World population | ConservationBytes.com

Human population growth, refugees & environmental degradation

7 07 2017

refugees The global human population is now over 7.5 billion, and increasing by about 90 million each year. This means that we are predicted to exceed 9 billion people by 2050, with no peak in site this century and a world population of up to 12 billion by 2100. These staggering numbers are the result of being within the exponential phase of population growth since last century, such that some 14% of all human beings that have ever lived on the planet are still alive today. That is taking into account about the past 200,000 years, or 10,000 generations.

Of course just like the Earth’s resources, human beings are not distributed equally around the globe, nor are the population trends consistent among regions or nations. In fact, developing nations are contributing to the bulk of the global annual increase (around 89 million per year), whereas developed nations are contributing a growth of only about 1 million each year. Another demonstration of the disparity in human population distributon is that about half of all human beings live in just seven countries (China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Bangladesh), representing just one quarter of the world’s total land area. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Climate, climate disruption, conflict, degradation, density dependence, density feedback, environment, growth, Population, refugees, resources, war, warfare, World population
Categories : Africa, climate change, climate shift, conservation, deforestation, exploitation, food, human overpopulation

Humans suddenly become intelligent

1 04 2012

Some described it as the “eco-topia”; some believed they had died in the night and awoken in a different universe. Some just stood there gaping stupidly.

Yet the events of 01 April 2012 are real*. Humans suddenly became intelligent.

In an unprecedented emergency UN session this morning, all the world’s countries pledged to an immediate wind-down of the fossil-fuel economy and promised to invest in a rational combination of nuclear and renewable energy sources. Some experts believe the pledge would see a carbon-neutral planet by 2020.

Additionally, the session saw a world-wide pledge to halt all deforestation by 2013, with intensive reforestation programmes implemented immediately.

Family planning would be embraced worldwide, with a concerted effort to see the human population plateau by 2070, and begin declining to a stable 2 billion by 2300. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Carbon neutrality, Carbon tax, deforestation, ecosystem services, environment, Fossil fuel, nuclear energy, reforestation, Renewable energy, World population
Categories : anthropocene, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, celebrity, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, human overpopulation, reforestation

The bomb is still ticking…

11 11 2010

Apologies for the silence over the last week – it’s been a whirlwind here with Paul Ehrlich visiting The University of Adelaide (amazing for a 78-year old man). In the meantime, Sharon Ede over at Post Growth wrote a great response to the LOLstralian‘s high-school effort to attack Paul a few days ago. Our response is coming shortly, but Sharon’s article is a great precursor.

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More than forty years after its publication, the predictions made in Paul Ehrlich’s landmark book ‘The Population Bomb’ are still the subject of debate. Australian think-tank the Centre for Independent Studies (‘Population bomb still a fizzer 40 years on’, The Australian, 8 November, 2010), says Ehrlich’s warnings of dire consequences, including of mass starvation as a result of overpopulation, have not materialised:

“More than 40 years ago, American biologist Paul Ehrlich sketched a doomsday scenario for planet Earth in his book The Population Bomb…Since the publication of the book, the global population has nearly doubled but most of its gloomy predictions have not come true…”

By all means, let’s have a robust debate on population, both at the national and global level. Both are long overdue.

But let’s make it a sophisticated debate, grounded in the science we have available and a thorough understanding of all the issues in play.

According to the United Nations’ Population Division, the global population has increased from one billion in 1804 to over six billion in 2010.

It has taken most of human history to reach one billion people. It took just over a century to add the second billion.

The rate of population growth since then is such that it has taken only twelve years to add the most recent billion people.

The moderate UN scenario is for a population of 9 billion by 2050 – that’s within the lifetime of many of us. Read the rest of this entry »