The Growing Pressure

Is this a problem of increase in number or a problem of growing human centred planning?

Each year, about 90 million new people join the human race. This is roughly equivalent to adding three Canadas or another Mexico to the world annually, a rate of growth that will swell human numbers from today’s 5.6 billion to about 8.5 billion by 2025.
The earth is a “closed system,” indicating that we have to recycle or store all the wastes we produce. We have one planet’s worth of land and water to provide resources for agriculture, energy and other needs. The resource use and pollution management basically depend on two factors:
1. The number of people on the planet, and
2. The average amount of resources available (per person) and the average amount of pollution produced.
As the world population continues to grow geometrically, great pressure is being placed on arable land, water, energy, and biological resources to provide adequate supply of food while maintaining the integrity of our ecosystem. According to the World Bank and the United Nations, from 1 to 2 billion humans are now malnourished, indicating the combination of insufficient food, low income, and inadequate distribution of food. This is the largest number of hungry humans ever recorded in history. Based on their evaluation of available natural resources, scientists have issued a joint statement reinforcing the concern about the growing imbalance between the world’s population and the resources that support human lives.


Strategies for the future must be based first and foremost on the conservation and careful management of land, water, energy, and biological resources needed for food production.

What solutions can we have?
Once we recognise the fact that overpopulation is a problem and that increasing standards of living around the world will add to our resource-use and pollution-management challenges, we must resist any temptation and work toward better solutions.
We should
• Strive to reduce suffering by combating disease and poverty around the world;
• Improve resource efficiency and pollution control so that standards of living can rise without negative impact, and
• keep human population to numbers that are sustainable.
Extinctions of non-human species
Human activities that have caused massive extinction of species are by killing and degradation of natural habitat. There are other factors as well which are directly or indirectly relate to human actions.
According to a survey nearly 70 percent of biologists believe that we are currently in the early stages of a human-caused mass extinction, known as the Holocene extinction event. The problems are:
• Seriously impairing the ability of the environment to recover from natural and human-induced disasters.
• Destroying the natural systems that purify the world’s air and water.
• Reducing the potential for the discovery of new medicines.
• Increasing flooding, drought, and other environmental disasters.
• Contributing substantially to the degradation of the world’s economies, thereby weakening the social and political stability of nations across the globe.
• Damaging agriculture, fisheries, and food production.
• Decreasing the ability to control infectious diseases.
Nearly one third of the world’s wildlife has been lost since 1970, according to the study released by the Zoological Society of London, WWF and the Global Footprint Network. It is high time we woke up understanding the consequences of our actions.
The Holocene extinction event is a name customarily given to the widespread, ongoing mass extinction of species during the modern Holocene epoch. The large number of extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods; a sizeable fraction of these extinctions are occurring in the rainforests. Since 1500 AD, 784 extinctions have been documented by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
According to the World Bank and the United Nations, from 1 to 2 billion humans are now malnourished, indicating the combination of insufficient food, low income, and inadequate distribution of food. This is the largest number of hungry humans ever recorded in history.

What should we do?
Strategies for the future must be based first and foremost on the conservation and careful management of land, water, energy, and biological resources needed for food production. The conservation of these resources will require coordinated efforts and incentives from individuals and countries. Once these finite resources are exhausted they cannot be replaced by human technology. Further, more efficient and environmentally sound agricultural technologies must be developed and put into practice supporting the continued productivity of agriculture.
Additionally, as developing countries become more integrated into the world economy, they will place greater demands on their own natural resources and as a result, pollution and environmental degradation are projected to increase at a rate exceeding the population growth rate.
One of the greatest threats to the world’s environment is the compounding number of rural poor who turn increasingly to the rainforests to feed and shelter themselves. They are sometimes pushed off more fertile soils by large, wealthy landowners who are capable of purchasing land or using political influence to gain title to land. Without realizing it, these poor farmers are perpetuating their own situation by their role in deforestation, which worsens their quality of life by increasing their chance of being diseased, degrading their drinking water stocks, escalating soil erosion, and leaving their children without the benefits of sustainably utilized forest. As the human population grows, the quality of all forms of life plummets as people are forced to move into more and more marginal lands with higher incidence of natural disasters (floods), crop failures, and disease.