How Does Population Affect Sustainability - Assignment Example

How Does Population Affect Sustainability? Introduction Sustainable development is referred to as the process through which people meet their needs and raise the quality of their lives while safeguarding the future generation capacity to meet their needs. For most individuals in the society, sustainable life is a high standard of living. High-Income levels and access to technology are some of the factors that are used to determine the standards of living. Intrinsic to the model of sustainability is the equity principle. To be able to attain economic, environmental and social goals such as healthcare, education, and economic opportunity, effective utilization of resources is necessary. This article will examine the effect of population growth on sustainability. The rapid increase in population increase affects all aspects of national and global development objectives. The increase in population affects production, consumption, income distribution, employment, social protection, and poverty (Reid, 2013). Population increase complicates the efforts to ensure universal access to education, health, sanitation, water, housing, food, water and energy. In particular, it puts pressure on the earth’s natural resources, which includes; land, water, forests and earth’s atmosphere, which ultimately offers significant environmental challenge and climate change. The dynamics of population increase not only affects the critical development objectives, it also influences the social and environment changes. Other than the challenges, population increase presents, it also presents significant opportunities for more sustainable development. For instance, population reduction, or fall in fertility levels leads to a continual focus on people in the working age range, which would enable nations to reap from the demographic bonus and jumpstart their development initiatives. The population increase leads to migration. People tend to migrate from areas of high population to low population. Currently, over a billion people migrate to run away from conflicts, poverty among other reasons. These people adapt to economic and environmental shocks to enhance their health, income, and education (United Nations Development Programme, 2014). Migration alone has led to the rise in development, especially in the developing nations. The annual remittances to the developing nations are $500 Billion. The Remittances are triple, the amount of Official Development Assistance from developed markets. These remittances have the potential of enhancing savings from the migration costs. Urbanization is one of the factors that form a powerful driver of sustainable development (Vaughn, 2011). A high population density offers the government an opportunity to deliver essential services and infrastructure in urban centers at a lower cost per capita. Sustainable and livable cities possess a knock-on impact in providing the rural population a greater access to health care and education. Moreover, the movement of people to urban centers can generate significant savings in the transportation and housing sectors (Holdsworth et al., 2013). Regardless of this, the advantages derived from demographic transitions, which involves migration and urbanization does not materialize immediately. The policies that are in place determine whether an increase in population poses an opportunity or a challenge. At any level of development, the effect of human development is a function of the size of the population. The other factors of human development are income, land, and access to resources and services (Stephenson, Newman, & Mayhew, 2010). The rapid growth of people in the developed nations has a strong effect on the sustainability of the global environment. Approximately 20% of the people living in the world’s richest nations are responsible for about 86% of the sum private consumption. And, the poorest 20%, are only responsible for 1.3% of private consumption. The richest one-fifth of the world’s richest countries accounts for 53% of the total carbon dioxide emissions and the poorest one-fifth account for only 3% (Hawken, Lovins, & Lovins, 2013). A child born in the developed countries adds more pollution in his or her life than 30-50 children born in the developing nations. As the standards of living are increasing, the consequences of population in the environment are being amplified (Mazur, 2013). People are aspiring to live a better life, and they tend to shift the blame of the effects of their consumption and pollution to others. However, other than shifting blame, people should take part in the debate about the effect of population increase in the environment. People should recognize and acknowledge the effect of their actions; this would enable them to address the results of their consumption activities (United Nations Development Programme, 2014). The most prevalent impact of the increase in population is usually local, such as, the disappearance of forests, desertification and soil erosion. Some consequences are relatively obvious, particularly in relation to the main renewable resources that human beings rely on, such as water, air and land. Almost 5 to 7 million hectares of agricultural land are lost annually owing to the rapid increase in population. The increase in population accelerates urbanization and degradation of land. The rise in population has resulted in one-sixth of the world’s agricultural lands, which is nearly 2 Billion hectares to be degraded (Brown, 2012). Another 20 million hectares comprising of woodlands and forests are lost yearly. Water is a limited or finite resource, the water that is there now, is not more than it was over 2000 years ago, when the global population was less than 3% of the current population. While the global population has almost tripled, the withdrawal of water has increased by over six times. Currently, the scarcity of water is described as less than 1,000 cubic meters per person per annum, about 458 million people in the globe face water shortages (Reid, 2013). It is estimated that by 2025, around 3 Billion people will be affected for almost part or the entire year by critical shortages of water. The less obvious consequences such phenomenon like accumulation of carbon dioxide, pollution of water and land resources, the reduction of fish catches, and the inappropriate dumping of industrial and hazardous waste products (Scarano, 2014). This issue is intricate owing to the lack of appropriate data, which assists researchers to the proper measurement of what is occurring and determine the trends. The relative youth of the environmental sciences and disciplines, which necessitate expertise across various research fields affects adequate measurement of the effects of population increase (Brown, 2012). The population increase and the continued rise in the levels of scarcity of renewable fresh water resource supplies threaten the welfare and health of