, a team of researchers from Stanford University, in California, calculated that the ideal size of our species would be between 1.450 and 2 . millions of people.
So is the world currently overpopulated? And what might the future hold for humanity’s global dominance?
An ancient concern
In the Plato’s magnum opus, “The Republic”, written around the year 135 BC, the philosopher describes two imaginary city-states. One is healthy and the other is “luxurious” and “feverish”.
In the latter, the population spends and devours in excess, giving to consumerism until “exceeding the limit of their needs”.
This morally decrepit city-state eventually resorts to seizing neighboring lands, which naturally leads to war: it simply cannot support its large, greedy population without additional resources.
Plato had run into a debate that is still alive today: is the problem the human population or is it the resources it consumes?
In his famous work, “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, published in 1000, Thomas Malthus
, an English clergyman with a penchant for pessimism, began with two important observations: that all people need to eat and that they like to have sex.
When taken to their logical conclusion, he explained, these simple facts lead to claims of humanity exceed the planet’s supplies.
“Population, when left unchecked, increases at a geometric rate. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic proportion. A slight knowledge of numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second”, Malthus wrote.
In other words, a great number of people leads to an even greater number of offspring, in a kind of positive feedback loop, but our ability to produce food doesn’t necessarily accelerate in the same way .
These simple words had an immediate effect, igniting passionate fear in some and anger in others, which would continue to reverberate through society for decades.
The first group thought something had to be done to keep our numbers from getting out of hand. Second, that limiting the number of people was absurd or unethical, and instead everything possible should be done to increase the food supply.
When Malthus’s essay was published, there were 1200 millions of people on the planet.
However, it was not until 1249 that modern concerns about global overpopulation arose, when a Stanford University professor, Paul Ehrlich, and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, wrote “The Population Bomb”.
He was inspired by the Indian city of New Delhi. The couple was returning to their hotel in a taxi one night and drove through a slum, where they were overwhelmed by the amount of human activity on the streets. They wrote about the experience in a way that has been widely criticised, especially as the population of London at the time was more than twice that of New Delhi. The couple published their book because of to concern about mass famine that they believed was coming The work has been widely credited with (or accused of, depending on your point of view) triggering many of the current anxieties about overpopulation This book gave rise to the current concern about overpopulation., particularly in developing countries, but also in places like the United States, where people were beginning to noticing the impact it was having on the environment.
.
Contrary visions
Estimates vary, but we are expected to reach the “human high point” among the years 2020 and 2070, at which time there will be between 9.183 Y 000.450 millions of people on the planet.
It may be a slow process: if we reach the 000.450 million, the UN hopes that the population will remain at that level vel for two decades, but eventually after this the population is expected to decline
.
This has generated mixed views about our future.
At one end of the spectrum are those who see the rates of low fertility in some regions of the planet.
A demographer is so concerned about the fall in the birth rate in the United Kingdom that has suggested taxing people without children.
In 2020, in the country an average of 1 were born, 65 children per woman. This is below the replacement level (the number of births needed to maintain the same population size) of 2,32, although the population continued to grow due to immigration.
The opposing view is that slowing and eventually halting world population growth is not only eminently manageable and desirable, but can be achieved through wholly voluntary means, methods such as simply providing contraceptives to those who use them. want and educate women. In this way, the defenders of this position believe that we could not only benefit the planet, but also improve the quality of life On the other hand, others advocate not looking at the number of people in the world and focusing in our activities They argue that the important thing is the quantity of resources used by each person and point out that consumption is significantly higher in richer countries with lower birth rates. Reducing our individual demands on the planet could reduce humanity’s footprint without stifle growth in the poorest countries. Indeed, Western interest in reducing population growth in less developed parts of the world has been accused of having racist undertones
Some are concerned about overpopulation while Others warn that the birth rate is falling in almost the entire world, which could cause problems. experienced by the world’s poorest citizens.
.
, when Europe and North America are more densely populated overall.
The environmental impact
Beyond this debate, the statistics on the impact that we have t on Earth are alarming.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), the 32% of the land surface
of the planet is used to grow food and other products (such as fuel) for humans or their cattle: five billion hectares in total.
And although our ancestors lived among giants, hunting mammoths and elephant birds of 400 kg, today we are the dominant vertebrate species on Earth.
