God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them. God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” [ The Bible – Genesis 1, 27-28 ]
|In demography, population growth is used to refer specifically to the growth of the human population of the world. Population exceeding the carrying capacity of an area or environment is called overpopulation.
It may be caused by growth in population or by reduction in capacity. Spikes in human population can cause problems such as pollution and traffic congestion, these might be resolved or worsened by technological and economic changes. Conversely, such areas may be considered “underpopulated” if the population is not large enough to maintain an economic system. Between these two extremes sits the notion of the optimum population.
According to projections, the world population will continue to grow until at least 2050, with the population reaching 9 billion in 2040, and some predictions putting the population in 2050 as high as 11 billion.
According to the United Nations’ World Population Prospects report:
Overpopulation is a condition where an organism’s numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat. The term often refers to the relationship between the human population and its environment, the Earth. Steve Jones, head of the biology department at University College London, has said, “Humans are 10,000 times more common than we should be, according to the rules of the animal kingdom, and we have agriculture to thank for that. Without farming, the world population would probably have reached half a million by now.” The world’s population has significantly increased in the last 50 years, mainly due to medical advancements and substantial increases in agricultural productivity.
The recent rapid increase in human population over the past two centuries has raised concerns that humans are beginning to overpopulate the Earth, and that the planet may not be able to sustain present or larger numbers of inhabitants.
The population has been growing continuously since the end of the Black Death, around the year 1400;at the beginning of the 19th century, it had reached roughly 1,000,000,000 (1 billion). Increases in life expectancy and resource availability during the industrial and green revolutions led to rapid population growth on a worldwide level. By 1960, the world population had reached 3 billion; it doubled to 6 billion over the next four decades. As of 2009, the estimated annual growth rate was 1.10%, down from a peak of 2.2% in 1963, and the world population stood at roughly 6.7 billion. Current projections show a steady decline in the population growth rate, with the population expected to reach between 8 and 10.5 billion between the year 2040 and 2050.
The scientific consensus is that the current population expansion and accompanying increase in usage of resources is linked to threats to the ecosystem.
Overpopulation does not depend only on the size or density of the population, but on the ratio of population to available sustainable resources. It also depends on the way resources are used and distributed throughout the population. Overpopulation can result from an increase in births, a decline in mortality rates due to medical advances, from an increase in immigration, or from an unsustainable biome and depletion of resources. It is possible for very sparsely populated areas to be overpopulated, as the area in question may have a meager or non-existent capability to sustain human life (e.g. a desert).
The resources to be considered when evaluating whether an ecological niche is overpopulated include clean water, clean air, food, shelter, warmth, and other resources necessary to sustain life. If the quality of human life is addressed, there may be additional resources considered, such as medical care, education, proper sewage treatment and waste disposal. Overpopulation places competitive stress on the basic life sustaining resources, leading to a diminished quality of life.
Concern about overpopulation is relatively recent in origin. Throughout history, populations have grown slowly despite high birth rates, due to the population-reducing effects of war, plagues and high infant mortality. During the 750 years before the Industrial Revolution, the world’s population hardly increased, remaining under 250 million.
By the beginning of the 19th century, the world population had grown to a billion individuals, and intellectuals such as Thomas Malthus and physiocratic economists predicted that mankind would outgrow its available resources, since a finite amount of land was incapable of supporting an endlessly increasing population. Mercantillists argued that a large population was a form of wealth, which made it possible to create bigger markets and armies.
Effects of human overpopulation
Most biologists and sociologists see overpopulation as a serious threat to the quality of human life.
Some problems associated with or exacerbated by human overpopulation:
- Inadequate fresh water for drinking water use as well as sewage treatment and effluent discharge. Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, use energy-expensive desalination to solve the problem of water shortages.
- Depletion of natural resources, especially fossil fuels
- Increased levels of air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination and noise pollution. Once a country has industrialized and become wealthy, a combination of government regulation and technological innovation causes pollution to decline substantially, even as the population continues to grow.
- Deforestation and loss of ecosystems that sustain global atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide balance; about eight million hectares of forest are lost each year.
- Changes in atmospheric composition and consequent global warming
- Irreversible loss of arable land and increases in desertification. Deforestation and desertification can be reversed by adopting property rights, and this policy is successful even while the human population continues to grow.
- Mass species extinctions. From reduced habitat in tropical forests due to slash-and-burn techniques that sometimes are practiced by shifting cultivators, especially in countries with rapidly expanding rural populations; present extinction rates may be as high as 140,000 species lost per year. As of 2008, the IUCN Red List lists a total of 717 animal species having gone extinct during recorded human history.
- High infant and child mortality. High rates of infant mortality are caused by poverty. Rich countries with high population densities have low rates of infant mortality.
- Intensive factory farming to support large populations. It results in human threats including the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria diseases, excessive air and water pollution, and new virus that infect humans.
- Increased chance of the emergence of new epidemics and pandemics. For many environmental and social reasons, including overcrowded living conditions, malnutrition and inadequate, inaccessible, or non-existent health care, the poor are more likely to be exposed to infectious diseases.
- Starvation, malnutrition or poor diet with ill health and diet-deficiency diseases (e.g. rickets). However, rich countries with high population densities do not have famine.
- Poverty coupled with inflation in some regions and a resulting low level of capital formation. Poverty and inflation are aggravated by bad government and bad economic policies. Many countries with high population densities have eliminated absolute poverty and keep their inflation rates very low.
