Effects of overpopulation: Scientists are getting worried. Very worried.

One-third of the planet’s resources have been consumed. Of what remains, almost two-thirds are degraded by human overexploitation warns a report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries. 

A warning to humanity

In 2017, over 15,000 scientists around the world issued warning to humanity: Rapid human population growth is the primary driver behind many ecological and societal threats.

“By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere”.

Actually this was the second such warning. Unfortunately, the first one from 1992 did not have much effect.

One generation to act

According to the American ecologist, geographer, biologist, anthropologist, professor Jared Diamond, humanity has one generation to save the world from collapse. We are approaching a tipping point beyond which it will be too late to save us. Basically, the growing world population is a threat… to the world population.

50/50 for humanity

Mr Diamond is predicting the tipping point around no later than 2050 - and maybe even sooner - beyond which it will be too late to save humanity from itself. Mr Diamond gives us a 50 percent chance of success. Or actually 51 percent. He likes to be an optimist.

The Era of Man

The human impact on Earth is so massive that it has resulted in the formal denomination of a new geological Epoch: The Anthropocene Epoch. Alternatively: The Human Age or the Era of Man.

Current effects of population growth

The effects of the human population have been quite “impressive” considering we make up 0.01 percent of Life on Earth. 

• We use up natural resources and dump waste at a rate exceeding the Earth’s capacity by 75 percent.
• If the current rate of deforestation continues, the world's rain forests will be gone in 100 years.
• 0.01 percent of life (humanity) has caused the loss of 83 percent of all wild mammals and half of all plants. 
• The world’s caged chickens are three times the weight of all the wild birds. Domesticated cattle and pigs outweigh all wild mammals by 14 to 1
• Plastic pollution - plastics are found everywhere on the planet and humans have produced enough of it in the last 70 years to coat the Earth entirely in plastic.

How much nature does humanity consume: Net Primary Production

Net Primary Production (NPP) is used to measure the human impact on Earth. NPP is calculated as: 

Net Primary Production = plant material produced on Earth - solar energy converted to plant organic matter through photosynthesis.

NPP is the primary fuel for the Earth's food chain system. To illustrate, the global food chain requires 1000 tons of grass to feed one human being for one year:

“Three hundred trout are needed to support one man for a year. The trout, in turn, must consume 90 000 frogs, that must consume 27 million grasshoppers that live off of 1 000 tons of grass”.

— G. Tyler Miller, Jr., American Chemist (1971)

1000 tons of grass x 7.8 billion people = 7,800,000,000,000 tons of grass a year.

That’s 7.8 trillion tons or 7.8 quadrillion kilos of grass annually to feed humanity.

One third of “nature” goes to man

Humanity uses  between roughly one-quarter to one-third of all NPP for the production of crops for food and fiber, timber for wood products and paper, and in support of livestock grazing. 

Lose of wildlife

According to WWF, the Earth has lost half of all wildlife in the past 40 years and the loss has been caused by consumption of the growing human population.

In an honest assessment of the accomplishments of the WWF, the WWF founder makes clear the effect population growth has had on the goal to save endangered species:

“You know, when we first set up WWF, our objective was to save endangered species from extinction. But we have failed completely; we haven’t managed to save a single one. If only we had put all that money into condoms, we might have done some good”. 

- Sir Peter Scott, Founder of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Global warming

Global temperatures have been rising since around 1900 and especially in the last 50 years. In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that: 

"It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century."

Worst-case climate change scenario just got worse

A study from 2017 concluded that the previous worst-case scenario estimate for global warming is actually not the worst case. Temperatures could go up by almost 5 °C by the end of the century.

“There is no room for complacency. Climate change is here. It is dangerous. And it is about to get much worse” 

- Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Chair of the Earth League – an international network of scientists, 2017.

Chemical pollution of Earth

150,000 different man-made chemicals

The growth of the human population has been accompanied by a growth in synthetic chemical substances. There are roughly 150,000 different man-made chemicals on Earth with an estimated 2000 new chemicals being released every year. 
We don’t know enough about the effects

We don’t know how all these chemicals affect us - especially when they mix with each other and create so-called cocktail effects. According to award winning British journalist Geoffrey Lean, out of over 100,000 recently introduced chemicals, 99 percent are poorly regulated and 85 percent does not have proper safety information. Of the 150,000 chemicals in existence, just 21 have been banned.

A staggering amount of chemicals

“Humans emit more than 250 billion tonnes of chemical substances a year, in a toxic avalanche that is harming people and life everywhere on the planet”.

One in four deaths

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) 12 million people die every year as a result of air, water, and soil pollution, chemical exposures, climate change and ultraviolet radiation - all a result of human activity. That is almost one in four of all deaths annually.

Really spooky effects of chemical pollution

Abnormal sex ratios due to chemical pollution

Abnormal sex ratios with very low number of boys being born have been observed in several places around the world including in villages in the Russian Arctic and Inuit villages in Greenland and Canada. The abnormal sex ratios have been attributed to high levels of endocrine disruptors in the bodies of inhabitants. These chemicals that include polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) are believed to build up in the tissues of fish and animals that make up the main diet in these areas.

