The elephant in a Durban room?

Born at 23.58 on Sunday night  31 October 2011 in the crowded Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Medical Centre in Manila in the Philippines Danica Camacho will go through life known as the seven-billionth human to enter life on planet earth. She might, however also become the symbol of the elephant in the room when world leaders meet in Durban later this month for the 17^th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP 17) to discus the international community’s response to climate change.

The exponential growth of the global population has seen a dramatic shrinking of the window of time during which the next billion has been  added to the global total over the past 150 to 200 years. With this goes ever-increasing pressure on the natural resources of the planet, the exploitation of which, with the technology and energy needed to sustain that population is probably by far the biggest contributing factor to harmful emissions and global warming.

Incredibly, however, scrutiny of the agenda for COP 17 does not reveal a single reference to this most basic of all problems facing humankind in its quest of sustainable survival on the planet. Almost without fail all human-linked factors impacting on climate change tie in with the issue of population growth.

It is estimated that at the turn of 19^th century the global human population, after the thousands of years since the emergence of the species, stood at only one billion people. It then took only 118 years until 1922 for the second billion to be added. By the time of Camille Galura’s birth (going from six billion to seven) the period between the billions has shrunk to, in historical perspective, the blink of an eye; 12 years – six billion having been reached in 1999.

Unless something unforeseen, like a major natural or human-induced global disaster happens and the present 1.3%-per-year population growth rate is maintained, the next billionth baby will be born before Camille reaches her teens. She might just have turned 10 in 2021 when it happens.

To what extent this rocketing population curve is interwoven with other human activities besides breeding and impacts on the natural environment, including the emission of climate damaging gas emissions, is well illustrated by what started the acceleration in the first place.

While it took just about all of eternity to reach the figure of the first billion people on earth the growth was put on turbocharge with the advent of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution brought with it machine power in place of manpower creating a much higher and safer standard of living for all, it brought cheap food, efficient energy sources with a chemical industry as an eventual spin-off, bringing better medicines and improved healthcare with much improved life expectancy across the board and better yields on agricultural land.

And, while the going was good, we did not notice or worry too much about the side effects and the  dire long-term implications that all of this brought – most notably air- and water-pollution, deforestation, and many more.

Inconvenient subject

Former United States Vice-President Al Gore will be remembered by history for bringing the dilemmas of dealing with the issue of human-induced climate change  into the open with, among others, the coining of the phrase “an inconvenient truth”.

Probably the most inconvenient and awkward subject of all in this context, and probably the reason why it has largely been evaded thus far, is the question of dealing with (containing?) human population growth.

It is a subject fraught with hazardous and probably even dangerously emotional ethical, moral, religious and practical implications. Looking at some of the implications of an unchecked continuation of population growth, however, poses the question of whether the issue can be avoided for much longer.

For one, mankind might literally be running out of breeding space on the planet. It is calculated by some experts that before the end of this millennium, in just over 880 years, the globe’s population would grow to a density of one per square metre on the dry land surface available on the planet, and the mass of people will equal the mass of the earth in 2 400 years.

It is probably  no longer good enough to put our hope on science fiction predictions of cities under the sea.

To this can be added the escalating crisis developing around finite resources, like fresh water and energy. New technologies, like renewable energy and desalination of water will probably go some way in dealing with these problems, but are unlikely to do the full trick – keeping in mind that some like the storage of renewable energy bring problems of their own such as  the scarcity of rare earth elements.

It also remains an open question whether these technological developments can happen fast enough to forestall the potential for major conflicts over scarce resources – with what is happening in theatres like the Middle and  Near East at present as a case in point.

(Next week we will take a look at directions in which some solutions might be sought.)

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