The World at 7 Billion

This month, the 7 billionth person will be born on a planet already strapped for resources. To mark this extraordinary milestone, TIME explores the most pressing population issues of the day, from the quest for sustainable energy sources to a look at what our biggest cities could look like in the decades to come.

Why the Real Victim of Overpopulation Will Be the Environment

Bryan Walsh, 10/26/11

Maybe it's just the fact that the official day has been set for Oct. 31 — Halloween — but there's a distinct whiff of panic and fear around the expected birth of the 7 billionth person on the planet. Here's Roger Martin, chair of the NGO Population Matters, writing in the Guardian recently:

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The 7 Billion Day is a sobering reminder of our planet's predicament. We are increasing by 10,000 an hour. The median UN forecast is 9.3 billion by 2050, but the range varies by 2.5 billion — the total world population in 1950 — depending on how we work it out.

Every additional person needs food, water and energy, and produces more waste and pollution, so ratchets up our total impact on the planet, and ratchets down everyone else's share — the rich far more than the poor. By definition, total impact and consumption are worked out by measuring the average per person multiplied by the number of people. Thus all environmental (and many economic and social) problems are easier to solve with fewer people, and ultimately impossible with ever more.

Until the 7 billion threshold was approached recently, population growth had largely disappeared as a major international issue — a far cry from the 1970s, when Malthusian thought was back in fashion and countries like India and China were taking brutally coercive steps to curb population growth. That's partially a reaction to those dark days — right-thinking environmentalists didn't want to be associated with unjust policies, and so population became the green issue that dare not speak its name. But I also think that when the 6 billionth person rolled around — just 12 years ago — the world was in a very different and much brighter place. It's a lot easier to feel sunny about the idea of the planet growing more crowded when the global economy is humming, there are few major conflicts ongoing and you can take a water bottle through airport security.

Things, of course, are a little darker in 2011, so suddenly more people just seem like more mouths to feed, more competitors at the marketplace, more straws in the milk shake. You can see it in the way that immigration has once again become a hot-button political issue in the U.S., or the rise of population-induced apocalyptic fears. Are we going to breed ourselves out of existence? Is there room on the planet to support 7 billion–plus people? (See "Welcome to the Era of the Everyday Billion-Dollar Disaster.")

Take a deep breath. The answer is yes — and not just because you could fit 7 billion people in the state of Texas and it would only have the population density of New York City, which I can tell you from personal experience isn't that bad. We're a long way from Soylent Green territory here. As Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University pointed out in the New York Times recently, we have more than enough food, water and other essentials to keep every one of the 7 billion — and far more — perfectly healthy:

In fact, the world is physically capable of feeding, sheltering and enriching many more people in the short term. Between 1820, at the dawn of the industrial age, and 2008, when the world economy entered recession, economic output per person increased elevenfold.

Life expectancy tripled in the last few thousand years, to a global average of nearly 70 years. The average number of children per woman fell worldwide to about 2.5 now from 5 in 1950. The world's population is growing at 1.1 percent per year, half the peak rate in the 1960s. The slowing growth rate enables families and societies to focus on the well-being of their children rather than the quantity.

It's not sheer population growth that is stressing out the planet — it's what those people are producing and consuming. It's notable that much of the concern over population growth tends to focus on sub-Saharan Africa and the developing world. That may be where population is growing fastest, but poor Ugandans and Nigerians use a tiny proportion of the world's resources compared with rich Westerners, even if our populations have begun to stabilize. Here's how Jared Diamond — of Guns, Germs, and Steel fame — laid out the issue in 2008:

The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that's a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya's more than 30 million people, but it's not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of the 300 million people in the U.S. consumes as much as 32 Kenyans do. With 10 times the population, the U.S. consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

A billion people — that's 1 in 7 — go hungry around the world today, but that's not because the planet is incapable of producing enough food to feed them. After all, as much as half the food produced worldwide ends up wasted, either rotting in the fields, the markets or in our refrigerator. We could feed 7 billion, 8 billion, 9 billion and probably more — if we chose to do so. (See "Population: The Numbers Game.")

That's one of the reasons I'm relatively sanguine about the population issue. It's basically impossible to predict the future, and past performance is no guarantee of future results. But humanity has been pretty good so far at responding to the challenges this planet puts before us, and I see little reason to expect that will change. More people, after all, does mean more potential problem solvers, not just more mouths to feed.