Truly, genuinely, profoundly disturbing 

Nicknamed “the Chemical Valley”, parts of the First Nation community Chippewa of Sarnia, Canada, is heavily industrialized and polluted. In less than 10 years in the 1990s the sex-ratio dropped from around 1 (50 percent girls and 50 percent boys) to roughly one-third boys and two-thirds girls. In another community of Chippewa away from the Chemical Valley, the sex ratio has not changed.

No change in sight: The world population continues to grow

The world population is growing by 220,000 people a day. The number of consumers is growing by 350,000 people a day. By 2030 there will be 8.5 billion people on Earth and a consumer population of almost 5 billion. Such a growing population will have tremendous effects on the environment and societies around the world.

Future effects of population growth

The explosive growth of the world population has already had massive impacts on our planet. And the world population will grow at least another 100 years. Here’s a few “highlights” on what the future will bring if we don’t act to reverse negative trends:

Oceans of plastic - not fish

If nothing changes we will run out of seafood in 2048

A four-year study in 2006 by an international group of ecologists and economists of 7,800 marine species. concludes that if current trends continue, the oceans stocks of seafoods will collapse by 2048 destroying the ability of oceans to feed the world's growing population.

"Every year a higher percentage of the currently fished stocks has collapsed. We are losing it piece by piece."

- Dr Boris Worm, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, lead author.

Instead of fish, oceans will be filled with plastic 

While life and ecosystems in our oceans are being destroyed, the oceans are being filled with something entirely different: plastic waste.

“Given projected growth in consumption, in a business-as-usual scenario, by 2050 oceans are expected to contain more plastics than fish (by weight)”

- “The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics”, report by the World Economic Forum and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, with analytical support from McKinsey & Company, 2016.

The plastic soup: Ocean garbage patches

All the plastic waste that is dumped in oceans have created several areas with massive amounts of plastic - the five so-called ocean garbage patches. The largest is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and covers about 1.6 million square kilometers. 

Rainforests could be gone by the end of the century

We are destroying rainforests so quickly they may be wiped out completely. A 2001 paper from the NASA Earth Observatory concluded that:

“If the current rate of deforestation continues, the world's rain forests will vanish within 100 years causing unknown effects on global climate and eliminating the majority of plant and animal species on the planet”.

- “Tropical deforestation”, NASA Earth Observatory paper, 2001.

The main reason for deforestation is to provide food, timber, and energy for the growing world population.

No water by 2040

Unless freshwater use is drastically reduced, severe water shortage will affect the entire planet by 2040. According to the UN, 5 billion people could face water shortages by 2050.

"There will be no water by 2040 if we keep doing what we're doing today" 

- Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Aarhus University, Denmark, 2014.

Where does the water go?

The Earth’s freshwater resources are being used up to satisfy the demand of the expanding world population. And not simply when we take a shower or cook our food. Water is used to produce virtually everything we buy - from our t-shirt to the coffee we drink and the chocolate or meat we eat.

On average this is the amount of water needed to produce:

• 1 cotton shirt: 2,700 liters of water
• 1 cup of coffee: 140 liters of water
• 100 grams of chocolate: 2,400 liters of water
• 100 grams of beef 1,550 liters of water

Water for electricity

The use of water to generate electricity is one of the biggest sources of water consumption throughout the world and also a main reason for water shortages. The generation of electricity is using up more water than even the agricultural industry. So even if electricity generated from water is green in one sense, it is causing other problems.

Not science fiction

To illustrate that this is not distant science fiction, the second largest South African city of Cape Town almost ran out of water in April 2018 and had to cut water use in half. Cape Town managed to avoid “Day Zero” (the day that the city will run completely out of water) but the risk of future water shortages remains as South Africa is one of the world’s driest countries and demand for water continues to go up.

According to the WWF, water demand will increase by 32 % between 2016 and 2030, reaching 17.7 billion m³. This is more than the country is able to allocate, so the risk of Day Zero is still present.

The End of the Era of Man: 2050 could be the end of the world as we know it

A study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warns that the human race is abusing the planet so badly that it will destroy its capacity to support life. The report shows that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by human activity over the past 30 years. Business as usual in 2050 with a population approaching 10 billion and a world economy double the size of 2018 would basically mean “the end of the world as we know it”.

“either consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no longer be able to sustain its growing population (...) seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted”.

The British newspaper The Guardian published an article announcing that: Earth 'will expire by 2050'

We would have to colonise space

Outer space will have to be colonised in order for mankind to live on. This is backed by the legendary Stephen Hawking: 

“we must colonise other planets to ensure human survival”.

- Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author.

Or completely revolutionize our relationship with nature

We need a new industrial revolution fundamentally changing the way our societies work at a magnitude similar to the industrial revolution of the 1800s.