The global population is higher than
the Earth can sustain, argues the Director of the British Antarctic Survey
in the first of a series of environmental opinion pieces on the BBC News
website entitled The Green Room. Solving environmental problems such as
climate change is going to be impossible without tackling the issue, he
says.
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![]() |
![]() The welfare and quality of life of future
generations will be the ineluctable casualty ![]() |
Ten
thousand delegates attended the recent Montreal Summit on the control of
carbon emissions "beyond Kyoto".
That's a lot of people! The conference organisation must have been
daunting; and just imagine arranging the hotel accommodation and
restaurant facilities and dealing with the additional human-generated
waste.
Imagine the carbon and nitrogen emissions from the associated air
travel!
The 40 or more decisions made were announced as an historic success.
Supposing this proves to be so, will it be sufficient to secure an
acceptable quality of life for the generations to come?
What about the myriad other planetary-scale human impacts - for example
on land cover, the water cycle, the health of ecosystems, and
biodiversity?
What about our release of other chemicals into the environment?
What about our massive transport and mixing of biological material
worldwide, and our unsustainable consumption of resources?
Big foot
All of these effects interconnect and add up to the collective
"footprint" of humankind on our planet's life support systems.
![]() |
![]() The consequences of the human footprint extend
to the ends of the Earth ![]() |
The
consequences extend to the ends of the Earth (recall the hole in the ozone
layer over the Antarctic) and each is as difficult to predict and as
challenging to deal with as the link between carbon emissions and climate.
It would surely be impractical and almost certainly ineffective to
assemble 10,000 delegates to address each one of these issues, and
especially to do so in the necessary "joined up" way?
And in particular, what about the net 76 million annual rise in the
world's population, which currently stands at about 6.5 billion - more
than twice what it was in 1960 - and which is heading towards eight
billion or so by mid-century)?
That's an annual increase 7,500 times the number of delegates in
Montreal.
Imagine organising the accommodation, feeding arrangements, schooling,
employment, medical care, cultural activities and general infrastructure -
transport, power, water, communications, waste disposal - for a number of
people slightly larger than the population of the UK, and doing it each
year, year on year for the foreseeable future.
Combined with ongoing economic growth, what will be the effect on our
collective human "footprint"? Will the planet cope?
Steps to Utopia
Although reducing human emissions to the atmosphere is undoubtedly of
critical importance, as are any and all measures to reduce the human
environmental "footprint", the truth is that the contribution of each
individual cannot be reduced to zero.
Only the lack of the individual can bring it down to nothing.
![Campaigner outside Montreal talks. Image: AP]()
The Montreal climate talks: Did they have the issue
right? |
So if we
believe that the size of the human "footprint" is a serious problem (and
there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along
with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of
population management must be addressed.
Let us assume (reasonably) that an optimum human population level
exists, which would provide the physical and intellectual capacity to
ensure a rich and fulfilling life for all, but would represent a call upon
the services of the planet which would be benign and hence sustainable
over the long term.
A scientific analysis can tell us what that optimum number is (perhaps
2-3 billion?).
With that number and a timescale as targets, a path to reach "Utopia"
from where we are now is, in principle, a straightforward matter of
identifying options, choosing the approach and then planning and
navigating the route from source to destination.
Cinderella subject
In practice, of course, it is a bombshell of a topic, with profound and
emotive issues of ethics, morality, equity and practicability.
As
found in China, practicability and acceptability can be particularly
elusive.
So controversial is the subject that it has become the "Cinderella" of
the great sustainability debate - rarely visible in public, or even in
private.
In interdisciplinary meetings addressing how the planet functions as an
integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are usually
notable by their absence.
Rare indeed are the opportunities for religious leaders, philosophers,
moralists, policymakers, politicians and indeed the "global public" to
debate the trajectory of the world's human population in the context of
its stress on the Earth system, and to decide what might be done.
Unless and until this changes, summits such as that in Montreal which
address only part of the problem will be limited to at best very modest
success, with the welfare and quality of life of future generations the
ineluctable casualty. ![]()
Professor Chris Rapley is Director of the British Antarctic Survey,
based in Cambridge, UK
The Green Room is a new series of environmental opinion articles
running weekly on the BBC News website
