What is the maximum in numbers that would push the planet to its limit? Many scientists believe that Earth has a carrying capacity of 9 to 10 billion people. One of these scientists, the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, bases his estimate on calculations of available Earth resources.
In addition to the limited availability of fresh water, there are in fact restrictions on the amount of food that the Earth can produce. Even in the case of maximum efficiency, in which all cultivated grains were dedicated to humans for food (instead of cattle, which is an inefficient way of converting plant energy into food energy), there is still a limit. “If everyone agrees to become a vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people” Wilson wrote. (Wilson, 2016)
The main feature of the twentieth century was the unbridled exploitation of nature. The world population rose from 1.65 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000, an increase of almost 4 times. But the growth of the economy occurred at a much higher rate. The emission of greenhouse gases has reached alarming levels and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is the highest in millions of years. According to biologist Joel Cohen, other environmental factors that limit the Earth’s carrying capacity are the nitrogen cycle, the available amounts of phosphorus, and the carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. However, there is a large amount of uncertainty in the impact of all these factors. (Cohen, 1995)
But the most serious is that the destruction of nature continues at a frightening pace in the 21st century. The promise of sustainable development and the green economy has been an illusion. The dematerialization and decarbonization of the economy – the promise of the 4th Industrial Revolution, based on the Internet, cell phones, 3D printers, etc. – did not happen in practice.
Global extraction of natural resources was high between 1970 and 2010, with the pace accelerating in the 2000s. As the “Jevons Paradox” shows, higher energy efficiency and lower material use intensity do not eliminate the fact of global demand use of natural resources.
The Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity report (UNEP, January 2016) shows that global natural resource extraction has increased threefold in the last 40 years. The amount of raw materials extracted from nature rose from 22 billion tons in 1970 to 70 billion tons in 2010. The increase in the use of global materials accelerated rapidly in the 2000s with the growth of emerging economies, especially with the growth of China. Growth in natural resource extraction rose from 7 tons per capita in 1970 to 10 tons per capita in 2010.
World Bank report released in May 2016 predicts that 1.3 billion people will be affected by the floods in the coming decades and the material damage could reach $ 158 trillion. It shows that over the last 30 years there has been a 10-fold increase in the overall cost of disasters. And everything is getting worse, because humanity has already surpassed the Earth’s carrying capacity.
In the last 45 years, the Global Ecological Footprint has surpassed the planet’s biocapacity. Since the early 1970s, the environmental deficit has been steadily rising.
The world had a total biocapacity of 30,14 billion acres globally in 2012, but had an ecological footprint of 49,6 billion acres globally. Therefore, the ecological footprint exceeded biocapacity by 64%. Or put another way, the world was consuming the equivalent of 1.64 planet. Therefore, the world population lives in the red and causes an environmental deficit that grows every year.
The planet Earth is unique. In the long run, you can not use more than one planet without destroying all the heritage accumulated by nature for millions of years. Therefore, it is necessary to decrease from the use of 1.64 planet to 1.0 planet. There are three alternatives: 1) to reduce the consumption pattern of the inhabitants of the globe; 2) reduce the world population; And 3) reduce consumption and population at the same time. The world needs to reverse the increase in entropic metabolic flux, as it is unfeasible to want to continue growing above the carrying capacity and above the planet’s biocapacity.
Undoubtedly, in order to avoid environmental collapse, we must reduce the ecological footprint and to avoid social injustices we must reduce the levels of inequality. The solution can not be unlimited economic growth with increasing extraction of environmental resources. On the contrary, it will be necessary not only the decrease of the world population, but also the decrease of the standard of average consumption of the people, with social equity.
A study published in September 2016 in the journal Current Biology shows that over the past 20 years the world has lost 3.3 million square kilometers, or almost 10 percent, of its wilderness areas, due to human action. ‘Globally important wilderness areas are ignored in conservation policy. Efforts aimed at protecting wilderness areas are failing to keep pace with its loss, international policy must recognize the actions needed to maintain wilderness areas.’ ( Current Biology, 2016)
The scale of human activities has already surpassed the fundamental limits of sustainability. Global warming moves to a temperature above 35,6F (compared to the pre-industrial period), the same level as 115 thousand years ago when sea level was 6 to 9 meters above the current level. Because of all this, humanity needs to get out of the ecological deficit and return to the environmental surplus, decarbonizing the economy and rescuing the natural reserves, for the good of all living beings on Earth, because nature does not depend on people, but people depend on nature. Ecocide will also mean suicide for humanity.