I was in a disagreement with a friend about this topic (he thought it was and I didn’t). But we both just don’t know enough about it so I came here for help on the subject. Appreciate it!
Edit: so who is (more) right, me or my friend?
In: Economics
Not really, no. Here’s a great video that explains it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348
The main point is, developed countries usually have a higher quality of life (better access to health care and lower death rates) and rely more on technology-based jobs (so we need fewer workers) and so growth rates are actually going down. The same trend is expected in developing countries once they get to the same level of development.
“Overpopulation” was originally just a buzzword to justify letting poor and homeless people die out, and… kind of still is to justify not aiding poorer countries or people who desperately need clean water and food. In reality we have plenty of resources today to help the population we have today, we just do a really bad job sharing it all.
Much like people saying the US is in a migrant crisis, being overrun and overcrowded with people, it’s bullshit.
Every humans needs, at an absolute minimum, food and water. Same goes for all other animals and plants as well. There is only so much possible farm land and clean drinking water on earth, even if we decided to burn down the Amazon rain forest and turn it into more human farm land. In theory there is a limit to how much can exist before we can’t feed them and they’ll starve and die, and I’d rather NOT burn down the Amazon.
We can’t grow forever. The planet is only so big and has only so much to offer. Something must give. And I’m sorry, realistically the human population is just growing too fast.
The issue is highly dependent on standard of living.
The resource consumption per capita of, say, a Canadian is vastly higher than that of somebody from, say, Liberia.
As you raise the standard of living of poorer nations (which most people want to do) you rapidly increase resource consumption. Energy use itself is highly correlated with wealth.
So yes, overpopulation is a problem if we all want to live like middle class westerners.
Depends what kind of overpopulation we’re talking about.
Globally – not really an issue
Locally – certainly can be more problematic if a city/town grows faster than it’s infrastructure and other support systems
Can handle
The collective output of humanity is excessive and directly responsible for a great deal of ever-mounting damage to the environmental conditions that gave rise to and continually support humanity.
You can break down this output into **average per capita consumption** x **population** if you like.
Decreasing either of these helps to get us to something more manageable, but we really need to reduce both.
A country or city on its own can also be considered overpopulated if the material wellbeing of the population would be improved by having fewer people and/or if the local ecosystem is suffering from the number of people and their output. For instance, if your country is stricken by regular famines and you have to import food every year, your country is overpopulated.
As any country develops, death rates drop and birth rates drop. Death rates tend to drop before birth rates do, so there’s always a couple generations of significant population growth, before it flattens out again. This has been observed pretty much everywhere.
The global population is expected to level out around ~10 billion people by the end of the century. Globally, we already grow enough food for 10 billion people. We can build enough clean power generation, too.
That doesn’t mean that growing populations aren’t a challenge for the countries experiencing them now. By definition, they’re countries that aren’t super rich. And growing enough food *globally* doesn’t mean that that food is distributed to everyone. Same with water, which we can’t just make more of.
But these are problems for the regions that are going through this process right now, they’re not unsolvable, and there is a maximum population that we’ll stabilize at, so it’s not a forever problem either.
The most important factor to the problem over population is, “Carrying capacity.”
Plants, animals, water, atmosphere all continuously replenish themselves in the life cycle of our biome.
The carrying capacity of the Earth is basically measured against the impact humans have on the earth and the ability the Earth has to recover from it.
I’ve seen estimates that with advancements in agriculture in the shift towards sustainable forms of energy the carrying capacity of the earth is around 12 billion.
I saw another study that said if we didn’t have any of those things in place and it was just humans taking what they wanted from the Earth the earth would be able to sustain 3.5 billion people.
Without doing anything just fishing as much as we want to fish eating whatever we want to eat chopping down as much as we wanted to chop down the most humans that could live on the earth is 3.5 billion.
In my lifetime the population has gone from 4 billion to almost 8 billion in about three decades.
At that rate we’re going to hit the maximum carrying capacity of the Earth in less than 50 years.
So short answer long it’s becoming a problem.
I think the population is a much lower level worry right now compared to the climate crisis. Ultimately all these problems potentiate each other, but right now we need to reduce carbon and methane pollution.
My father recalls when he was in primary school the world population was 3 billion and they were already talking about overpopulation.
The real thing is not the number of people, it’s the consumption of resources and the quality of life. People are not spreaded equally on the world’s surface, thus there are places with too many people and places where we’re good.
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