Is a population of 10 billion or even above actually sustainable on Earth?
In: Other
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.
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