Front Burner - The impact of 8 billion people on the planet

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

On Tuesday, the human population reached eight billion people, according to an estimate by the United Nations. While population growth has slowed in recent years, it still took about a decade to add the last billion people. Meanwhile, humankind is continuing to do irreparable harm to the planet, including climate change, accelerated species extinction and ecosystem collapse. We’re also straining the planet’s ability to sustain this many people, as revealed by water scarcity for billions of people — all while people in more affluent countries are responsible for far more than their fair share of the harm. Today we’re joined by Céline Delacroix, adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Health Sciences and the Director of the FP/Earth project with the Population Institute, to discuss how it got to this point, what it means for people and the planet, and where we go from here.

Happy Holidays! I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic. I'd like you to set a goal to drive key learning for your people in 2025. I want you to connect with Humber CPL to design a custom training solution that accelerates your team's performance and engagement. Humber works with you to hone industry-specific upskilling, enhance your leadership, and drive results. Flexible learning delivery formats are tailored to your unique needs. Adapt, evolve, and excel. To learn more, go to humber.ca slash cpl. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. This week, the human species reached a new milestone.

There are now 8 billion people on Earth, according to UN estimates. The UN projects there'll be 9 billion people by around 2037 and 10 billion by 2058. This continued population growth has contributed to a whole host of issues. There's climate change, environmental degradation, and accelerated species extinction. And there's also the strain the global population puts on food and water security.

Today, 40% of people on Earth live in regions facing water scarcity. So, what does an 8 billion person planet look like? Celine Delacroix is here. She's an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa's School of Health Sciences and the director of the FP Earth Project with the Population Institute. Celine, hi. Thank you so much for coming on to FrontBurner. Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It took people right up until the Industrial Revolution, around 1807, to reach a population of 1 billion. Now we're at 8 billion.

And how has population growth, just purely in terms of numbers, changed in the last 200 years? Well, as we know, it's been a truly exponential growth. It's been a unique situation of really seeing these numbers grow extremely fast. We're now at 8 billion officially, extremely fast. We're now at 8 billion officially, symbolically perhaps as well. And we're about to continue growing for the next decade. So if we put the numbers in perspective, for example, in 1950, we were at 2.5 billion humans. So for a lot of the people listening in, the world has changed enormously in terms of human numbers just during their lifetimes. It really took off in the 20th century, reaching three billion in 1960 and putting on nearly a billion each decade after that. It reached seven billion in 2011.

What are the factors that have the greatest impact on how quickly that's changed? Why? Well, there's many of them, but there is, for example, great advances in public health. We've managed to make enormous progress with vaccination, with access to clean water, etc. And then there's also the industrial revolution, the green revolution, our ability to really increase our food production significantly and to feed a growing population. So there's been a number of factors, variables, that are all associated with the human ingenuity and the human progress that have enabled us to grow so fast.

More than half the projected population growth is likely to take place in just eight countries, right? The Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Republic of Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines. And how do you expect population growth to change in the coming decades? Yeah, so it's interesting. The world is becoming demographically polarised. There's some parts of the world that still experience rapid population growth. As the world's population hits the 8 billion mark, India is bursting at the seams. With their already crammed transport and overcrowded public spaces, cities like the capital New Delhi and the financial hub Mumbai are struggling

to cope with surging numbers of new residents. This is Lagos, the most populated city in Africa. It's the financial capital of Nigeria, the continent's largest economy. Earlier this year, the state expanded its population control policy, granting access to free contraceptives. At least 95 million people here live below the poverty line. And as families keep growing, there are more mouths to be fed. And others that experience kind of the opposite, with the declining populations. The UN anticipates that China's population

will actually start shrinking from next year. In 2021, the country's fertility rate of 1.16 was below the 2.1 OECD standard for a stable population, one of the lowest in the world. I love children. I love the children in my life. It just it wasn't something I wanted to do myself. It wasn't something I wanted to do myself. Decisions like hers, one of many experts say, contributing to the U.S.'s stalled population growth, increasing by just 0.1% in the past year, a record low. So this will have very significant implications, different implications in different parts of the world.

