Some argue there are too many people on the planet. This is partly true; 7 billion is too many given the primitive technologies in use, from three-stone cooking fires to internal combustion, fossil-fuel engines. Education and reproductive health programmes can help stabilize population growth. This would also help reduce poverty and increase human potential. But since the mid-1990s, population has been a neglected issue. It is time to educate and empower women.
Others argue that how people live counts more than their numbers. Only 5% of the global population live in the US, but they produce a quarter of the world’s CO2 emissions. And, unlike Europe, the population of the US is growing fast – from 200 million in 1970 to over 303 million today, projected at 420 million in 2050.
Since 1950, the richest fifth of humanity has doubled its consumption of energy, meat, timber, steel and copper, and quadrupled its car ownership, while the poorest fifth of humanity has hardly increased its general consumption at all. The big increases in consumption now happen in countries such as China and India, which together are expected to add half a billion more people to the planet’s population by 2050.
More than three-quarters of the world’s people live in nations where national consumption has outstripped their countries’ biological capacity. The wealthier among us must find ways to live within planetary means: renewable energy; efficient heating, cooling, and transport; diets that need less land and water.
Most population growth will take place in poorer nations, with some large countries such as Pakistan and Nigeria on course to triple their numbers by 2050. Such nations may need to skip the “big grids” of the industrialized nations and go straight to cell phones and local energy, water and sewerage solutions. Whether it is numbers, reproductive rates or appetites, population is about what people know and how they live.
