Is it because there are too many of us, or too much going to too few?
In a small province located in the northern hemisphere, there sits just over 750,000 people. For the most part, these people live a good life, with access to clean water, food, education and electricity. Most are English-speaking, but a third are French and almost half live in urban centres. The province has lots of trees and some fresh water lakes, with an array of wildlife and four seasons, including a very cold winter.
Life is comfortable in New Brunswick. But in other parts of the world, it doesn’t come close.
“Things are pretty nice for us right now because we’re not facing the problems that we’re creating, but I wouldn’t want to be around in 20 years time. I wouldn’t want to inherit that world…because the problems are going to be so huge,” said James Whitehead, geologist and professor of science and technology at St. Thomas University.
“It’s like inheriting America’s debt without keeping it in check and letting it continue to grow and in 20 years time it’s just going to be insurmountable.”
History of population fascination
It’s 1960. The world’s population has just reached three billion. The first billion was reached in 1804, the second in 1927, and now scientists are starting to realize the rapid growth could lead to future consequences.
Population growth has peaked at 2.2 per cent per year and more people are worried about whether there will be enough food tomorrow. Population fascination has become a trend.
Fast-forward 51 years and the population has more than doubled – according to United Nations estimates, as of last week, we are sharing the world with seven billion others.
If we all held hands, we could go to the moon and back 18 times.
But researchers are realizing it’s not only the number of people that’s the problem, but the unequal distribution of crucial resources between people.
Population surged to four billion in 1974, five in 1987 and six in 1998. If we continue at this rate, by the end of the century, the world should make room for three billion more.
But Brigid Reading, a staff researcher at the Earth Policy Institute, a think-tank located in Washington, DC, reiterates that the number isn’t the sole contributing factor.
“It’s not like there’s a magic number where that’s like too many people and anything above that just shouldn’t be here,” she said. “However, at the same time, at the very basic mathematical level, every person on the planet means less resources.
“But those resources aren’t distributed equally.”
This raises the question: At what point does it all become a problem?
A reason for concern
An increasing population first threatens our water resources, says Whitehead.
Already, a billion people are living without a sufficient amount of drinking water, yet 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water is being used just for agriculture. Industrial use is at 20 per cent and domestic is just 10 per cent.
By 2025, the UN predicts that one in three people will be affected by water shortages.
That’s why we need to find ways to extend the water resources we have now.
“There’s a huge supply of water, I mean it’s all in the oceans,” Whitehead said. “But de-salivating water is hugely expensive and requires a lot of energy.”
Whitehead said there are newly developed methods that are worth our attention.
These include nanotechnologies, films that can filter contaminates and salt from water. But right now, the films are only the size of a quarter. Inefficient now, but the technology is still developing and pose lots of possibilities for the future.
“Or, build new buildings with rain water collection systems so we don’t have to use clean ground water to flush toilets,” Whitehead said.
It’s easy for Canadians to assume we have an endless supply of clean, fresh water. After all, 20 per cent of the world’s total freshwater resources are in our country’s backyard. But only seven per cent is renewable – the other 13 per cent comes from fossil water, underground aquifers and glaciers.
What do these numbers mean?
That Africa, India, China, eastern Australia, parts of Europe and the western United States will soon face water shortages if people aren’t careful.
“Since 2000, over half the world’s population has been living in urban areas which basically means half the world’s population lives on one per cent of the surface area,” said Whitehead. “So people are very concentrated which means that their food is not where they are living. Water also generally has to be brought to them. They’re placing very high pressures on available resources to service very small areas, so people need to be aware of that.”
Food shortage or wastefulness?
Madeline Weld, president of the Population Institute of Canada, said although the population commotion started in the 1960s, it was then when Africa was self-sufficient in its food production.
“But its population has grown very rapidly since then and so the development has never been able to keep pace,” she said.
Today, just under a billion people face food insecurity or undernourishment every day. More than half of the children in Africa and South Asia are stunted in their own growth because of it.
Weld says part of this is because green space is being eaten up by development.
“[Some] of it is the best farming land that’s around,” she said. “So the question is why are we doing this in a world with increasing hunger?”
But in 2009-10, the world produced enough cereal grains – 2.3 billion tons – to sustain nine to 11 billion people. Obviously, not all the grain made it into people’s mouths.
So, where did it all go?
A third fed domestic animals. Industrial uses like biofuels and plastics were fed 19 per cent.
Less than half was grown for the purpose of feeding people.
And one third of all the food that’s produced around the world goes to waste, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN.
Because of the alternative uses of basic food products, like grain or corn, the UN projects food production will have to double by 2025.
Perhaps it’s a matter of wastefulness, rather than shortage.
Light bulb effect
Over the past 100 years, our population has quadrupled. But our energy consumption has increased by 16 times, says Whitehead.
“So individually per capita we are using four times more energy than we were.”
And three quarters of the world’s population are using only one quarter of the energy being produced, he said.
According to the New Brunswick Energy Commission’s 2010-11 report, the province’s demand for energy is at 317 petajoules (PJ).
To put this in perspective, 210 PJ is equivalent to about 50 megatons of TNT. That was the amount of energy released by the Tsar Bomba, the largest man-made nuclear explosion ever.
Basically, it’s quite a bit.
On average, a household’s energy consumption was about 111 gigajoules (GJ). Six GJ is about the amount of potential energy when a barrel of oil is set on fire.
But there are so many places that don’t get access to this amount of energy.
China has 26 new nuclear power stations under construction.
“They want power because they don’t have the same access to power that we have traditionally,” said Whitehead.
“There are ways of reducing the amount of energy and there needs to be policies instituted to prevent obscene uses of energy like we see in Las Vegas, for example.”
Sometimes, the growth in numbers of actual households matters more than the number of just people, since most households include refrigerators, televisions and computers, and a car or two. The average energy consumed goes up as the average number of people in a household goes down.
“It’s not really about the raw number of people but places where we are seeing a very fast population growth, sometimes that can be one of many stressers on the immediate environment,” said Reading.
What does this all mean?
According the UN, it means that there’s only room for improvement.
Kirill Andreev, population affairs officer at the Population Division of the UN, says the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo, Egypt in 1994, was “perhaps the most important event over the last 20 years.”
“The Population Division has served the UN’s Commission on Population and Development [molded by the ICPD],” Andreev said. “Our role is to carry out the work mandated by the commission.”
This work, decided at the ICPD, includes four key areas: universal education, reduction of infant and child mortality, reduction of maternal mortality and access to reproductive and sexual health services, including family planning.
The Earth Policy Institute agrees these areas need more help, said Reading.
“There are 215 million women in just the developing world who need family planning resources…If every person had this very basic ability to plan how many children they want to have and when they want to have them…our population would not be growing at the rate that it is now,” Reading said.
But while the UN’s focusing on those four areas, the world should be doing their part, Andreev said.
“People should be worried about population growth and North Americans can be helping by thinking and improving their consumption.”
The other thing people can be doing is encouraging decision makers to come up with long-term goals, said Whitehead.
“We’re all living on the same planet and whether we like it or not, we’re all linked by the same atmosphere and the same oceans and we share the same responsibilities,” he said.
Or as Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the UN’s Population Fund, puts it:
“We are seven billion people with seven billion possibilities.”
