What If Experts are Wrong on World Population Growth?

Matthew Martin

Haub, Carl. “What If Experts Are Wrong On World Population Growth?” Yale E360, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 19 Sept. 2011, e360.yale.edu/features/what_if_experts_are_wrong_on_world_population_growth.

  1. Before reading this article, I was familiar with the idea that global populations will continue to grow rapidly due to high birth rates in developing countries, but may begin to fall or stagnate in the future as poorer developing countries become more modernized.

  2.  After reading the article, I have a better understanding of the specifics behind population growth, and the difficulty of slowing population growth in certain areas. The author explains that poor countries don’t have access to many resources that help with family planning; contraceptives, sexual education, employment opportunities/education for women, and many other factors play in to the often extremely high birth rates in poor/developing countries. There are even some countries, like India, where different regions have drastically different growth rates.

  3.  The paper doesn’t spend much time on specific environmental/sustainability consequences, but part of living sustainably is not overpopulating the planet. The more the population grows, the more difficult it will be to provide enough resources for everyone, and increasing amounts of resources will have to be used to provide for the population. The author gives one example of how growing populations in the sub-Saharan region of Africa will have extreme environmental impacts; this region already has trouble finding resources to sustain its current population, and population increase will only exacerbate this problem.

  4.  It is extremely important to consider both the human and environmental impacts of human population growth, as increased population growth can cause some serious problems for sustainability. Though the article provides good information on the mechanics of population growth, an issue I had with this article is that while it poses a very interesting and serious claim in the title, the author does very little to back up or provide any evidence for this claim. The author simply continues to pose a “what if” question without really providing any convincing data or theories for why current projections might be wrong. I would like to see a more detailed article on the subject.