Population?
Who? & Where? Part III
March 26, 2023
Environmental Crimes
March 27, 2023There is enough space for veryone and even more
The long-feared “population bomb” may not go off, according to the authors of a new report that estimates that human numbers will peak lower and sooner than previously forecast.
The study, commissioned by the Club of Rome, projects that on current trends the world population will reach a high of 8.8 billion before the middle of the century, then decline rapidly. The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels.
The new forecasts are good news for the global environment. Once the demographic bulge is overcome, pressure on nature and the climate should start to ease, along with associated social and political tensions.
But the authors caution that falling birthrates alone will not solve the planet’s environmental problems, which are already serious at the 7.8 billion level and are primarily caused by the excess consumption of a wealthy minority.
Declining populations can also create new problems, such as a shrinking workforce and greater stress on healthcare associated with an ageing society, as countries like Japan and South Korea are finding.
The risk is particularly acute in the most vulnerable, badly governed and ecologically vulnerable economies.”
In the second, more optimistic scenario – with governments across the world raising taxes on the wealthy to invest in education, social services and improved equality – it estimates human numbers could hit a high of 8.5 billion as early as 2040 and then fall by more than a third to about 6 billion in 2100. Under this pathway, they foresee considerable gains by mid-century for human society and the natural environment.
“By 2050, greenhouse gas emissions are about 90% lower than they were in 2020 and are still falling,” according to the report.
“Remaining atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial processes are increasingly removed through carbon capture and storage.
As the century progresses, more carbon is captured than stored, keeping the global temperature below 2C above pre-industrial levels. Wildlife is gradually recovering and starting to thrive once again in many places.”
For those who can afford the luxury of occasionally escaping other members of our own species, doing so often requires getting on a plane and travelling to increasingly far-fetched locales.
Yet humanity’s footprint extends even to the most seemingly isolated of places: you’ll find nomadic herders in Mongolia’s Gobi desert, Berbers in the Sahara and camps of scientists in Antarctica.
This begs the question: as the world becomes even more crowded, will it become practically impossible to find a patch of land free from human settlement or presence? Will we eventually overtake all remaining habitable space?
Taking a stab at answering these questions requires examining what we know about where people will likely base themselves in the future, and what life will be like then. For starters, experts predict that – reflecting current trends – an increasing number of us will live out our lives in cities.
As agriculture becomes more efficient, people abandon jobs in that shrinking and difficult sector and instead take up ones in urban manufacturing or service. This has been going on for some decades. In 1930, just 30% of the world’s population lived in cities, compared to about 55% today.
By 2050, however, about two-thirds will be based in urban areas.
“The Africa projections are really scary,” says John Bongaarts, vice president and distinguished scholar at the Population Council, a non-profit research organisation based in New York City.
“A large proportion will end up in urban slums, which is not a recipe for happy living.”
The problem, he continues, is that Africa’s large cities – and, to some extent, Asia’s as well – are not equipped to absorb all of that population influx.
Indeed, places like Lagos, Dhaka and Mumbai already face tremendous challenges at current levels.
“People buy water at great [high] prices from street vendors, human waste is all over the place and garbage is just abandoned – not to even speak of green spaces around the city or quality of habitation,” Cohen says.
“I don’t think we are preparing adequately in thinking about the placement and organisation, or the political and environmental security, of growing cities.
“No doubt the problems will work themselves out, one way or another,” Cohen says. “But likely at a cost of tremendous and avoidable human suffering.”
Cities, however, are not the only places that will experience future change due to growing populations.
Rural and remote places that are not strictly protected will likely see a modest increase in human habitation, too. “With a combination of climate change and technology, it’s not unthinkable that Antarctica might become inhabited, although it’s hard to imagine it being densely populated,” Raftery says.
This also means that, for those with the means to do so, finding a quiet corner free from humanity’s mark will become even more challenging.
There will simply be too many other people with the same idea in mind.
None of this, however, means that we will run out of actual space to live. Around half of the world’s land currently holds around 2% of the planet’s population, whereas only about 3% of total land supports more than half of humanity.
But a growing population does mean that the number of relatively pristine places left to visit will also likely decrease, thanks to an ever-increasing demand for resources needed to support urban lives.
“I’d say there’s no threat of the world’s rainforests all being taken over by cities,” says Karen Seto, a professor of geography and urbanisation at Yale University.
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One of the authors of the report, Ben Callegari, said the findings were cause for optimism – but there was a catch.
