HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN OUR PLANET REALLY SUPPORT ?

"It is not the number of people on the planet that is the issue but the number of consumers and the scale and nature of their consumption," says David Satterthwaite, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. 

According to United Nations predictions the number of population it could reach 9.7 billion people by 2050, and over 11 billion by 2100. But our  current level of knowledge does not allow us to predict whether such a large population is sustainable, simply because it has never happened before.

It is not the number of people on the planet that is the issue but the number of consumers and the scale and nature of their consumption People living in high-income nations must play their part if the world is to sustain a large human population So a world with a human population of 11 billion might put comparatively little extra strain on our planet's resources.

Even if those changes occur, it seems unlikely that our planet could really sustain a population of 11 billion. So Steffen suggests that we should stabilise the global population, hopefully at around nine billion, and then begin a long, slow trend of decreasing population.

Creating a sustainable population is as much about boosting women's rights as it is about reducing consumption of resources The rate of population growth has been slowing since the 1960s and the UN Population Division's world fertility patterns show that, worldwide, fertility per woman has fallen from 4.7 babies in 1970-75 to 2.6 in 2005-10.

In a 2014 study, Bradshaw concluded that if two billion people died tomorrow or if every government adopted controversial fertility policies such as China's recently-ended one-child policy there would still be as many if not more people on the planet by 2100 as there are today.

According to this reasoning, creating a sustainable population is as much about boosting women's rights as it is about reducing consumption of resources.

So if a world population of 11 billion is probably unsustainable, how many people, in theory, could Earth support? In support of this, they point to the problems of climate change, the biodiversity extinction crisis underway, mass ocean pollution, the fact that one billion people are already starving and that another one billion people have nutrient deficiencies.

In the early 20th Century, the global population problem was as much about the fertility of soil as the fertility of women In the early 20th Century, the global population problem was as much about the fertility of soil as the fertility of women.

George Knibbs, in his 1928 book The Shadow of the World's Future, suggested that if global population reached 7.8 billion, there would have to be much more efficient use of its surface.

In the very distant future, technology could lead to much larger sustainable human populations if some people could eventually live off planet Earth.

OPINION

 I believe that overpopulation is indeed a global crisis. This is because as the world gets more populated, the food supply must increase to support the newborns. I think that once the world has reached its limits, the fittest will survive and the developing countries will fail to support their people with food, causing mass starvation all around. Overpopulation also causes less jobs to be available around the globe, and that causes families to struggle hard and live on the streets. So that makes over population the apocalypse of the future.  That is not a problem of outstanding proportions at the present time. It's more visible in the third world countries. But   certainly the methods to control population in some countries has failed and if we don't start to control it now we won't find a solution.

wealthy: having great wealth; rich.
growth: the act or process or a manner of growing; development; gradual increase:

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