How are we scared of the demographic problem of overpopulation?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

They say that we are rushing at full speed to some kind of population apocalypse - that there is a line, overcoming which, we will inevitably come to mass famine and that the entire planet will be like the Moscow metro at rush hour. These thoughts have instilled fear and sold books for over a century.

This whole topic seems so toxic that you don't even want to dive into it. Looking around, we see people everywhere: happy and not so, hungry and fat, large and not. But they are everywhere. Is the planet really bursting at the seams?

Jesse Osubel, Director of the Human Environment Program at Rockefeller University

“In most animal populations, the niches in which these populations fit are constant in size. The animals of a society growing in a given niche have dynamics clearly defined by equations with a constant limit or ceiling. In short, from a niche perspective, resources are marginal numbers. But access to resources depends on technology. When animals learn to invent new technologies - for example, bacteria produce a new enzyme that will stir up the sleepy component of their broth, a problem arises. Suddenly, new impulses of growth appear, growing stronger than the previous ones.

Homo faber, the tool maker, is constantly inventing, so our limitations are gradually being lifted. And these floating limits make it difficult to predict the long-term size of humanity. Expanding a niche, accessing resources and redefining them - all this happens to people all the time.

Through the invention and diffusion of technology, people are changing and expanding their niche, redefining resources, and disrupting population predictions. The leading demographer of the 1920s, Raymond Pearl, estimates that the world could have supported two billion people back then, but today it is home to about 7.7 billion people. Many Earth observers today seem to be stuck in their mental petri dishes. The resources around us are resilient.

The biggest threat to future well-being is the abandonment of science. Having gone so far, 7, 7 billion people cannot pick up and go back. Without science, we will bounce back like a stretched elastic band."

Where to get food in a crowded world

Matthew J. Connelly, professor of history at Columbia University

“When people ask if our world is overpopulated, I ask them in response: what is the meaning? Do you know someone you think shouldn't have been born? Perhaps there are large groups of people - millions of people - that you think shouldn't be here? Because I think that if you just take the number of people in the world, it will not tell you what is really important. If you want specific information about what people are really worried about, is there enough food? are there a lot of carbon dioxide emissions? - then you really need to ask who exactly is consuming this food. Are they really lacking food? And if we are talking about global warming, where does it come from?

Ever since Thomas Malthus, people worried about overpopulation have worried about whether there is enough food for everyone. The good news is, yes, there is plenty of food. In fact, calorie intake has only increased every decade. If we were running out of food, it would be difficult to explain why people are eating more and more, despite the fact that most of us live a relatively sedentary lifestyle.

When it comes to CO2 emissions, you have to ask yourself: who is responsible for most of these CO2 emissions? Four years ago, Oxfam published a study that found that the richest 1% of people in the world are likely to emit 30 times more carbon into the air than the poorest 50% of the planet."

Betsy Hartmann, Professor Emeritus, Hampshire College

“For some people, the world has been overpopulated for centuries - Malthus wrote about the population“problem”in the late 1700s, when the world's population was about one billion. Many people are still afraid of overpopulation - they are concerned that it leads to environmental degradation and a lack of resources, be they environmental, economic or social.

But this approach has a lot of problems. It ignores the fact that all people are different: for example, it is important to determine who is actually causing damage to the environment and why. There is a big difference between a poor peasant who works the land and the head of a fossil fuel corporation. The talk of overpopulation tries to cram all people into one broad category, without distinguishing between their various impacts on the planet. The focus is on negative impacts, ignoring the positive role that technological innovation and sustainable resource management can play in restoring and improving the environment. All this fuels apocalyptic sentiments, especially in the United States, where many people believe in the approach of the end of the world. At the same time, the United States is most afraid of overpopulation - which is funny considering that it has so much land and resources.

And although we have increased our population significantly over the past century, and the growth rate has slowed significantly this century, the average family size around the world includes 2.5 children. Fertility remains relatively high in some countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, but this is mainly due to a lack of investment in health, poverty eradication, education, women's rights, and so on. In other countries of the world, the population is declining, the birth rate falls below the replacement level. In the United States, an average of fewer than two children are born today. In Russia, four people die for every three babies born.

I think people get very nervous - and this is understandable - when they see the numbers: we now have 7.6 billion people, and this figure could grow to 11.2 billion by 2100. But what people don't understand is that the demographic impulse embedded in these numbers is related to the distribution of age: there is now a significant proportion of people of reproductive age among the population, especially in the global south, and even if they only have two or less children, this means an absolute growth in the population. We need to understand that the population is likely to stabilize or even decline in the future as the younger generation ages, and this momentum will dwindle. Meanwhile, the real challenge we face is how to plan population growth in environmentally sustainable and socially equitable ways. Since most of the world's people now live in cities, greening urban spaces and transport is vital.

Talking about overpopulation as a cause of climate change may be convenient for some people - it allows you to ignore other, more powerful forces that in the past and now contribute to the accumulation of greenhouse gases.

We live in an era of incredible concentration of wealth: globally, 50% of adults own less than 1% of the world's total wealth, and the richest 10% own almost 90% of the wealth. And the top 1% owns 50%. These numbers are staggering. Let's talk about the world's big problems rather than the fact that the world's poorest people have too many children.

Is Overpopulation Worth Fighting?