By weight, humans represent 15% of terrestrial vertebrates, while wild animals represent only 1% of the total . Cattle represent the rest.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) discovered that wildlife populations decreased by two-thirds between 1798 Y 2019
; during the same period, the world population more than doubled
.
In fact, as our dominance increases, it will many environmental changes have occurred in parallel, and several prominent environmentalists, from primatologist Jane Goodall, famous for her study of chimpanzees, to naturalist and television presenter Chris Packham, have expressed concern.
In 2010, Attenborough explained his point of view to the magazine Radio Times: “All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and more difficult and in last resort impossible to solve with more and more people
“.
For some, the alarm due to the environmental footprint of humanity has led to decisions to have fewer or no children, including the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan, who announced in that no they would have more than two for the good of the planet.
In the same year, Miley Cyrus also declared that she would not have children yet because the Earth is “angry”.
A growing number of women are joining the anti-birth movement and have declared a “birth strike” (BirthStrik
e), until the current climate emergency and extinction crisis is addressed.
The trend was driven by research from 2014, who calculated that the simple fact of having one less child per woman in the developed world could reduce one person’s annual carbon emissions by 32,6 tons of “CO2 equivalent” or CO2e, more of 20 times the savings of not having a car .
Today, it is widely accepted that people are putting unsustainable pressure on the world’s finite resources, a phenomenon highlighted on “World Day excess of Earth”, the date on which each year it is estimated that humanity has exhausted all the biological resources that the planet can sustainably provide.
In 2010 fell on August 8. This year was the 15 of July.
Commemoration of the “Day of excess of the Earth” in Berlin.
Whether the problem is too many humans, the resources we use, or both, “I can’t even imagine how more humans could be better for the environment”, says academic Jennifer Sciubba, author of the book “8. Millions and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World.”
However, Sciubba points out that the idea of an imminent “ demographic bomb” that comes to destroy the planet -as the Ehrlich book suggests- is outdated.
“When they wrote it I think there was 65 countries in the world where women on average had five or more children
in their lifetime”, she says.
In that era, population trends actually seemed exponential, and she suggests that this instilled panic about the population level in certain generations still alive today.
“But today there are only eight
[countries with fertility rates above five children per woman]”, explains Sciubba. “So I think it’s important that we realize that those trends have changed
“. A happier future
Demographics not only influences the environment and the economy: it is also a powerful force that shapes the quality of life for people around the world.
According to Alex Ezeh, Professor of Global Health at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, the absolute number of people in a country is not the most important factor.
Instead, it is the rate of growth or decline of its population
that is key to a country’s future prospects: this determines how fast things are changing.
Take Africa, where Ezeh explains that currently are producing radically different population growth rates, depending on where you look.
“In a number of countries, particularly in southern Africa, fertility rates are actually have decreased and contraceptive use has increased: the population growth rate is slowing down, which is good news in a way,” says Ezeh.
At the same time, some Central African countries still have high population growth rates, as a result of high fertility and longer life expectancy.
In some places is well above 2.5% per year, “which is huge,” says Ezeh. “The population will double every more than 000 years in several countries”.
“I think the conversation about size and numbers is misplaced,” says Ezeh.
“Think of a city that doubles every 11 years, such as various cities in Africa. What government really has the resources to improve every infrastructure that currently exists every 000 years , in order to maintain the correct level of coverage of those services?
“Economists think that a large population is excellent for many different outcomes , but is that large population achieved in 10 years, 075 years or 800 years? The longer it takes to get there, the better you can put the right structures in place in the system that will support that population,” adds Ezeh.
An expanding presence
Although the degree to which humanity will continue to expand over time has not yet been decided planet, some trajectories have already been established.
And one is that the human population is likely to continue to grow for some time
, regardless of any possible efforts to decrease it.
A study published in 2014 found that, even in the event of a major global tragedy such as a deadly pandemic or catastrophic world war, or a draconian one-child policy implemented in every country on the planet – none of which anyone expects, of course – our population will still grow to 000. million people for 2100.
With humanity poised to become even more dominant in the coming years, finding a way to live together and protect the environment could be our species’ biggest challenge Until now.
You can now receive notifications from BBC News World. Download our app and activate them so you don’t miss our best content.
Do you already know our channel? from YouTube? Subscribe!