And just numbers alone, should we expect the same level of rapid population growth in the coming years? So the projections are that we will grow, the UN projections are that we will reach a peak in 2086 at 10.4 billion humans. So that is, if we're today at 8 billions, that's 2.4 billion humans, additional humans, by 2086. So remember, in 1950, we were only 2.5 billion humans globally. So this increase is really enormous if we put it in perspective like that. And then after that, it's estimated that population will plateau and that by 2100 will be at around 10.3 billion.

So we're envisaging that population will continue to grow significantly in the next decades, but that it will stabilize itself towards the second part of the 21st century. What's the reasoning for why it might stabilize itself? Well, a population growth rate is slowing down, and that is global. We know that everywhere on the planet, even in these countries where there is rapid population growth, the population growth rate is slowing. So we are all tending towards a lower fertility. And this is associated with the fact that socioeconomic status is rising, that gender equity is improving in many parts of the world.

But there is really a tendency for population levels to stabilize in the long term. When I was reading those list of countries, one thing that stood out to me is that China is not on the list. Yes, so population dynamics evolve over long periods of time. When fertility levels change and evolve, this has long-term implications. So China's current fertility levels aren't specifically high. It's just that it's a very large population today numerically, but its age structure, which is really the driving force for population growth, isn't very young. So the age structure is really one of the key elements that drives population growth.

The success of humans and the rapid increase in population has, of course, come with a cost, starting with climate change, right? And we know we've done compounding damage to the atmosphere and, as a consequence, damaged many ecosystems and living things. Even pandemics are understood to be tied to some of the pressures we put on the environment, deforestation, urbanization. on the environment, deforestation, urbanization. When you think of the impacts humans have had on the planet, I wonder if you could just elaborate on some of that for me. And can we link that directly to population? Yes. So our environmental impact as a species is determined by a number of variables. And it's a bit of a simplification, but I'll give you an equation that kind of summarizes it. And it's that impact, environmental impact,

equals population, and that is the size of our population, whether there is one individual, a hundred, a million, or a billion, times affluence, which is how do we consume? And that really refers to this crisis of overconsumption that we experience today and that is so much linked to climate change and environmental degradation. So population times affluence times T, which is technology. And that really is what technology do we use to enable our lifestyles? Is it renewable energies or is it coal that will have a very different impact? And this really

shows that population is a variable in generating environmental impact. And this variable is not linear. Not every population has the same environmental impact. Tell me more about that, this idea that not everyone has the same environmental impact. Yes, so certain population groups have a much lower environmental impact because they have different lifestyles than us. They are not consuming as much as we might do. And I'm using us as a reference because we rank among the biggest, those who have the biggest environmental footprint, who have the biggest impact. But it's important to keep in mind that different population groups have different types of impact. For example, there were studies that showed that one American person would emit as much carbon emissions

as 250 Ethiopian persons, for example. So this is often referred to as a crisis of inequity because it shows how different our lifestyles are around the globe and how much certain populations have access to wealth and others not. So it's important to keep that idea of redistribution of resources and perhaps also addressing this crisis of overconsumption in relation to this question of population dynamics. Maybe we could talk a little bit about your work, which focuses on reproductive health,

autonomy as part of what can contribute to reducing the growth of the population. Tell me where you see opportunity to address that issue. Yeah, so the FB Earth Project stands for F FP, which is Family Planning and Earth Project. And we're really trying to advance the discussion on the linkage between removing the barriers to family planning, population dynamics and environmental sustainability. What I see that's the most interesting, fascinating aspect of this discussion here around population dynamics is that we have a crisis of reproductive health and rights around the globe. This category of rights, which is the right of every person to choose to truly have the means to choose how many children they want to have. This category of rights is always under threat, it's underfunded, and it's also under acknowledged. And this results in really dire statistics. We know that 121 million women around the world have unintended pregnancies every year. This means that half of all the pregnancies that take place are unintended. There's 225 million women who have an unmet need for contraception, for example.