Warren Sanderson, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Stony Brook University

“There is a better question: Are we emitting too much CO2 into the atmosphere? The answer to this question is: we throw it away, yes. Another interesting question is: Are we treating our groundwater properly? The answer to this question is: wrong, unstable and unstable. The goal should be to put the planet on a sustainable footing. Should we do this by sterilizing women who have more than two children? Will this help reduce carbon dioxide emissions? Of course not. Do we need to spend more money on education in Africa? This will reduce fertility, but the more educated generation will become richer and therefore more polluting. We must put the planet on a stable footing. Trying to put the planet on a sustainable path by reducing population is dangerous rhetoric.

Kimberly Nichols, Professor of Sustainability Sciences at the Center for Sustainable Development Studies, University of Lund

“The latest IPCC research tells us that in order to avoid the more dangerous effects of climate change, we need to halve today's climate pollution in the next decade. This means that it is imperative to reduce emissions today. The biggest systemic changes will include quickly moving away from burning fossil fuels and reducing the number of livestock we raise.” At present, higher income tends to be correlated with higher climate pollution. This is a relatively small number of people who account for most of the climate change. About half of the world lives on less than $ 3 a day; they cause very little climate pollution (15% of the global). Those of us in the top 10% of global income (living on more than $ 23 a day or $ 8,400 a year) are responsible for 36% of the world's carbon emissions.

The fastest way to cut emissions today is for those of us responsible for high emissions to cut them. Our research has shown that three important choices that can help reduce carbon emissions are cutting out meat, cutting out cars, and flying less. These choices will also be beneficial to health and society. One should strive to at least reduce the use of these three options.

In particular, flights are fraught with high emissions. By comparison, you would have to recycle all the trash over four years to equalize the climatic benefits of not eating meat for a year, but just one flight can equal two years of eating meat or eight months of driving.”

Overpopulation threat: truth or myth?

Reivat Deonandan, Associate Professor, Department of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa

“It all depends on what you mean and how you measure these things. A region is usually considered overpopulated when it exceeds its carrying capacity, that is, the number of people that the region's resources (usually food) can support. But this estimate will depend on what these people are eating and what they would like to eat. For example, it is well known that a vegetarian diet is easier to maintain than a carnivorous one. Food supply will also depend on our ever-changing ability to produce food.

And it's not just food. It is also a matter of whether there is enough energy, water, jobs, services and physical space to support people. With innovations in urban architecture, the issue of space can be resolved. Energy needs will differ depending on the level of development of the society. Softer factors such as jobs and services will be influenced by political leadership and global socio-economic factors that are difficult to measure and predict.

How we define population density also depends on where we count it. The population density of the entire world is about 13 people per square kilometer, if we take the entire surface of the globe. But if you just count the terrestrial land (no one lives in the ocean), the density will be 48 people per square meter. km. We call this arithmetic density. But there is also a "physiological density" that only takes into account the amount of arable land on which one can live. And with rising sea levels and desertification, there is less and less arable land every day. Perhaps it would be wiser to look for an “ecological optimum,” a population size that can be supported by the region's natural resources. According to some estimates, for everyone to live in the comfort of the American middle class, the Earth could support about 2 billion people. For a more modest European life, this number will exceed 3 billion. With other lifestyle changes, that number will rise again, perhaps radically. What cutback in lifestyle are we willing to tolerate?

When we talk about "overpopulation," we are actually talking mostly about food, because that is all about food. Food shortages will be noticed faster than ecological collapse. When fears of overpopulation began to be fanned in the 1970s, the forecast was that soon we would all be starving to death. But even in the poorest areas of the planet, food supplies typically exceed 2,000 calories a day. This is mainly due to the improvement of food production practices and technology. 1.3 billion tons of food produced for humans is thrown away every year. This is about a third of all food produced. Most of the losses are caused by improper storage and transportation. This means we have a huge calorie buffer for more population growth, provided the food chain is managed properly.

However, given the exponential population growth, you probably think that we will soon exceed this food threshold, right? Not really. There is a so-called demographic transition, according to which the richer a society, the fewer children it gives birth to. Poverty is now lower than at any time in human history, and all trends show that we will have consistent successes in the fight against poverty for the foreseeable future. In other words, we expect the rise in global wealth to manifest itself in slower population growth and, ultimately, population decline. Estimates vary, but most of them indicate that the population will peak at 9-11 billion in the 2070s and begin to decline thereafter.

Will we officially reach overpopulation before things start to subside? Nobody knows. After all, the problem is not in the number of people. The problem is how much these people are eating. As wealth rises, people tend to get more environmentally harmful foods, such as meat. There may be fewer of us, but each of us will leave a larger footprint on the environment. Another way to look at overpopulation is to ask the question, not whether we have enough resources to support the existing number of people, but whether the existing population is causing unacceptable environmental damage. A poor person in a low-income developing country produces one ton of CO2 per year. A wealthy person in a developed, high-income country can produce 30 times more.

In other words, strong population growth in low-income countries is probably not as damaging as moderate population growth in high-income countries. Perhaps we could provide for a lot more people if people in rich countries consumed a little less. Relatively speaking, it is better to lecture people of the First World about how wasteful they live, rather than twisting the arms of people in large families with low income.

If you want to hear a straight answer, then no, the world is not overpopulated. I say this because: 1) most people in the world do not overeat; it is the richer people in the lower fertility groups who behave more destructively; 2) the greatest growth is observed in those population groups that are least responsible for environmental damage; 3) we actually have enough food for everyone and more, but lack the organizational and political acumen to make it publicly available; 4) the rate of population growth in the world has already slowed down, and by the end of the century we will see a decline”.