Why is population growth a problem

Site by TMBR. Why Population is Important We cannot have a sustainable planet without stabilizing population. How does Population media center address overpopulation? People deserve good health. People deserve space to live and play. People deserve food and water. Girls deserve equal opportunities. What Do Solutions Look Like? Gender Equality. Reproductive Health.

Health Services. The Misperception that Population Growth is Stopping You are living in an extraordinary time — the planet Earth is, at this very moment, experiencing an incredible human population rise. Population Controversy Work related to population can be controversial, and those discussions should not be overlooked. Current World Population 7,,, Net Growth During Your Visit 0.

You can make a big difference. Clinic Monitoring. More than 27, people used a Planned Parenthood widget from East Los High 's website in the first month of broadcast. Web Analytics. Married women who listened to Yeken Kignit in Ethiopia increased their use of family planning by Endline Research.

Tell Us Your Story. Learn More. Reducing parking requirements for new apartment buildings, removing height limits, altering restrictive lot sizes namely lot minimums , and generally just allowing landowners to build freely on their property would greatly reduce the cost of living and boost population growth and density.

It would prompt Americans to move to denser areas while also lowering housing prices and easing family budgets — which would itself increase fertility. Recall that many American families wish they could afford more children. The concern with overpopulation, naturally, often dovetails with concerns about climate change. We can answer that question fairly easily, making use of forecasts of population, GDP per capita, and emissions intensity per dollar by country. We can come up with some scenarios and then compare them to estimates of emissions needed to keep global warming manageable.

The greenish lines show emissions under different population scenarios. The most steeply climbing line assumes only a modest decline in global fertility rates, while the lowest green scenario assumes a very rapid decline in total fertility rates — frankly, an unattainable decline. The teal line assumes that fertility rates in every country go directly to replacement rate in down for most poor countries, up for rich ones , and stay there.

The central green line assumes fertility declines in the future following the historic trend. As you can see from these crude extrapolations, fertility rates do have substantial long-run effects on emissions.

But note those two gray lines. The darker gray line would get us down to a 2. No amount of population control achieves those goals. One complication is that fertility decline tends to increase GDP per capita, as families invest more in human capital for each child. What happens if GDP growth is much faster than in my baseline scenario?

Finally, the red and orange lines show different assumptions about technology and society. The orange line assumes it declines substantially faster. Achieving either scenario requires a global economy that is substantially less dependent on fossil fuels than it is today in either case, but reaching the most optimistic scenario requires a near-total elimination of fossil fuel power generation on developed countries as France has done, with its commitment to nuclear power.

Either scenario is technologically possible, though we would need big breakthroughs in cost-effectiveness of alternative energy for the best-case outcomes. But unfortunately, even if we combine lower fertility, more efficient technology, and lower economic growth the brown line , by the s we are once again overshooting necessary emissions. In other words, this entire exercise is hopeless within current technological constraints. As with fossil fuels, each of us is implicated in the problem of over-consumption, in complicated ways that are hard to see and disentangle ourselves from.

Trying to figure out how to reduce per-capita consumption gets us into nebulous territory. Essentially, our entire society needs to develop a new system of values, or revive some very old ones, so that what drives us collectively is the pursuit of enough for all, rather than a lot for a few.

Another panelist, Katherine Wilkinson, points out that 10 percent of the world's population is responsible for about 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and about 60 percent of those people are in the Global North. The Green New Deal works to tackle this problem by addressing inequality while also attempting to get a handle on over-consumption by the few. Another huge problem with focusing too much on population is that, historically, the topic has been infused with racism and sexism.

Find out what people in countries with high rates of growth have to say about it, and help to amplify their voices. Check out, for example, the Oasis Initiative , which partners with activists in Nigeria and Niger—countries with some of the highest growth rates in the world—to improve access to family planning and education.

Consider, for example, Niger, where child marriage is common and girls often drop out of school early. Seen through this lens, a rapidly growing population can be interpreted more as a symptom of a problem than the problem itself. When women have the information and tools they need, they generally make the best choices for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Female agency, in and of itself, is a goal we all need to be working for. For example, according to the WHO, an estimated million women in developing countries who want to avoid pregnancy are not using modern contraceptives. Getting more women the access and agency to utilize family planning methods could go a long way in flattening the population curve.

Although female access to education has increased over the years, the gender gap remains. Roughly million girls worldwide are out of school currently, and an estimated 15 million girls of primary school age will never learn to read and write, compared with 10 million boys. Increasing and encouraging education among women and girls can have a number of positive ripple effects, including delayed childbearing , healthier children, and an increase in workforce participation.

Plenty of evidence suggests a negative correlation between female education and fertility rates. If increased female education can delay or decrease fertility and provide girls with opportunities beyond an early marriage, it could also help to mitigate current population trends. More people means an increased demand for food, water, housing, energy, healthcare, transportation, and more. And all that consumption contributes to ecological degradation, increased conflicts, and a higher risk of large-scale disasters like pandemics.

An increase in population will inevitably create pressures leading to more deforestation, decreased biodiversity, and spikes in pollution and emissions, which will exacerbate climate change. Ultimately, unless we take action to help minimize further population growth heading into the remainder of this century, many scientists believe the additional stress on the planet will lead to ecological disruption and collapse so severe it threatens the viability of life on Earth as we know it.

According to estimates in a study by Wynes and Nicholas , a family having one fewer child could reduce emissions by The scarcity brought about by environmental disruption and overpopulation has the potential to trigger an increase in violence and political unrest. Many of the recent novel pathogens that have devastated humans around the world, including COVID, Zika virus, Ebola, and West Nile virus, originated in animals or insects before passing to humans.