So if we put these statistics in perspective in relation to this opportunity that we might have to influence fertility levels just by enforcing reproductive health and rights, empowering women in particular. We really have an opportunity here that we should, I think, capitalize on. This idea that we're talking about here that some people, I guess in this case people in the developing world, should reproduce less is extremely controversial, right? Like some believe it's a step towards eugenics.

And do you encounter these arguments being used in ways that promote racism or even ideas that brush up against things like eugenics? Well, yes, this is a sensitive discussion also because of its history. The population policies in the past have targeted specific population groups and people of color in particular. And so this is associated with questions of race and it has a dark history which has a backlash. race and it has a dark history which has a backlash. Now today I think that when we're addressing this issue we have to first and foremost keep in mind that what we talked about earlier which is that population is a variable in generating environmental impact. So this is purely a fact, this is science and next whether this opens the door to racism is something that

we have to keep in mind and address but that shouldn't prevent us from addressing this topic and one of the ways I'm dealing with this is that I'm currently conducting a survey, I'm conducting a study with a researcher at the University of Ghana to really document the voices of sub-Saharan Africans on this issue, to document how they perceive this relation between population dynamics, environmental sustainability. And it's very important to really engage in this kind of exercises to ensure that there isn't a crisis of representation where the people who are the most concerned

and who will likely be the most affected by environmental degradation, climate change, and even, I should say, by the impact of a rapidly growing population, that these people have a voice and can really say and can tell us what they think about it. Happy Holidays. I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic. And I'd like you to set a goal for 2025 to sharpen your skills and get promoted. Register for a professional designation, micro-credential, or certificate with Humber's continuous professional learning and ignite your career journey this new year. Our experts deliver accelerated learning from resilience-based leadership to electric vehicle fundamentals and learning options that work with

your ambitious lifestyle. Adapt, evolve, and excel. Go to humber.ca slash cpl to get started. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing.

In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. We've discussed, and to come back to what you were talking about earlier, the inequality playing between different parts of the world. You know, the most affluent people living with a level of comfort and luxury that's in stark contrast to the suffering and struggle experienced by billions of people

on the other end of the spectrum. Maybe this is just a pie in the sky question, but is there a possibility that reducing inequality and basically doing a better job of sharing the world's resources could somehow increase the planet's ability to support

a growing human population. Maybe put another way, do we have enough resources and we're just plundering them and not doing a very good job sharing them? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I would say that, yes, to a certain extent, we definitely have the ability to make a much better job at redistribution resources and ensuring that everybody has a better quality of life but currently no we do not have enough resources in the sense that resources in the sense that many scholars and researchers have studied the carrying capacity of the planet and have found that many estimates have been given, and they range from one to six billion, roughly. So this idea that if we could redistribute resources and that we would be able to live within the planet's limits, I think today is utopian in the sense that we haven't

managed to achieve this. We're very far from achieving this. How do you imagine this playing out if we continue to test the limits of Earth's carrying capacity? Well, it's not a very positive picture at all. We know that there are planetary tipping points that could be reached and that would bring irreversible damage. We know that there are various limits that we are crossing and that these have effects that are very difficult to predict. We're basically entering entering into a new ecological, a new geological age that is, that can be characterized as being much more uncertain than the one we have evolved in for the last 12,000 years, which was the Holocene. And that was a very stable geological period, which enabled us as a species to thrive and grow. Today, we're in this new geological era called the Anthropocene, and we know that this is

a much more unstable world. And so we have to reflect on these questions of overconsumption, but also of the Earth's carrying capacity. How many can we be and what quality of life does everyone deserve to have but also what about nature what kind of planet do we envisage is it a planet that would be dominated by the human where the human species really controls all of the planet and where there is no more space for other species. And I think it's important to have that discussion as well.

How much space do we leave for the rest of the planet and for the ecosystems of which we are truly a part? Celine, thank you so much for this. This is really interesting. Thank you. Thank you so much for this. This is really interesting. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.