Population, consumption and unsustainable growth: the most important factors in climate change and ecological degradation?

Many celebrated the day in mid-November 2022 that the global human population reached 8 billion.

Many celebrated the day in mid-November 2022 that the global human population reached 8 billion. Or “8 billion strong” according to the United Nations: “A milestone in human development” with “infinite possibilities for people and planet”. Yeah, got us! It is remarkable, certainly. It means the number of people alive has doubled since the early 1970s, just 50 years ago! largely because people are living longer thanks to advances in public health, hygiene and nutrition.

This is great for individuals who benefit from longer and healthier lives. But great for the Earth?  Interestingly, it was also in the early 1970s when humanity’s demands on the planet began to exceed what nature’s ecosystems are capable of regenerating. Our ‘ecological overshoot. This means that we use more resources and materials per year than the Earth can renew, such as fish stocks or soil nutrients, as well as produce more waste than can be naturally dealt with,  like you know, our old friend carbon dioxide. Up until then, we’d kept within the limits of what the biosphere could provide. Taking no more than what was available.

Today, we use a year’s worth of resources by the summer (Earth Overshoot Day in 2022 was 28 July). We need 1.7 Earths every year to meet our demands. And so, year after year, the debt builds up and the biosphere is further depleted. It can’t last. But it’s more complex than simply having too many people on the planet. It’s how much those people consume, and patterns of consumption across the world are uneven. Countries with a higher income per individual, on average, have higher per capita resource demands and accompanying emissions. These countries also tend to have lower birth rates and ageing populations, so a booming population isn’t really the issue.

This graphic shows the projected Overshoot Days per country for 2023. As you can see, if we all lived like the average Qatari, we’d exceed the planet’s yearly capacity for renewal on February 10th; if we lived like Jamaicans, we’d just about stay within the Earth’s limits.     Hand in hand with an increasing number of people, growing production and consumption is resulting in ecological collapse. Yet rightly  countries continue to industrialize to increase standards of living. But perhaps we need to rethink an economic system which is built on relentless growth. Unchecked growth is not something you find in a healthy ecosystem.

Like our current economic model, the “pro growth demographic dogma” (as described in 2020 by former UN Population Division director Joseph Chamie) also promises prosperity and progress, but in reality generates money, power and influence for a minority. What is becoming clearer is that it is this minority who are the problem. Environmental impact and demand on resources are unequal around the world, not because of where you live but because of your financial constraint and social status.

Recent reports have found, for example, that people on low incomes in richer countries are less polluting (especially in terms of carbon emissions) than rich people in poor countries. Consumption is tied to economic prosperity and nationality is irrelevant. Indeed this feels like a paradigm shift, ecological impact is not about developed versus developing countries. Dividing the world up by nation states as we do is not getting us anywhere. Instead, we need to rethink how we frame the problem and find the solutions to match: it’s about wealth, it’s about inequality, and it’s about the economic system that encourages this.

Edited by: Muhammad Abdullahi Ibrahim

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