Population & Sustainability

Sustainability has become more and more important in the last two decades although its origins can be traced back to ancient civilizations. Humans as a species have been consuming the physical world around themselves for over 50,000 years but have probably caused a major portion of the damage to the planet since the industrial revolution. We had been using our natural resources as an inexhaustible commodity and polluting our biosphere as if the environment has infinite capacity. Since we have realized that we are essentially killing our planet, we are now hustling to control its fate before it reaches a point of irreparable damage.

In my academic career so far, I am yet to read a paper or attend a talk that holds the human population explosion responsible for the unsustainable growth our civilization over the last two centuries. People hover over the issue and then try and justify it just like Carl Folke does in his essay “Respecting Planetary Boundaries and Reconnecting to the Biosphere:

“The Anthropocene is a manifestation of what could be called the Great Acceleration of human activity, in particular since the 1950s. It took humanity close to 200,000 years to reach a population of 1 billion in the early 1800s, and now that population is beyond 7 billion. A central factor behind the shift from a human-empty to a human-full world was the discovery of fossil fuels, a major source of additional energy, which allowed humanity to take off into a truly globalized world. It is a remarkable achievement for a single species to become this dominant and, although there are conflicts, still exist in relative peace—with a stunning capacity for ingenuity, innovation, collaboration, and collective action. To a large extent this has been enabled by the human ability to draw on the functioning of the biosphere.”

The facts that he states are astonishing. Our population has grown 700% in 0.1% of the time over the last two centuries. This fact doesn’t seem to raise any red flags for the author but instead he chooses to project the fact as an achievement for us as a species. I can’t deny that to live or give life is not a fundamental right we have to acknowledge as humans but there has to be a “maximum occupancy” the earth can support. The earth as a physical body and the biosphere that envelops it only has so much to give although it is regenerative. Like we have building codes for “maximum occupancy” for occupant safety in a building, we need to come up with a target “maximum occupancy” for the earth and work towards it.

Planetary Boundaries

Using a similar “maximum occupancy” approach, a group of leading earth system scientist at Stockholm Resilience Centre put forward a concept of planetary boundaries. Their model proposed nine Earth systems that are critical to keep the planet in a relatively stable state known as Holocene. It is important to acknowledge that these bounds are just the bare minimum that we should aspire to achieve. In order to repair the damage done we need to store the planet and that would take more than just aspiring to achieve the bare minimum.

Our understanding of these boundaries and having clear targets that need to be met makes the goal of sustainability achievable. For the last century we as a society have recognized factors causing environmental harm and have taken certain steps to control their damaging effects but the change isn’t coming fast enough. Planetary boundaries such as freshwater use, land use change and climate change hint at population control and rationing resources which would be essentially impossible to monitor. It is almost imperative that population be a more dominant boundary in this model. Humans, being the most dominant species on the planet, are an integral part each and every one of the earth systems and should take significant responsibility in terms of how many of us can be supported by this planet whilst keeping these earth systems intact.

Social Boundaries

Unlike the planetary boundaries where there is a maximum limit, social boundaries have a minimum threshold. To have a truly sustainable future we need to integrate social and planetary boundaries. Kate Raworth describes this quite elegantly in her essay, “ Defining a Safe and Just Space for Humanity”:

“Human well-being depends on keeping total resource use below critical natural thresholds, but it equally depends upon every person having a claim on the resources they need to lead a life of dignity and opportunity. International human rights norms have long asserted the fundamental moral claim each person has to life’s essentials—such as food, water, basic health care, education, freedom of expression, political participation, and personal security—no matter how much or how little money or power they have.”

As a human being, one is entitled access to life’s essentials, being food, water, sanitation, clothing, shelter, health care and education. This is an indisputable fact. Some of us are lucky enough that we have access to all these resources where as there are many who struggle to acquire one or many of these resources on a daily basis. We as a society have failed to provide these basic life essentials to every single one of our kind.

Beyond that we have other social problems like social and gender equality, income discrepancies, job shortages and access to education. These are issues that can’t be quantified in scientific numbers but can be reflected upon and act in a way to resolve some of these issues within ourselves and then project out towards our community. Education and exposure to different ideas and cultures can equip an individual to be accepting and tolerant of social stigmas that even some of the more developed societies face these days.

These issues are complicated but sometime the most complicated problems have the simplest solutions. If we were to reduce our population by 10% with in the next 25 years and keep the same number of jobs we would probably have a job for everyone on the planet or if we were to reduce our global population in the near future could it be easier to distribute wealth and redistribute the necessary resources more evenly. Someone at sometime has probably toyed with these ideas but no one wants to explore them because that would make one inhumane.

A lot of social boundaries we deal with are directly related to income disparity and allocation of resources. If we were to consider global population control, strategic planning and provide access to education, we as a society might be able to meet some of these social boundaries.

