Tag Archives: population

Population Control

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The jury is out on whether the global population will reach 10 billion though there seems little doubt that our planet cannot sustain the current population, never mind 10 billion, with a Western life style.  Maybe some of you saw Stephen Emmott’s show ‘Ten Billion’ at London’s Royal Court Theatre last year; I didn’t but you can read his book of the same title.  As you will probably have guessed from the title, he thinks we are headed for a global population of 10 billion and that radical social and political action is needed because science and technology cannot avoid the impended disaster.  Erle C. Ellis does not believe that overpopulation is problem because he subscribes to Ester Boserup’s theory that population growth drives land productivity.  He suggested in the New York Times last week (13th September 2013) that we have transformed ecosystems to sustain ourselves in the past and will continue do so.

This idea could be extended to suggest that the human society or population is self-controlling that has parallels with the Gaia principle that the planet is self-regulating system in which organisms co-evolve with their environment.  The UN low-fertility model offers some evidence of self-regulation of the human population being to operate because it predicts the global population reaching a maximum of 8.34bn in 2050 and declining to 6.75bn by 2100.  At those levels engineering solutions could probably manage the rest and avert disaster.  Danny Dorling in his book ‘Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It’ provides further evidence by pointing out that the global average family size has never been so small with the norm being less than one child per woman for more than half the planet and immigration to wealthier countries leading to further declines in birth rates.  If the UN low fertility model is right then perhaps we will be able to avoid overpopulation but  scientists and engineers will still need to redouble their efforts to provide sustainable goods and services.  Progress is being made but mainly through incremental improvements that many of us take for granted perhaps in part due to our ignorance of science and engineering or at least of the advances in living standards that it are being delivered to billions of people who previously did not access to the internet, mobile phones and medicines.

Sources:

‘Overpopulation is not problem’ by Erle C. Ellis in the New York Times on September 13, 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-not-the-problem.html?_r=0)

‘Crowded Planet’ by Clive Cookson in the Financial Times on July 13/14, 2013 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a7e5ba20-e7e4-11e2-9aad-00144feabdc0.html

‘Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It’ by Danny Dorling, published by Constable http://10billion.dannydorling.org/

’10 Billion’ by Stephen Emmott published by Penguin http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141976327,00.html

‘Damn the cynics and embrace the positive’ by Luke Johnson in the Financial Times on August 14th, 2013 http://www.ft.com/management/luke-johnson or http://www.ft.com/management/luke-johnson

Extraordinary technical intelligence

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In his book ‘A History of the World’, Andrew Marr identifies a recurring process in the development of societies, from an agricultural revolution that releases enough people from food production in the countryside to enable basic manufacturing in town and cities, through an industrial revolutions leading to more sophisticated manufacturing and a large, rapid rise in the standards of living.  This process happened first in Britain during the 18th and 19th century, in the US during the 19th and 20th century and then more quickly in Japan, Korea and Taiwan in the second half of the 20th century.  It is happening now and even faster in China with the same ‘grim working conditions in the factories, the raucous enjoyment of plenty by the winners in the cities and a certain recklessness about pollution’ to quote Andrew Marr [Marr, A., A History of the World, MacMillan, 2012].  It is starting in India and Africa might be next, though in the Financial Times on Friday 22nd March, 2013 Chandran Nair argues that we should reverse the flow from the countryside to the cities if we want to achieve a sustainable society.  This might just be possible in Africa, probably not in India and China seems set to follow the well-beaten path to urban industrialisation.

What comes next in the process?  Perhaps a loss of interest in manufacturing industry, followed by over-spending by individuals and governments, economic recession or collapse and stagnation of growth.  Andrew Marr suggests that the wealth based on manufacturing derives from ‘mankind’s extraordinary technical intelligence’ and that there is ‘a long lag in advancing our political and social intelligence’.  The stale-mate at the heart of US politics and the failure of successive UK governments to avert a multi-dip economic recession would suggest the need to advance our political intelligence.  In the meantime we might lose our technical intelligence if don’t train more graduates in technology [see my post on Financial crisis, 27th March, 2013].

Population crunch

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The current growth trends suggest that the global population will increase by a billion in the next few decades, with perhaps 500 million additional people in Africa and the same number in Asia [see http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf%5D.  Another observable trend is urbanisation.  Thus, taking these together it is not unreasonable to expect most of the population growth to occur in cities.  The typical size of cities in Africa is 0.5 million people and so we might expect to see 1000 new cities in Africa and perhaps around 500 in Asia where the average size is 1 million.

The challenge for engineers is to provide an acceptable quality of life in these cities.  This involves providing a built environment, food, energy, transport and health care using scientific advances in novel materials, information communication technology, biosciences, electronics and photonics.

Can it be done? Probably, but it will require a higher level of innovation than is the norm at the moment, otherwise the population crunch might take many forms.