But there's an undeniable cost to all these people and all this growth: the planet itself. Even as human beings have grown in numbers and wealth, becoming healthier and more robust, other species have suffered. A study last year in Science found that on average, 52 species of mammals, birds and amphibians move one category closer to extinction every year. Almost one-fifth of existing vertebrates species are threatened, including some 41% of amphibians. Another recent Science study found that humans are destroying apex predators like tigers, wolves or sharks, which then has a major knock-on effect down the food chain. (See photos of World AIDS Day 2010.)

And as our numbers increase, other species decrease. A Nature study found that we are already entering a period of historic extinctions — perhaps the sixth great "extinction wave." It doesn't seem to matter that we keep putting more and more of the planet under protection for nature. Our sheer numbers — and our material needs, our carbon emissions, our waste — leave less and less room for other species, or at least, species that don't depend directly on us, like domestic animals and pests.

We may be headed toward a planet that supports 7 billion, 8 billion, 9 billion people — but not much else. It's not exactly the overpopulated apocalypse that science fiction and some environmentalists would have us fear, but it would still be an incalculably lessened world.

See "Getting Paid to Procreate in Taiwan: Is $640 Enough?"

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2097720_2097782,00.html

Overpopulation Isn't The Problem: It's Too Few Babies

Joel Kotkin, 10/27/11

The world’s population recently passed the 7 billion mark, and, of course, the news was greeted with hysteria and consternation in the media. “It’s not hard to be alarmed,” intoned National Geographic. “We should all be afraid, very afraid,” warned the Guardian.

To be sure, continued population increases, particularly in very poor countries, do threaten the world economy and environment -- not to mention these countries’ own people. But overall the biggest demographic problem stems not from too many people but from too few babies.

This is no longer just a phenomenon in advanced countries. The global “birth dearth” has spread to developing nations as well. Nearly one-third of the 59 countries with “sub-replacement” fertility rates -- those under 2.1 per woman -- come from the ranks of developing countries. Several large and important emerging countries, including Iran, Brazil and China, have birthrates lower than the U.S.

In the short run this is good news. It gives these countries an opportunity to leverage their large, youthful workforce and declining percentage of children to drive economic growth. But over the next two or three decades -- by 2030 in China’s case – these economies will be forced to care for growing numbers of elderly and shrinking workforces. For the next generation of Chinese leaders, Deng Xiaoping’s rightful concern about overpopulation at the end of the Mao era will shift into a future of eldercare costs, shrinking domestic markets and labor shortages.

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This scenario is already a reality in Japan and much of the European continent, including Greece, Spain, Portugal, much of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Germany. Adults over the age of 65 make up more than 20% of these countries’ populations -- compared with 15% in the U.S. -- and their numbers could double by 2030, according to researchers Emma Chen and Wendell Cox.

In many of these countries, rising debt burdens and shrinking labor markets have already slowed economic growth and suppressed any hope for a major long-term turnaround. The same will happen to even the best-run European economies, just as it has in Japan, whose decades-long growth spurt ended as its workforce began to shrink.

By 2030 the weight of an aging population will strangle what’s left of these economies. Germany, Japan, Italy and Portugal, for example, will all have only two workers for every retiree. The U.S. will fare somewhat better, with closer to three workers per retiree. By 2030 the median age will also be higher in China and Korea than in the U.S. This age difference will grow substantially by 2050, according to the Stanford Center on Longevity.

The biggest impact of aging, however, will not occur in northern Europe and Japan, where there may be enough chestnuts hidden away to keep the aged fed, but in Asia. In the next few decades, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and even Indonesia will start following Japan into the wheelchair stage of their demographic histories. These are not quite rich places like China and Brazil, which still lack the wealth and a developed welfare state to take care of the elderly Although not headed directly to European or Japanese rates of aging, these countries will experience a doubling of their Old Age Dependency Ratios; both will rise slightly above current U.S. levels by 2030.

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In China, the one-child policy could be used to explain this phenomenon, but this hardly accounts for declining birthrates and rapid aging in countries such as Iran, Mexico or Brazil. Other factors -- urbanization, a secular society and upwardly mobile women -- also appear to be playing an important role.

Of course, the populations in most developing countries will still grow, but more due to longer lifetimes than a surfeit of new births. But projections are often wrong, and their demographic trajectory may slow down more than now predicted.

The one region expected to continue growing is Africa. Some countries, like Nigeria and Tanzania, are expected to more than double or even triple their current populations by 2050. But as Africa urbanizes and develops, it may eventually experience the same unexpected decline in fertility we already see in Islamic Iran, multi-cultural Brazil or throughout east Asia.

