The negative effects of crowding and lack of connection to nature are well documented. We are currently 7. Studies suggest that a future population of 11 or 12 billion could require a doubling of global food production. Tens of millions of people around the world already go to bed hungry every night.
Continued population growth, combined with the uncertainties of climate change, could lead to much greater food insecurity in the years ahead. Human beings have no right to act so selfishly and destructively.
Earth is their home, too. It is important to realize that overpopulation exists in many rich countries with too high rates of consumption as well as in many poor countries with too high fertility rates.
Every effort should be made reduce consumption rates as well as high birth rates; in combination, these two measures would create a much better future for people on the planet. I accept. Take action on UpLink. Forum in focus.
Read more about this project. Explore context. Explore the latest strategic trends, research and analysis. Have you read? Part of the reason is that our consumption of resources varies massively across the globe. Image: Global Footprint Network. Image: The World Bank. There is also plenty that individuals can do to reduce their personal footprint. License and Republishing. Aung San Suu Kyi has been condemned for her failure to act around the Rohingya massacre when thousands of Muslims were killed in what the UN described as genocide.
The danger is that theories of overpopulation can become an excuse for racism and anti working class arguments that may, in the hands of the right, become justifications for reactionary policies. In their excellent book Too Many People? This led to forced, undemocratic action. Similarly, in China in the s with the introduction of the infamous one child policy provinces had to sign up to quotas, with parents who had more than two children sterilised, and there were forced abortions.
But what about the central argument that links population growth to increased environmental destruction? Superficially this seems logical. In Ehrlich discussed a major contemporary environmental problem — smog in Los Angeles.
This, he argued, was because the growth of the city meant more people, which in turn meant more cars and more air pollution from their exhausts. But this abstracts the problem from its real causes. Until the s Los Angeles had been a city served by an extensive electric tram network. As the city grew, planners wanted to expand the suburbs, but they did not expand the tram system.
A massive road network was built and public transport companies realised that buses were much more profitable than trams. Thus the growth of the city did lead to more smog, not because of population growth, but because transport became geared towards polluting cars and buses over other low pollution alternatives. In fact there is no direct relationship between population and environmental damage.
Crudely put, population growth in the developing world has less of an impact than population growth in affluent countries. While this is a useful counter to arguments that link population directly with environmental damage, socialists must go a step further to argue that the real problem is structural. How small do the numbers which meant overpopulation for the Athenians appear to us!
Between and world population grew about three-fold, but the economy grew ten-fold and it is the nature of the capitalist economy that really determines environmental damage.
As one study argued, just companies have been responsible for 71 percent of carbon emissions since Multinationals like Shell, Chevron and BP are the ones responsible for the worst environmental destruction.
Again, this ignores the driving force for capitalist production. One reoccurring example of resource use is the mobile phone. These devices rely on expensive and rare metals and thus can be linked to the depletion of precious resources. But that decent overall count masks some bigger errors: The same analysis estimates the black population was undercounted by 2 percent. In many parts of the world, population data is much less reliable. Countries can have incentives both to overcount in regions vying to demonstrate increased need for aid, say and undercount their populations perhaps to disfavor a disliked minority group.
If estimating populations is hard, estimating population trends is much harder. The demographers who estimated a ruinous, extremely fast growth trajectory were wrong, but how could they have known that the trend they were observing was about to reverse? But some organizations and institutions have done surprisingly well.
These reports have turned out to be surprisingly accurate. Since the UN has been making population projections since , and since it publishes revisions and corrections to those projections over time, we can compare its initial estimates to the revisions and corrections.
Researcher Nico Keilman did that, and found that the UN has an impressively accurate track record at population predictions. Their estimates of world population by , published in , were off by about 12 percent. They quickly got better: By , those estimates were off by only about 2 percent. Since then, the UN has pegged global population growth rates pretty precisely. So up to the present day, the UN has been highly reliable in predicting global population trends. Its prediction now is that the world population will continue to increase until , when it will peak at Nonetheless, they have their critics.
These models expect fertility in low-income countries to fall faster than the UN projects it will. Some of the differences are simply methodological. How the fastest-growing countries in the world are modeled has a huge impact on how global population models come out overall, so small differences in expectations in those countries can significantly shift overall results. But much of the difference in projections may be rooted in disagreement over another question: how many people the world can handle.
But technology — including green and sustainable technology — has been rapidly improving for a long time. The year is more than 80 years from now, and almost all the technology that we have today to make civilization sustainable sounded like wild science fiction 80 years ago. If, for example, climate change drives currently developed countries back into poverty and drives their birthrates back up, the estimates are poorly equipped to account for that.
On the other hand, if more reliable contraceptives are developed and virtually end unintended pregnancies the world over, birthrates could fall much faster than predicted. Nonetheless, this disagreement obscures a lot of agreement. Everyone now agrees that without any totalitarian or coercive measures, populations will start declining; the big disagreement is simply when.
It implies both good things — that coercive population controls will never be necessary — and concerning ones, like that societies will age and have a shrinking workforce. But on the whole, we are much better positioned for sustainable growth than it looked in , and the fall in rich-country birthrates is why.
The connection between societies growing wealthier and people desiring smaller families is pretty straightforward.
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