The venerable Professor John Beddington has some stern warnings about over-population in the next few decades. In essence, we cannot ignore the human over-population problem any longer. There are simply too many people for the finite resources available and the consumption rates that do not appear to be declining (not surprising given our voracious appetite for economic growth – more like long-term economic suicide, really). Australia is certainly no exception – with most of our country essentially uninhabitable, we’ve already exceeded our carrying capacity (but try telling this to the pollies).
In my opinion, human over-population is THE principal driver of biodiversity loss in the modern context. Without some serious global efforts for population planning, expect a lot more conflict in your lifetime, and a lot worse effects of climate change. See also Global Population Speak Out.
Growing world population will cause a “perfect storm” of food, energy and water shortages by 2030, the UK government chief scientist has warned. By 2030 the demand for resources will create a crisis with dire consequences, Prof John Beddington said. Demand for food and energy will jump 50% by 2030 and for fresh water by 30%, as the population tops 8.3 billion, he told a conference in London.
Climate change will exacerbate matters in unpredictable ways, he added. “It’s a perfect storm,” Prof Beddington told the Sustainable Development UK 09 conference.’Perfect storm’ poses global threat, says Professor Beddington. “There’s not going to be a complete collapse, but things will start getting really worrying if we don’t tackle these problems.”
Prof Beddington said the looming crisis would match the current one in the banking sector. “My main concern is what will happen internationally, there will be food and water shortages,” he said.
“We’re relatively fortunate in the UK; there may not be shortages here, but we can expect prices of food and energy to rise.” The United Nations Environment Programme predicts widespread water shortages across Africa, Europe and Asia by 2025. The amount of fresh water available per head of the population is expected to decline sharply in that time. The issue of food and energy security rose high on the political agenda last year during a spike in oil and commodity prices.
Prof Beddington said the concern now – when prices have dropped once again – was that the issues would slip back down the domestic and international agenda. “We can’t afford to be complacent. Just because the high prices have dropped doesn’t mean we can relax,” he said. Improving agricultural productivity globally was one way to tackle the problem, he added. At present, 30-40% of all crops are lost due to pest and disease before they are harvested. Professor Beddington said: “We have to address that. We need more disease-resistant and pest-resistant plants and better practices, better harvesting procedures. “Genetically-modified food could also be part of the solution. We need plants that are resistant to drought and salinity – a mixture of genetic modification and conventional plant breeding. Better water storage and cleaner energy supplies are also essential, he added.
Prof Beddington is chairing a subgroup of a new Cabinet Office task force set up to tackle food security. But he said the problem could not be tackled in isolation. He wants policy-makers in the European Commission to receive the same high level of scientific advice as the new US president, Barack Obama. One solution would be to create a new post of chief science adviser to the European Commission, he suggested.
Despite all the complexities of modern life, it seems to me that unvarnished and unreflective support of three primary behaviors are governing the “way of life” of most people in our culture. These widely shared and consensually validiated behaviors literally drive unbridled growth of production capabilities, unrestrained per human consumption of resources borne of unchecked greed, and unbounded hubris rather than the achievement of a more adequate understanding of the “placement” of the human species within the natural order of living things. The leviathan scale and anticipated rise of these objective and subjective all-too-human tendencies could become patently unsustainable soon; whereas, setting limits on the increasing growth of uneconomic production, unhealthy overconsumption, unrestricted population numbers and unconscionable, objectively unjustifiable arrogance could lead the human community toward sustainable ways of living in the world.
Human reproduction does not occur by means of some magical process over which human beings have no control. Quite to the contrary, people know about “where babies come from.” It is for this reason that I am suggesting people can choose to take responsibility for this behavior. There are all kinds of incentives that could be deployed to encourage people to have “one child per family”, for example. This is only a guess but I believe adequate incentives would lead to rapid behavior change, the kind of change that would put the human community on the road to population stabilization/reduction. The idea that human population stabilization will occur automatically in the foreseeable future has been refuted by good science and shown to be a product of preternatural thinking.
Not only does human production not occur magically, we can see from voluminous evidence from the twentieth century — when there were two world wars and other ubiquitous armed conflicts, AIDS and other terrible diseases, pestilence, famines, natural and manmade disasters leading to great loss of life — that the global human population skyrocketed from 1.6 to over 6.1 billion people in that century alone. Please note that nothing served to stem the rapidly rising tide of humanity on Earth in the years between 1900 and 2000. It seems to me that human beings simply have to take responsibility for the propagation of our species {as well as consumption and production} activities because these activities could soon become unsustainable if they remain as unbridled as they are now.
One reason people have kids is that kids take care of you in your old age. Children are a retirement plan, in the developing world.