If you were only paying attention to the ravings of pronatalists, you’d be thinking that the plummeting global population numbers are a disaster looming on our horizon. Others, like some scientists from Flinders University, who published their findings in the journal Environmental Research Letters, argue that, actually, maybe that’s not so bad since, by their calculations, humanity blew past our population limit a long time ago.
The study tracks global population and resource use over centuries and finds that the balance between the growth of the human population and the planet’s ability to support that growth was thrown out of whack sometime in the mid-20th century. Before the 1950s, more people meant more of everything, which was exactly what a global civilization on the rise needed at the time, as our efforts across a variety of fields collectively created a feedback loop that kept our expansion sustainable.
But then our population kept rising, and our growth efficiency dropped. This sent us into the era we’ve been in for quite some time, something the researchers call a “negative demographic phase.” That’s when “adding more people no longer translates into faster growth,” said study lead author Cory Bradshaw, a Professor of Global Ecology at Flinders, via a press release published on the University’s website.
To put it another way, adding more people stopped making things better; it actually made things harder, according to the research team.
How Full Is Earth, Really? Scientists Say There’s a Limit
Today, the global population sits at around 8.3 billion. It’s still growing, but more slowly. This is due in large part to a global population decline that I’ve covered extensively here on VICE. Population growth is expected to peak between 11.7 and 12.4 billion by the late 2060s or 2070s. After that, there is an expected decline, which has not been seen since the Black Death.
The real problem isn’t the people themselves but all of the resources it takes to maintain our civilizations. Amped up fossil fuel use. Supercharged food production. Massive, highly polluting industrial growth. The researchers say that instead of hitting our resource ceilings, humanity burned through oil and gas to delay the consequences of trying to provide for all the people we were creating. That leaves us where we are today, with a system overwhelmed with cracks, ready to break at any moment.
By their numbers, the researchers estimate that while the population is expected to top out at around 11 or 12 billion, the actual number to sustain a global population where people can live comfortably without overloading the planet is probably closer to 2.5 billion.
Obviously, that’s a number we have severely overshot and will continue to build on that lead for the foreseeable future.