humans and biodiversity. Close to 1.1Billion people was not able to access to clean water in 1994, and another 2.8 Billion people lacked proper access to adequate sanitation services. Over 250 million people suffer from preventable waterborne diseases per annum, out of which, 10 million children perish. The less advantaged, or poor societies in this world are the most affected by the polluted rivers and fumes, which enhanced because they cannot protect themselves (Brown, 2012). Air pollution causes an approximate 2.7 million deaths per annum, out of which 2.2 Million people die from indoor pollution, with 80% of this death, emanating from rural poor people in the developing world. The effect of population increase has pushed people into unsustainable practices, for instance, the razing and burning of tropical forests so as to plant crops or over-crop. The effects of human activity results in the subsequent depletion of the fragile agricultural land and the excess pumping of ground water (Prasad & Power, 2010). Currently, experts worry the continued increase in unsustainable practice results in further increase in Carbon Dioxide (CO2) concentrations. The concentration of CO2 is already over 28% higher than the industrial revolution era (Reid, 2013). The increase CO2 results in atmospheric temperature and water increase, which hampers agricultural production. The rise in temperature results in melting of glacier ice caps, resulting in a rise in water levels, and depletion of arable land. For the last 50 years, the production of food was ahead of the increasing demand. In a world where 65% or two-thirds of the population relies on maize, rice and wheat as their staple food, 80 nations cannot generate enough food to feed their population (Stark & Jakubek, 2011). FAO has indicated that the production of food will have to double in order to offer food to 7.8 Billion people by 2025. The population growth rate has been slowing down in recent times. The population growth rate has been reducing since its peak in 1962 and 1963, at 2.2% per annum (Prasad & Power, 2010). The estimated population growth rate in 2009 was 1.1% per annum. The population growth rate has declined from 88 Million in 1988, to 75 Million in 2006. Since then the population has reduced to 74.2 Million in 2009, and it is estimated that it will reduced further to 41 Million per year in 2050 (Stark & Jakubek, 2011). The slowdown in population growth offers a partial solution for the challenges facing the globe. The slower population increase offers countries more time to prepare for the inevitable. The smaller population increase presents the government with more time to build schools, lay water pipes, and dig sewers (Stark & Jakubek, 2011). The population expanded from 1 Billion in 1800 to 7 Billion in 2012, it is expected that the population would reach between 9 to 12 Billion people by the end of 21st century. This would place additional pressure on the natural resources, making it difficult to use the depleting resources to sustain the needs to the population (Stark & Jakubek, 2011). The rise in population present significant challenges, such as the provision of basic health care, reproductive health care, family planning, and education are all essential elements to alleviate poverty and ensure sustainable population growth. All these are crucial to the long-term environmental and economic sustainability (Hawken, Lovins, & Lovins, 2013). Above all, to ensure sustainability people must make changes in the manner that is considerate to the environment and how they live it. Particularly, the high waste lifestyle, high consumption, of people who live in the developed countries continue to affect lives of persons who live in the developing and emerging countries (Stark & Jakubek, 2011). If the world continues with its unsustainable living endeavors, the future population would have no much to live for as much of it would have been wasted by the current population. The rise in population presents both opportunities and challenges for sustainable development. All this depends on the policies that are inexistent; therefore, appropriate policies must be in place to ensure sustainability in utilization of resources (Reid, 2013). The current world population is 7.2 Billion people, and it is estimated that an additional 2 Billion people would added by 2025 (Stark & Jakubek, 2011). Now, taking into account what will happen with the estimated population growth. The population in 2025 would use up to 70% of the available fresh water, and this does not consider the needs of the people who would not get adequate supply of water. If the consumption rose universally to the present developed-nations levels, 90% of the fresh water would be utilized (Reid, 2013). The effects on the ecosystem would be devastating; rivers, springs and other wetlands, as well as ground water sources would run dry; estuaries and lakes where fish stocks breed would irreversibly be destroyed; the list of its effects is long. In 2000, over 508 Million people lived in 31 water-scarce or water-stretched nations, and it is projected that by 2025, this number would have risen to 4.2 Billion people (Brown, 2012). This person would be living in countries, which cannot meet the basic requirements of 50 Liters per day. Water is not only the indispensable human need, without it, people die. It also forms the basis for food security, human health and economic development (Scarano, 2014). One of the impacts of population growth can be witnessed in urban areas. As the rural settings become less able to sustain people, they move to urban centers. Approximately, 160,000 rural residents migrate to urban areas daily (Reid, 2013). The result of this is a densely populated, sprawling urban centers under a greater economic, social and environmental stress. The effects of the rural to urban migration range from health impacts to social friction such as xenophobia and crime. Unless the rise in population is discussed and talk about head on, sustainable development would never be achieved (Stark & Jakubek, 2011). Conclusion The rapid growth of the population is continuously pushing the consequences of every level of consumption to a much greater plateau, and a decrease in human consumption can be overwhelmed by population increase. The plain truth is acting on both, simultaneously and consistently, is fundamental to the strategic and long-term sustainability of the environment. The effect of the rise in the population is extremely powerful to ignore for a considerable amount of time. Bibliography Brown, L. R. 2012. Outgrowing the Earth: The food security challenge in an age of falling water tables and rising temperatures. New York: Taylor & Francis. Hawken, P., Lovins, A. B., & Lovins, L. H. 2013. Natural capitalism: The next industrial revolution. London, UK: Routledge. Holdsworth, C., Finney, N., Marshall, A., & Norman, P. 2013. Population and society. 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