“This gives us evidence to believe the population bomb won’t go off, but we still face significant challenges from an environmental perspective.
We need a lot of effort to address the current development paradigm of over consumption and over production, which are bigger problems than population.”
Previous studies have painted a grimmer picture. Last year, the UN estimated the world population would hit 9.7 billion by the middle of the century and continue to rise for several decades afterwards.
The new projection, released on Monday, was carried out by the Earth4All collective of leading environmental science and economic institutions, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Stockholm Resilience Centre and the BI Norwegian Business School. They were commissioned by the Club of Rome for a followup to its seminal Limits to Growth study more than 50 years ago
The report is based on a new methodology which incorporates social and economic factors that have a proven impact on birthrate, such as raising education levels, particularly for women, and improving income.
It sketches out two scenarios depending on the extent to which such policies are pursued.
In the business-as-usual case, it foresees existing policies being enough to limit global population growth to below 9 billion in 2046 and then decline to 7.3 billion in 2100.
This, they warn, is too little too late: “Although the scenario does not result in an overt ecological or total climate collapse, the likelihood of regional societal collapses nevertheless rises throughout the decades to 2050, as a result of deepening social divisions both internal to and between societies
Sometimes it’s difficult to fathom that the world could actually become even more crowded than it is today – especially when elbowing through a teeming Delhi market, hustling across a frenetic Tokyo street crossing or sharing breathing space with sweaty strangers crammed into a London Tube train.
Yet our claustrophobia-inducing numbers are only set to grow.
While it is impossible to precisely predict population levels for the coming decades, researchers are certain of one thing: the world is going to become an increasingly crowded place.
New estimates issued by the United Nations in July predict that, by 2030, our current 7.3 billion will have increased to 8.4 billion.
That figure will rise to 9.7 billion by 2050, and to a mind-boggling 11.2 billion by 2100.
Yet even today, it’s difficult enough to get away from one another.
Drive a few hours outside of New York City or San Francisco, into the Catskill Mountains or Point Reyes National Seashore, and you’ll find crowds of city-dwellers clogging trails and beaches. Even more remote and supposedly idyllic spaces are feeling the crush, too.
Back country permits for the Grand Tetons in Wyoming sell out months in advance, while Arches National park in Utah had to shut down for several hours last May due to a traffic gridlock
Manhattan’s educational, cultural and employment opportunities – as well as its health care options, safety regulations and relatively efficient infrastructure – all contribute to the high quality of life its residents enjoy.
Those are not universal urban guarantees, however, and they do not necessarily develop organically as a city or country grows.
As Adrian Raftery, a professor of statistics and sociology at the University of Washington, points out: “Increases in population have to be planned for.”
It takes capable governments and institutions to organise basic amenities such as freshwater, sanitation and waste disposal.
“But the problem,” Cohen says, “is that managerial talent is in short supply.” Worryingly, the places that are most in need of such oversight today are also the ones where most of humanity’s growth is projected to occur.
Much of the future population increase will come from Africa, which will shoot up from its current one billion people to over four billion by 2100.
Even in developed countries, however, standards of living will probably not continue to improve at the same rate as in recent years.
“We’ve had a few decades of extraordinarily rapid economic growth, with poverty declining in both rich and poor countries,” Bongaarts says.
“But this will become much more difficult in the future.”
Climate change is another wild card that could have a significant impact on how both developed and developing urban centres play out in the future.
Around 60% of all cities that currently have a million residents or more are at risk of at least one type of major natural disaster, many of them climate-related, and even the most well-organised, highly developed cities have yet to fully plan for these threats.
“People oftentimes don’t want to have this discussion because it’s associated with an alarmist view of climate change, but it’s worthwhile to consider what catastrophic climate change would mean for habitable space,” says Michail Fragkias, an applied social scientist at Boise State University.
While the impact of many of these issues could lessen with proper planning, outside of a few progressive nations and cities, there is not much evidence that that is occurring
“The bigger threat is the indirect impact of urbanisation on those landscapes.” Indeed, cities require wood for creating buildings and furniture, agricultural land for growing food, space to dispose of tonnes of rubbish produced on a daily basis – and much more.
Eventually, world population will likely level off, Wilmoth says. Even with our numbers skyrocketing into the billions, growth throughout this century is actually already slowing, and is projected to continue to do so.
Many decades from now, human population might even begin to decline. For the foreseeable future, however, we are headed toward an increasingly crowded Earth – although the conditions of that world are still uncertain.
G.|I.T.C
