Is a population of 10 billion or even above actually sustainable on Earth?
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I have seen simple analyses that claim even 100 billion people can be sustained on earth. It all depends on the level of technology and integration you are willing to consider. Food is the easiest part as with the use of more active farming techniques (greenhouses, hydroponics) you can increase production by a factor of two or more and you can even stack the farms vertically in buildings for 100x more food per area of land.
Sustainable materials is a much harder question but with advancing technology it is likely possible to restrict ourselves to that which can be produced without destroying the planet.
Yes and no. Right now we are 7 billion people and 820 milion people are undernourished, but this number seem to constantly drop faster than the population grow. The main source of undernourishment isn’t to produce the food, but to get it to the people that need it. We also waste enough food to feed 3 billions people. So yes even if keep consuming like we do now, but cut down the waste and improve availability, we could feed 10 billion people. In reality, we won’t cut down all that waste and availibilty to certain people will always be an issues.
So in reality will we be able to feed 10 billions? Probably not. We for sure can produce that amount of food, but chance are people will still starve. That said, there is hope. Like I said we waste a lot, but we also eat a lot in certain countries (obesity is a big issue in several rich countries), we also produce a lot of ressources intensive food like beef, switching to a more efficient type of food, even if that’s just for a part of our foods would help a lot. Finally, we build over our farming land in a lot of countries.
It’s estimated that between 2000 and 2030, urbanisation would have cost between 1.6 and 3.3 million hectares of prime agricultural land per year. I say prime, because cities usually start close to food and water. We could decrease this lost by improving our transport and construction to make more dense city. Building up instead of spreading the city over larger area like we do right now.
The thruth in the end is that we don’t know. We develop better crop and technics to improve our production and so far it’s enough to combat propulation growth and slowly decrease undernourishement worldwide. But at some point we will hit a point where we gonna need to stop population growth, stop our waste, decrease our cities’ footprint, change our dies or a mix of all those.
We once thought that 100 million would be unsustainable. We have been able to improve food production a lot. And we are still not producing food optimally most places and still waste a lot of food. So even with current technology, just more of it, we can likely maintain a population ten times the current number. And that is before we consider new technologies which are under development. Similarly in other areas other then food. Current technology is good enough, we just need to build more infrastructure and change our culture and economy to be more sustainable.
Yes and no. Really it depends on how we continue to use and allocate our resources.
For example, beef, pork, and other cattle animals are super energy intensive to grow and care for.
Almost Half of all grain grown in the world goes to feeding live stock. That is a lot of food going to feed other animals and not humans, and 1 pound of grain doesn’t equal 1 pound of meat on a cow, some is always wasted and lost.
If every one of those 10 billion humans wants to eat like the average American does right now, sustainability is going to be a problem, we eat too much meat.
But, if we were socially capable to changing meat from being the center piece of a meal to more being an addition or side, and scale back meat consumption, that will be much more sustainable.
Then again, with advancements being made in lab grown meats and all that kind of new technology, that’s hard to predict what exactly is going to happen there.
It depends on technology. The current population is not sustainable because we rely on fossil fuels that will run out. And we are raising the temperature of the planet that will eventually cause massive problems.
Daily and even yearly this is sustainable. We could have a population of 10 billion and sustain it for decades. But it is all based on using resources that are not being replaced and will eventually run out.
But it all comes down to energy. If we could get cheap solar power we could large eliminate fossil fuel use, get fresh water by desalinating sea water, grow plants in hyrdoponics in skyscrapers with electric lights, pull carbon out of the air to reduce the greenhouse effect, etc.
We can accomplish amazing things, but we need energy to do it. And fossil fuel as an energy source is not sustainable. Also we use fossil fuels as a source of fertilizer for farming which is not sustainable.
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