Why exponential growth in human population is unsustainable

For a variety of reasons, not quite. Population is not a contrasting force to consumption but something very close to its parent. Alone, each of us has no significant impact on the planet, even when our collective behavior overwhelms its natural processes. Historically, population has grown fastest when per capita consumption is modest. Later, consumption tends to explode on the base of a population that is large, but it is by then growing more slowly.

Throughout the 19th century, the U. That century of rapid growth helped to make 21st-century America with million people now a consumption behemoth. The same one-two punch of population growth followed by consumption growth is now occurring in China 1. Per capita commercial energy use has been growing so rapidly in both countries or at least it was through on the eve of the economic meltdown that if the trends continue unabated the typical Chinese will outconsume the typical American before , with Indians surpassing Americans by Moreover, because every human being consumes and disposes of multiple natural resources, a birth that does not occur averts consumption impacts in every direction.

A person reducing her carbon footprint, conversely, does not automatically use less water. A wind turbine displaces coal-fired electricity but hardly prevents the depletion of forests now disappearing in the tropics at the rate of one Kentucky-size swath a year or fisheries at current depletion rates facing exhaustion by the middle of the century. But unlike wind turbines, humans reproduce themselves. So every smaller generation means that the multipliers of consumption linked to population also shrink on into the future.

With respect to saving the planet, over a few short years it is hard for smaller families to beat sharp reductions in per capita consumption. Since the early s, however, published calculations have demonstrated that slower population growth over decades yields significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions even in countries where per capita fossil-fuel consumption is modest. Slower population growth that leads to eight billion people in rather than to the currently projected 9.

The subsequent savings in emissions would grow year by year ever afterward—while the billion-plus fewer people would need less land, forest products, water, fish and other foodstuffs. Those improvements still would not be enough on their own to avert significant climate change. If two billion automobiles getting 30 miles per gallon traveled only 5, miles a year instead of 10,, that change would save another billion tons of carbon emissions. So would replacing coal-fired power plants that produce 1.

But without a population that stops growing, comparable technology improvements or lifestyle downshifts will be needed indefinitely to keep greenhouse gas emissions sustainable. The complications that population growth poses to every environmental problem are not to be dismissed. In fact, they are accepted and understood best by the governments of poorer countries, where the impacts of dense and rapidly growing populations are most obvious.

During the past few years, most of the reports that developing countries have filed with the U. Instruments of Policy A commonsense strategy for dealing with rising environmental risk would be to probe every reasonable opportunity for shifting to sustainability as quickly, easily and inexpensively as possible.

No single energy strategy—whether nuclear, efficiency, wind, solar or geothermal—shows much promise on its own for eliminating the release of carbon dioxide into the air. Obstacles such as high up-front costs hamper most of those energy strategies even as part of a collective fix for the climate problem.

No single change in land use will turn soils and plants into net absorbers of heat-trapping gases. But the more obvious reason is the discomfort most of us feel in grappling with the topics of sex, contraception, abortion, immigration and family sizes that differ by ethnicity and income.

What in the population mix is not a hot button? And so critics from left, right and the intellectual center gang up on the handful of environmentalists and other activists who try to get population into national and global discussions.

Yet newly released population data from the U. Even if net immigration ended tomorrow, continuation of that fertility rate would guarantee further growth in U.

Those who do consider population to be a key to the problem typically say little about which policies would spare the planet many more billions of people. Should we restructure tax rates to favor small families? Propagandize the benefits of small families for the planet? Reward family-planning workers for clients they have sterilized? Each of those steps alone or in combination might help bend birthrates downward for a time, but none has proved to affect demographic trends over the long term or, critically, to gain and keep public support.

And how can we reduce consumption? Ideas such as cap-and-trade plans for limiting greenhouse gas emissions and allowing companies to trade emission rights are based on the same principle: raise the price of what harms the environment to reduce consumption of it.

Governments can also eliminate subsidies of polluting behavior, an approach that is more palatable—except to the often powerful interests that benefit from the subsidies. Or governments can subsidize low consumption through tax deductions and credits, but the funds to do so on the needed scale will likely be increasingly scarce.

Moreover, we are tearing the web of life by condemning tens of thousands of non-human species to extinction G. Ceballos et al.

A positive rate of growth will make the damaging effects of the human population to our planet even worse. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to Richard E. Reprints and Permissions. White, R. No myth: Population rise unsustainable.

Nature , Download citation. Published : 20 January Issue Date : 21 January Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. And this is exactly what has transpired. Wiedmann et al. In the — period covered by the study, no country achieved a planned, deliberate economywide decoupling for a sustained length of time.

Claims by the Global North to the contrary conceal the substantial offshoring of its production, and the associated ecological devastation, to the Global South. Recent proposals for ecocidal deep-sea and fantastical exoplanetary mining are an unsurprising consequence of a growth paradigm that refuses to recognize these inconvenient truths. These observations lead us to a natural minimum condition for sustainability: all resource use curves must be simultaneously flatlined and all pollution curves simultaneously extinguished.

It is this resource perspective that allows us to see why EVs may help offset carbon emissions yet remain utterly unsustainable under the limitless growth paradigm.

We have argued that the inextricable link between material consumption and GDP makes the infinite-growth paradigm incompatible with sustaining ecological integrity. Thus, while EVs constitute a partial answer to the climate question, within the current paradigm they will only exacerbate the larger anthropogenic crises connected to unsustainable resource consumption. The real question is this: how do we transition to alternative economic paradigms founded on the reconciliation of equitable human well-being with ecological integrity?

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Chirag Dhara is a climate physicist and a research associate at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. Vandana Singh is a professor of physics at Framingham State University working on transdisciplinary climate pedagogy. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.

See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Industrial era exponential rise in the use of primary and derived physical resources: cropland a , fossil fuels b , freshwater c , metals d , plastic e. Sustainability from a resource perspective: Exponentially rising resource use and pollution a and b are unsustainable.