Integrating Boundaries

When we talk about resources, natural or otherwise, the first thing that comes to mind is economics. We have been measuring national growth using GDP which is purely a monetary gauge and as Kate Raworth mentions in her essay, “ Defining a Safe and Just Space for Humanity”:

“The excessive attention given to gross domestic product (GDP) in recent decades as an indicator of a nation’s economic performance is like trying to fly a plane by its altimeter alone: it tells you if you are going up or down, but nothing of where you are headed or how much fuel you have left in the tank.”

As a society we need to access more than just the monetary index to determine a country’s development, but on a larger scale we need to start accessing the worlds social, environmental and economic indices as a whole because of the highly complex international relationships one country has with others. The combination of social boundary and planetary boundary models can help us get closer to the answers for a sustainable future.

Almost all the nine of the planetary boundaries can be controlled by controlling consumption of resources and we need to consider population control as one of the strategies to do so. Increase in population not only strains the earths natural resources, it creates greater disparities within societies, financially and socially as is evident in overpopulated countries.

Advancement in technology has reduced the demand for workers, intern leaving society with lesser jobs. We as a species needed more workers and bodies post industrial revolution but as time has progressed and we have developed machines to reduce the burdens on humanity, they have rendered some of us, to put it bluntly, unnecessary. The spike in population over the last century has played a major role in the unsustainable growth of industry.

Population & Industrialization

Industrialization has been a boon for humanity and its sustenance as a species but it is in fact the major factor contributing to the degradation of our environment statistically speaking. The planetary boundary approach uses pre-industrialization statistics to compare our current values and determine the absolute threshold for its nine boundaries. The comparison is almost unbelievable. The age of the machine and globalization has had major impacts on our planetary boundaries such as climate change, rate of biodiversity loss and the nitrogen/phosphorus cycle.

If we ask the question as to why industrialization has had such an immense impact on our biosphere, the one thing that comes to my mind is increasing demand. Taking into account the basics of business that dictates that supply follows demand, it is fair to assume that success of industrialization has been directly proportional to the population increase over the last two centuries. Basically we have been producing more and more because there are more and more people that want to buy the products that are on the market as a result of industrialization.

One prime example of such an industry is automobiles, which might leave the largest carbon footprint as a whole than any any other industry on this planet. From the extraction of the metals that are used to produce automobiles to the actual production of the parts and their assembly and then finally their post production use. The automobile life cycle consumes fossil fuels along each step of the way like many other consumer driven products that are on the market today. Concurrently we have seen a steady increase in the demand of automobiles ever since their inception in the late 19th century due to increasing population and their need in our early to mid 20th century land use.

The different industries have identified different problems over the years that are effecting our biosphere negatively and have been investing their resources to eliminate these processes with varying success. These efforts have definitely slowed down the damaging effects to our biosphere but we are no where close to repairing the damage that we have done in the past. The goal of a sustainable future isn’t easy but it would be easier and faster to get there if we have less people to provide for.

Population and sustainability

We have overshot our ecological footprint by 50%, which means humans are using natural resources faster than they can renew themselves. That means to be sustainable we have to reduce our extraction and consumption of natural resources by 50% and find ways to reduce waste. That would pretty much bring life to a halt for most of the worlds population, leave alone the economic turmoil that would cause. Social disparities will become greater and the resources would be scarcer than they are now. The projected population increase rates are 1 billion every 10 - 15 years. If we are over extended with our resources right now, how will be support our future generations?

We should take precedence from Indigenous people and their ways. They have lived on this earth for generations and have managed to keep their populations under control. A small tribe remains a small tribe even when exposed to modern technology. They protect their lands and their people. Most Indigenous people have a connection to their natural surroundings imbedded in their belief system and that is reflected in their culture and practices. We as a society have evolved socially and economically really fast over the last dozen generations or so. To take a step back and look at the Indigenous people who have been going about their life pretty much the same way for centuries and reflect on its merits would be an asset to modern humanity.

The only way to control social and planetary boundaries is not necessarily to tackle them head on but to think long term and consider the possibility of controlling world population as one of the strategies to have a sustainable future. I am not suggesting a targeted reduction of population as civilizations have done in the past to preserve their future but to educate people on the merits of having lesser children. In overpopulated countries use of legislation to control population as china did in the late 1990s could be a step in the right direction. There will be some pushback and unrest in the beginning but i’m sure if given a choice we as a species would choose the more sustainable alternative and procreate responsibly. We have to have faith in the resolve of our species.

It would be ignorant to think that just controlling population can secure a sustainable future for us. We need to consider adding population as a planetary boundary to the nine that have been established and integrating population control to the arsenal of things we need to implement for a sustainable future.