- Low life expectancy in countries with fastest growing populations
- Unhygienic living conditions for many based upon water resource depletion, discharge of raw sewage and solid waste disposal. However, this problem can be reduced with the adoption of sewers. For example, after Karachi, Pakistan installed sewers, its infant mortality rate fell substantially.
- Elevated crime rate due to drug cartels and increased theft by people stealing resources to survive
- Conflict over scarce resources and crowding, leading to increased levels of warfare
- Less Personal Freedom / More Restrictive Laws. Laws regulate interactions between humans. Law “serves as a primary social mediator of relations between people.” The higher the population density, the more frequent such interactions become, and thus there develops a need for more laws and/or more restrictive laws to regulate these interactions. It is even speculated that democracy is threatened due to overpopulation, and could give rise to totalitarian style governments.
Some economists, such as Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams argue that third world poverty and famine are caused in part by bad government and bad economic policies.
Overpopulation has substantially adversely impacted the environment of Earth starting at least as early as the 20th century. There are also economic consequences of this environmental degradation in the form of ecosystem services attrition. Beyond the scientifically verifiable harm to the environment, some assert the moral right of other species to simply exist rather than become extinct. Environmental author Jeremy Rifkin has said that “our burgeoning population and urban way of life have been purchased at the expense of vast ecosystems and habitats. … It’s no accident that as we celebrate the urbanization of the world, we are quickly approaching another historic watershed: the disappearance of the wild.”
“Where do we stand in our efforts to achieve a sustainable world? Clearly, the past half century has been a traumatic one, as the collective impact of human numbers, affluence (consumption per individual) and our choices of technology continue to exploit rapidly an increasing proportion of the world’s resources at an unsustainable rate. … During a remarkably short period of time, we have lost a quarter of the world’s topsoil and a fifth of its agricultural land, altered the composition of the atmosphere profoundly, and destroyed a major proportion of our forests and other natural habitats without replacing them. Worst of all, we have driven the rate of biological extinction, the permanent loss of species, up several hundred times beyond its historical levels, and are threatened with the loss of a majority of all species by the end of the 21st century.” – Says Peter Raven, former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in their seminal work AAAS Atlas of Population & Environment
Further, even in countries which have both large population growth and major ecological problems, it is not necessarily true that curbing the population growth will make a major contribution towards resolving all environmental problems. However, as developing countries with high populations become more industrialized, pollution and consumption will invariably increase.
The Worldwatch Institute said the booming economies of China and India are planetary powers that are shaping the global biosphere. The report states:
The world’s ecological capacity is simply insufficient to satisfy the ambitions of China, India, Japan, Europe and the United States as well as the aspirations of the rest of the world in a sustainable way.
It has been estimated that a person added to the population of the United States will have 30 or more times the impact on world resources as will a person added to the population of anunderdeveloped nation. Indeed, resource consumption in North America is roughly the same as resource consumption in the entire rest of the world.
It said that if China and India were to consume as much resources per capita as United States or Japan in 2030 together they would require a full planet Earth to meet their needs.
In the long-term these effects can lead to increased conflict over dwindling resources and in the worst case a Malthusian catastrophe.
A Malthusian catastrophe (also phrased Malthusian check, Malthusian crisis, Malthusian disaster, or Malthusian nightmare) was originally foreseen to be a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth had outpaced agricultural production. Later formulations consider economic growth limits as well. The term is also commonly used in discussions of oil depletion. Based on the work of political economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), theories of Malthusian catastrophe are very similar to the Iron Law of Wages. The main difference is that the Malthusian theories predict what will happen over several generations or centuries, whereas the Iron Law of Wages predicts what will happen in a matter of years and decades.
In 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, describing his theory of quantitative development of human populations:
I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations.
Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. —Malthus 1798, Chapter 1, 
If unchecked over a sufficient period of time, and if the ratio between successive sequence members is larger than 1.0, then exponential growth will always outrun linear growth. Malthus saw the difference between population growth and resource growth as being analogous to this difference between exponential and linear growth. Even when a population inhabits a new habitat – such as the American continent at Malthus’ time, or when recovering from wars and epidemic plagues – the growth of population will eventually reach the limit of the resource base. –Malthus 1798, chapter 7: A Probable Cause of Epidemics
Food Insecurity and Undernourishment
Every 3.6 seconds someone in the world dies of hunger.
In 2001–03, FAO estimates there were still 854 million undernourished people worldwide:
820 million in the developing countries, 25 million in the transition countries and 9 million in the industrialized countries.
Factors influencing progress or setbacks in hunger reduction are diverse and depend on the region. In most instances, food insecurity has been a direct consequence of humaninduced disasters – war, conflict and political and economic instability with ensuing problems of refugees and displaced persons.
The world’s population is set to soar in the coming decades – but food supplies are already under pressure. Our modern life is finely balanced. Everything works like clockwork until the moment that some unforeseen strain is imposed, and then – to the horror of all – it doesn’t. This is particularly true of the cities where most people in the world now live. If the infrastructure fails – and a report by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers this week says that the world’s infrastructure is alarmingly stressed – so does life as we know it, if not life itself.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the supply of food. It doesn’t take much – a drought in the Ukraine, floods in Australia – to throw it into disarray. If the food supply is wobbling now, most people prefer not to think about what it could be like in 2050. By then, there will be another 2.5 billion open mouths, as the global population bursts its corset and balloons outwards to over 9 billion. Will they have anything to eat? Can agriculture almost double its capacity? If everybody on the planet farmed as we do in Europe, the answer would probably be no. Europe has been scaremonger-in-chief over climate change, but when faced by the more immediate and quantifiable challenge represented by population growth, its response is a shrug.
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