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Introduction,
Have you ever considered what our beautiful green earth would look like in 50 years? Well if you are well educated you will quite easily be able to answer that question. The air will be polluted, global warming will be destroying the earth, and people will be everywhere you look. The world will be overpopulated to the point where it will have at least tripled our current population. At least, that is the first option, the second is a world where we have truly realised how much of a problem overpopulation is, a world where we stopped having so many children and cut back, a world where we have space instead to living in apartment towers in oversized cities with minimal water and food. Those are the only two likely outcomes for the years to come. How could we prevent this future?
What is overpopulation?
Overpopulation is an undesirable condition in which a species or animal breeds to the point where they start to use up more resources than its environment or planet can provide. This will cause water and food shortages, depletion of ecological and natural resources, and environmental degradation. We are doing precisely that. This is what is happening right now, it’s been on the news, in the paper, and over the internet, and yet we are still doing nothing about it, we are just letting it happen and we are too busy to care. We are killing the environment and the animals in it! Scientists estimate that in the next 50 to 70 years that if we keep reproducing like we are we will reach 50 billion people on Earth. If we don’t start doing something to decrease our population soon we will all be dead along with our planet!
Why does overpopulation exist?
Some might say it doesn’t exist and deny that it’s a problem, but it does exist. Overpopulation exists because we are beating the game of life, a game that was never made to be beaten, and it is causing catastrophic disasters, we are lowing the death and mortality rates with new medical technology and getting higher birth rates and lower death rates, from that we need more room, so we cut down forests and damages the ecosystems and kill the animals inside. Poverty is a major contributor to overpopulation, mothers give birth to more children creating larger families to make up for the high infant mortality rate, however unlike a couple of hundred years ago, much more are surviving, this is happening in developing countries but like Europe after the industrial revolution that population boom is predicted to taper off. Agricultural advancements are also allowing more people to settle in one area because they can farm more food in a field than a hundred years ago. However, the biggest cause of overpopulation is family planning, or lack thereof, having people just go around doing the forbidden dance unprotected can also lead to unwanted surprises.
Why is overpopulation a problem?
Growing advances in technology each day help grow our problem of overpopulation each year by even further lowering death rates and helping the ability to save lives. Overpopulation is such a large problem because of its negative effects on the environment, its animals, and the water, and its help in increasing pollution over the world. However, the main problem with overpopulation is the amount of resources that we take up from our stupidly large population. At the moment, Earth increases by 4.5 newborns every second with the death rates taken into account that number is at 2 every second, that may not sound like much but believe me, that is a huge amount. That is 120 extra people the world has to account for every minute, 7,200 an hour, 172,800 a day, and 1,209,600 a week! That’s 62,899,200 million a year! That is staggeringly high numbers! 50 years ago in 1973, the world population was only 4 billion, half of what it is now! If these rising numbers keep going up were going to reach a crisis very quickly. Whether it’s going to be a food crisis, a global warming crisis, a pollution crisis, or a war for resources. More worrying risks of overpopulation will be the higher risk of disasters, whether it will be nuclear, wars, or natural disasters. The larger the population in the future there will be a much larger large risk of pandemics and epidemics, just like we have seen with COVID-19, but on an even larger scale and likely more dangerous.
What are the environmental consequences of overpopulation?
If we keep breeding like we have been doing over the past couple of years, there will be no environments left on Earth, it will all be ruined, gone, dead. Keeping our environment healthy is very important to not only the Earth but us too, I say this because without our environment on Earth, we would have no food to keep ourselves alive, and we would not have any clean air to breathe because the trees would all be dead, and last of all, we will make all the animals inside said environment extinct. Being overpopulated on our earth would mean the depletion of our natural resources, which would be our food, our oil, the land, the animals, and our lovely fresh air. It would also mean the degradation of our environment, meaning deforestation, and soil erosion. It will help speed up climate change from having more humans than Earth was made to handle, and lastly, overpopulation will also limit our space, we will likely be living in apartments stacked on top of each other in filthy supercities, a lot like the city in Ready Player One. (As shown below)
What are some solutions to the problem and how effective are they?
Finding some possible solutions to overpopulation was surprisingly hard, however, I have been able to find three ideas that are most likely to be effective in our current world situation. First, we have better education for young men and women in college! It is straightforward but it still pays to mention it, some pros of this would be that they can be taught about people who know what they are talking about and can get it ingrained in what not to do and what to do while they are still young, what I am saying is that they should get taught about condoms and birth control. Our second option would be a new Tax or concessions. In our current world, parents of large families are given more money with the more kids they have, this is bad because it is encouraging them to have more babies and contributes to overpopulation. Taxes and concessions could work because instead of getting more money from the Government, they will be Taxed. By doing this people will be discouraged from having more than two children because they will get Taxed and will get a concession from our Government if they have only one child. Taxes and concessions will help discourage having large families and encourage having smaller families. Now saving the best option for last, we have a one-child policy. I think this is the most likely to succeed out of the three solutions because while it may not be the most appealing solution to people, it will help put a large dent into our population and hopefully start solving overpopulation slowly over the years and bring us down to the level of humans at where Earth can provide enough resources to sustain us sustainably which is estimated to be around 2 billion. You can see why this is the most likely option to work in the PMI analysis below.
How could we apply these solutions to fix overpopulation?
For better sex education for our young men and women, we can start by raising the money a Government pays schools for people to come in or teachers to teach it, that way they know what not to do and what to use so they don’t have any unexpected surprises. In terms of Tax benefits and giving out concessions, depending on how many children you have, so if you have more than two children you should pay a new type of extra children Tax to discourage contributing to overpopulation and give benefits to those with only one child who is helping curb overpopulation. That will make people think twice about having large families and helping our unseen problem looking us in the eye. Lastly, we have the one child per family policy. Having only one child per family would be the ideal number because if we have only one child then the world’s population will start to go down and so will the pollution and overcrowding. The ideal When we reach an ideal number of around 2 billion instead of the 8 billion that we are at now. Once we reach around 2 billion we will stop the decrease in the population and start to have larger families again to stay at our perfect number. 2 billion is the perfect number because it is the perfect amount of humans to be sustainable for the earth while having a decent population.
Conclusion,
In conclusion, we need to stop overpopulation before it becomes an even bigger issue and eventually kills us all. Overpopulation is most common because of, new medical advances in technology, mass migration, poverty and lack of family planning. By the year 2086, we are likely to have at least a population of 36 billion and a maximum of 44 billion, we need to take action. We need to put on restrictions on how many children we and other nations can have if we are to combat overpopulation, preferably the one-child policy because it is most likely to work and be most effective. We can solve overpopulation with a one-child policy.
Bibliography,
• CEF
• NY Times
• Environment: Young Peoples Trust
• CEF: Overpopulation: Causes, Effects and Solutions
• Population Media Center: Overpopulation: Cause and Effect
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