Largely left out of the analysis may well be the next big demographic phenomenon: the rise of childlessness. We have already seen how the move in developing countries from six kids or more per household has reduced population growth. In a similarly dramatic way the shift towards zero children, particularly in wealthier countries could have unforeseen lasting consequences. After all, with two children, or even with one kid, there’s the possibility of two or more grandchildren. With no children, it’s game over -- forever.

Of course, there have always been unmarried people and childless people; some by necessity or health reasons, others by choice. But now a growing proportion of young child-bearing age women in countries as diverse as Italy, Japan and Taiwan are claiming no intention of having even one child. One-third of Japanese women in their 30s are unmarried, and similar trends are developing in other Asian countries.

Life without marriage, and children, has also become the rage among a large proportion of the cognoscenti even in historically procreation-friendly America. Whether it’s because men are seen as weak, or children too problematical, traditional families could erode further in the decades ahead.

The chidlessness phenomenon stems largely from such things as urbanization, high housing prices, intense competition over jobs and the rising prospects for women. The secularization of society -- essentially embracing a self-oriented perspective -- may also be a factor.

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

7 billion? Hold the celebrations!

Managing the consequences of a population boom

Robert J. Walker, 10/28/11

According to the United Nations, world population will reach the 7 billion mark on Monday. More than one commentator has declared that we should "pop the champagne." But as much as we should revere human life, this milestone is more cause for concern than celebration.

In the 12 years that have passed since world population reached 6 billion, a lot has changed. In 1999, decades of rising stock values, declining commodity prices, rising incomes and continued progress in the fights against hunger and severe poverty led many to believe that there were no limits to growth. Confidence was high that we could virtually eliminate hunger and severe poverty, and while only modest progress had been made in reining in greenhouse gas emissions, it was hoped that the world would act in time to avert some of the worst effects of climate change.

Today, after a decade of economic turbulence, rising commodity prices and setbacks in the fight against hunger and severe poverty, profound questions are being raised about humanity's future. We may not be facing a doomsday scenario, but the march of progress seems less assured than it did in 1999. The challenges now posed by climate change and resource scarcity raise legitimate questions about the capacity of Earth to meet the needs of a growing population.

Twelve years ago, hopes were high that fertility rates would continue to fall and that world population would begin to decline by midcentury. Max Singer, founder of the Hudson Institute, warned in 1999 that the world would soon be downsizing. "Fifty years from now," he predicted, "the world's population will be declining, with no end in sight." Twelve years later, however, as we approach the 7 billion mark, world population is still growing ... with no end in sight. The U.N.'s latest projections indicate that population will reach 10 billion by 2082 and keep growing.

Fertility rates in many parts of the developing world are not falling as fast as once expected. While lack of access to contraceptives inhibits many women in the developing world from preventing unwanted pregnancies, other factors, such as gender inequity and child marriage, loom even larger. Women in many parts of the developing world have little or no say in determining how many children they will bear.

One of the most profound questions now facing humanity is whether food production will be able to keep pace with projected population growth. In the past five years, the world has endured two major food crises. Food stocks have been shrinking. As a result, prices for grains and other food staples have doubled. At the same time, there is growing concerns about the impact that climate change, water scarcity, desertification, loss of topsoil and fuel prices will have on future food production.

Rising levels of consumption, as much as population, are to blame for this growing imbalance between what we demand of the Earth and what this planet can provide. And if our consumption exceeds sustainable limits, people living in severe poverty will hit the wall first.

We already have 1 billion hungry people in the world. If world population, as currently projected, reaches 8 billion in 13 years and 9 billion in about 30 years, how many more people will go hungry?

The U.N. says food production in the developing world must double in the next 40 years to keep pace with population. But even if does, the cost of food could keep rising, making it unaffordable for the urban poor. The world is awash with money, after all, but severe poverty persists.

Those who regard population growth as cause for celebration must also believe that the world has a virtually unlimited supply of fresh water, arable land, energy and minerals. And that climate change and loss of biodiversity pose no threat to posterity. It's difficult to say what planet these optimists are living on, but it's not 21st century Earth.

Population growth is a formidable challenge, but it's not insurmountable. Domestically, we need to expand, not slash, government support for family planning; nearly half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are still unintended. In the developing world, there are proven, cost-effective strategies for lowering fertility rates and improving the health and welfare of families. They include improving access to contraceptives, providing school lunches to keep girls enrolled in school longer, enforcing laws against child marriage and promoting gender equality.

Until we've made more progress in eliminating hunger, reducing severe poverty and addressing climate change, let's keep the cork in the champagne.

Robert J. Walker is the executive vice president of the Population Institute.

Copyright © 2011, Chicago Tribune

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