Eight billion people and counting: can planet Earth sustain its population?
According to a projection by the United Nations, planet Earth will welcome its eight billionth inhabitant this Tuesday. While some experts worry that this is too many people, most say the bigger problem is the overconsumption of resources by the wealthiest.
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"The milestone is an occasion to celebrate diversity and advancements while considering humanity's shared responsibility for the planet," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.
The UN attributes the growth to human development, with people living longer thanks to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine.
It is also the result of higher fertility rates, particularly in the world's poorest countries -- most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa -- putting their development goals at risk.
The sheer number of human lives is not a cause for fear
"Some express concerns that our world is overpopulated," said United Nations Population Fund chief Natalia Kanem. "I am here to say clearly that the sheer number of human lives is not a cause for fear."
Environmental impacts
However, it is clear that the population growth has magnified the environmental impacts of economic development.
Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Populations told AFP the question of how many people Earth can support has two sides: natural limits and human choices.
Our choices result in humans consuming far more biological resources, such as forests and land, than the planet can regenerate each year.
The overconsumption of fossil fuels, for example, leads to more carbon dioxide emissions, responsible for global warming.
The UN climate Conference of the Parties (COP27) held in Egypt, now in its second week, has been dominated by calls from developing countries that rich polluters pay for the harm their emissions have already caused, known as "loss and damage".
"Africa contributes less than three percent of the pollution responsible for climate change, but it's most severely impacted by the ensuing crisis," Kenya's President William Ruto said last week.
Kenya is being ravaged by the worst drought in 40 years, as is the wider Horn of Africa region, threatening millions with starvation. The UN has warned that Somalia is on the brink of a famine for the second time in just over a decade.
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"Multiple African countries are projected to face compounding risks from: reduced food production across crops, livestock and fisheries; increasing heat-related mortality; heat-related loss of labour productivity; and flooding from sea level rise," scientists with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have warned.
Emerging economies around the globe face similar challenges as they are being hammered by climate-induced floods, heatwaves or droughts.
Scientists agree that as climate change worsens, threats to human health and well-being will also increase.
Nearly 70 percent of all deaths worldwide are from diseases that could be made worse by global warming, according to a report this year from the IPCC.
"We are stupid. We lacked foresight. We are greedy. We don't use the information we have. That's where the choices and the problems lie," said Cohen.
He rejects the idea that humans are a curse on the planet, saying people should be given better choices.
Decline in fertility rates
The current population is more than three times higher than the 2.5 billion global headcount in 1950.
However, after a peak in the early 1960s, the world's population growth rate has decelerated dramatically, Rachel Snow of the UN Population Fund told AFP.
Annual growth has fallen from a high of 2.1 percent between 1962 and 1965 to below 1 percent in 2020.
That could potentially fall further to around 0.5 percent by 2050 due to a continued decline in fertility rates, the United Nations projects.
The UN expects the population to continue growing to about 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, peaking around 10.4 billion in the 2080s.
(With newswires)
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