By Dr. Ariane Marcar
When a rapid global rise in living standards combined with a population explosion threatens not just the sustainability of resources, but biodiversity, alarm bells should ring. Large scale environmental destruction, over-exploitation of species, unacceptable levels of pollution, with Co2 emissions causing global warming, and rapidly dwindling primary resources are the result of our activities. Metals and oil are running out, and we are using up our water and timber quicker than the planet can replenish these. Biologists tell us we are in the middle of the “6th mass species extinction”, but that this time it is a human-caused event. It is no surprise that in 2002 the WWF concluded that “at some point in the 1970s, humanity as a whole passed the point at which it lived within the global regenerative capacity of the earth”.
What's more, on top of our energy problem, we are facing global food and water shortages. Capitalism, overconsumption, unequal distribution of wealth and poor environmental practices are effectively the culprits, along with shifting dietary habits, as meat and dairy consumption rises. We also recognize the growing demographic pressures. The cure: switching to renewables, changing our behaviour and dietary patterns, improving resource management, and no less than technological “revolutions”. But few openly acknowledge the seriousness of the population problem. Population growth is predicted to slow or stabilize by 2050, but how likely is this, and at what environmental cost? And above all, how are we going to accommodate another 2 billion or more?
The key facts:
-Global population: circa 7 billion and by 2050 expected to reach 9.2 or 9.4 billion (medium UN estimate); an increase of 30%. In 1900 we were roughly 1.6 billion, but by 2000 we had reversed that figure to 6.1 billion. Currently circa 80 million people are added each year.
-Urban growth: In 1900 only 15% of the world's population lived in cities. Today the figure is approximately 50%, with 27 now classified as megacities (over 10 million). By 2050 it is predicted to rise to 70 or 80%. Going from macro to mega-macro creates increased transportation, water delivery, sanitation and waste disposal problems, and governments admit they are not sure how to deal with urbanization on such an enormous scale. Currently 2.6 billion have no access to toilets.
-Food and water: Right now 1 billion are going hungry and lack access to fresh water. Over 2 billion are facing impending water scarcity. To meet our demands we need to increase food production by around 50%. Water demand is also set to rise 70 to 90 percent by 2050, without improved agricultural methods, according to the recent U.N. World Water Development Report.
-Poverty: The gap between rich and poor is increasing. Worse “An estimated 1.4 billion people – often referred to as the ‘bottom billion’ – live on just $1.25 a day” (UN). The rate of slum formation is nearly the same as the rate of urban growth. UN’s secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, warned the biennial World Urban Forum meeting in Nanjing that 2 billion could be living in slums in the year 2030 and that “urban areas consume most of the world’s energy and are generating the bulk of our waste.”
-Renewable energies have been fast-tracked, and yes, are close to providing 20% of global electricity demand. This figure will continue to rise, but in the meantime around 1.5 billion people worldwide still lack access to electricity, and approximately 2.6 billion are reliant on wood, charcoal, straw or dung for daily cooking, and our tropical forests are still being converted into crop and grazing land. All this is contributing to further environmental destruction we can ill afford.
-The food crisis is pushing countries to re-consider food self-sufficiency, but the feasibility for many is excluded by their high populations and low water tables. Food prices are set to rise due to growing food shortages caused by climate change, rising cost of fertilisers, shifting diets, decreasing availability of land for crops and its conversion to bioenergy production, and to waste and speculation. Bees are currently dying off worldwide. Why precisely is unclear, though human intervention is to blame without a doubt. They are a priceless workforce responsible for pollinating most of our flowering plants, including many of our fruit and vegetable crops, so losing them is surely not an option. As for Harvard's proposed robot bees I doubt they will make honey. More importantly, who will pay for these to be produced and maintained, when Nature did it for free? To make things worse our arable soils are heavily contaminated with agro-chemicals, and our intensified farming and slaughtering methods are quite inhumane. Conventional meat production is projected to become too expensive for the average consumer to support, and so plans are afoot to introduce artificial meat. The latter however currently requires large doses of growth hormones and antibiotics. Its nutrient level is also dubious.
