on earth’s carrying capacity: wot about population?
Sooner or later in our learning about sustainability, we return to this question: How many humans can Earth support?
The answer, of course, is: It depends…on what their footprint is.
Most of the research on ecological footprints tends to focus on how much we need to reduce consumption to achieve ‘one planet living’, yet reducing population is another option.
Or is it?
Now, a new report from OptiPop urges a radical form of “offsetting†carbon dioxide emissions to prevent climate change…having fewer children.
Says the OptiPop report, “even if the world managed to achieve a 52 per cent cut in its 1990 emission levels (21.4 billion tons) by 2050 – not far off the IPCC’s 60 per cent target – it would be cancelled out by population growth.”
Much of OPT’s research concerns the development of Ecological Footprinting, a technique used to measure the ecologically sustainable bioproductivity of Earth and calculate by how much populations are overshooting sustainable levels of renewable resource consumption. When used to measure the carrying capacity of individual countries it is a ‘broad brush’ treatment and a snapshot picture.
Says OptiPop:
“Population estimates can be raised by incorporating realistic expectations of improvements in environmental technology, and by the capacity of some nations to live by international trade.
Nations which ignore the question of what populations their country can sustain on a warming planet and in a post-fossil fuel world do so at high risk to their citizens and to others.”
OptiPop notes that “the widely used Kaya formula, first presented to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990, describes emissions as a product of four variables:
- population size
- consumption levels
- efficiency of carbon
- energy use
Yet, notes OptiPop, “policies to tackle climate change, by contrast, almost universally ignore population: it is seen is too sensitive and controversial.”
“Global population growth by 2050 is equivalent in emissions terms to the arrival on the planet of nearly two more America”, notes OptiPop.
How do you like those choices?
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