-The proposed widespread use of biotech foods, which include the controversial genetically modified (GM) food revolution that is underway, is set to increase the food supply to feed not only those that our currently without, but those that are arriving, so tying us into further demographic growth. It is the use of intensified agricultural practices and our uptake of fossil fuels, combined with improvements in medical science, that have fuelled this population explosion. This “green revolution” based on pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers made from fossil fuels allowed cereal production alone to double from 1961-1985, and now we want to do the same with GM. This works directly against our lowering fertility rates. And here too we are tampering with already seriously degraded soils and stressed ecosystems without knowing the long-term outcome to them, or to human health, knowing full well that GM alone is not sufficient to hold off widespread starvation.
Yet, we frequently hear developed countries moaning about their low TFR (total fertility rate), and how this is going to have a negative impact on State finances. Yes, TFR determines the age structure of populations from which States calculate the size of the labour force and plan tax returns, state benefits, pensions, demand for housing and consumer markets, but world historical TFR has gone from 4.92 in 1950 to 2.56 in 2010 (global average of 2.3, 2011), so population ageing actually began back in 1950. Population ageing is seen as irreversible simply because we are unlikely to go back to the high fertility rates of the past, and we are living longer. Today the median world age is 28, that means that half of the world's population is under 28. The UN predicts that by 2050 it will rise to 38, except for Africa. This means that we expect fertility rates to lower further, and so the theory is that our numbers will stabilize by then.
But it is important to realise that this is based on predicting how the under 28s, half of the world's population, will behave: at what age they will marry, the mean age of the first child, the percentage of extramarital births, use and availability of contraception. And one should not forget that the 28-49 year old category will also be accountable.
There is also the fact that even a fertility rate of 2 children per woman (the replacement level is roughly 2.1) can correspond to either growth, or decline. For instance, in spite of the sub-replacement 2.01 TFR, the U.S. population grew by 9.7 percent in 2010, rising to 308,745,538 after factoring in death rates, and annual immigration of circa 1 million. By 2050 the population is estimated to rise to 392 million (U.S. Census Bureau medium figure). That is more than a 50% increase from 1990!
Therefore population momentum is one thing, and the “exponential function” which means that even a population growth of 1.3% will result in the doubling of that population within 53 years, is quite another. Modest growth of even 1% over a short period of time generates large numbers regardless, and this is the frightening reality. Therefore the population problem does not just belong to developing countries. Small deviations of fertility can also have a large impact on population numbers.
These are the reasons why the UN's projections have a low-medium-high forecast. For 2050 they go from a low of 7.2 to high of 11 billion (2008-09), and keep shifting. In 2004 the UN medium projection was 9.2 billion for 2075, not 2050! This makes planning ahead very difficult indeed.
Worse, even if the additional 2 billion people all live in a low-carbon environment and on artificial foods their arrival will still equate to circa two more “carbon USAs”, and if we apply the exponential function, this extra 2 billion will double again in a relatively short space of time, as long as more food is made available. At some point of course the growth train will have to come to halt, as we simply will not able to keep playing “catch-up”.
Conclusions? Well given the impact we are having on the planet, it is hard to believe that we can sustain yet further population increases beyond current levels. The idea that everyone can enjoy a high quality of life when the planet is already under severe strain trying to keep up with our present demands is therefore not convincing. Right now the combination -population-technology is definitely widening the gap between humanity’s footprint and the available biological capacity. One cannot get away from the triangle: population-CO2-natural resources.The rapid rise in standards of living that are in India and China are simply accelerating environmental destruction and resource depletion.
It is time to accept that like every other species we are not exempt from adhering to the ecosystem's carrying capacity, and so yes, population does matter. Land is not an interchangeable form of capital and therefore population must realign itself with the available resources, and the replenishing times imposed by Nature.
So why is population not on national agendas when we know that fewer children mean higher investment in education and health per child, and boosts family income, as lower fertility means an increase in the female labour force? The idea that we are entitled to as many children as we want does not work when individual desire, fuelling production and consumption, comes before safeguarding the well-being of our future generations. Similarly, promoting a “second green revolution” based on introducing biotech farming methods into our sick ecosystem does little to rectify the root of our problem: the health of our soils, our real life support system. We need to actively tackle desertification, growing soil degradation and salinization caused by over-irrigation and agro-chemicals. By reducing population we will also see reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and so help our ecosystem recover. So what are we waiting for? Certainly if we sit back and do nothing to address global warming and the biodiversity loss in a manner that actually has immediate impacts, it is very likely that Mother Nature will have her say on population either way, sooner rather than later. All the natural levellers are alive and growing: disease, famine, wars (increasingly resource based) and natural disasters.
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