What 11 Billion People Mean for Water Scarcity

[Buster's Uncle]

What 11 Billion People Mean for Water Scarcity
LiveScience.com
By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer  11 hours ago






Editor's note: By the end of this century, Earth may be home to 11 billion people, the United Nations has estimated, earlier than previously expected. As part of a week-long series, LiveScience is exploring what reaching this population milestone might mean for our planet, from our ability to feed that many people to our impact on the other species that call Earth home to our efforts to land on other planets. Check back here each day for the next installment.

After 14 years of drought, Lake Powell is less than half full.

Water flows into Lake Powell, nestled between Utah and Arizona, from high in the Rocky Mountains via the Colorado River. More than 30 million people in seven states depend on the mighty Colorado for water to grow crops, fuel power plants and keep cities such as Las Vegas alive. But this year, the worst drought in a century has slowed the flow to a trickle.

In August, the federal Bureau of Reclamation cut, by 9 percent, the amount of water people in the southwestern United States could draw from Lake Powell. As states and counties squabble over their allotment of water in the coming years, hydroelectric plants (including the one on the Hoover Dam) could idle, and farmers are bracing for reduced crop production.

In western Colorado, water is fed to farms through a network of ditches. Because water is allocated based on seniority, some of the newest farmers saw their water turned off in July, before the end of harvest, said Kate Greenberg, the Western organizer for the National Young Farmers Coalition, a group that supports young and independent farmers. Greenberg is also part of a working group looking for agricultural solutions to water shortages along the Colorado River.

While small farms managed to keep going by using private water supplies, some of the alfalfa farmers have been hard-hit, Greenberg said. Alfalfa requires a plentiful, steady supply of water, and is one of the most prevalent cash crops in Colorado, she said.

"If you have an alfalfa crop, it's ideal to get three cuttings a year, but in a dry year like this year, a lot of farmers have gotten one," Greenberg told LiveScience. "They get a third of their crop that they can bring to harvest."

The water woes plaguing the Southwest foreshadow a worldwide problem to come. Already, 2.7 billion people globally face at least some water scarcity, according to a 2012 study detailed in the journal PLOS ONE. Fights over water rights are causing political conflicts and instability in such places as the Nile valley and the Indian subcontinent. As population sizes rise, those conflicts will get more intense, according to a report by the National Intelligence Council, which advises the director of national intelligence for the United States about national security issues.

And the latest population models predict that 11 billion people will live on Earth by 2100, according to a United Nations report released last summer. Given that the existing population is already taxing water supplies in many regions, how will the planet provide for all the new people who will be here next century?



An irrigation system sprays water on a cornfield.


"Water is the new oil," said Bill Davies, a plant biologist at the Sustainable Agriculture Center at Lancaster University in England. "People will be scrambling for water."

To provide for the planet, it's critical to understand the available water supply by creating detailed maps of where water is scarce or abundant, and improving water infrastructure, experts say. Making agriculture more efficient is also key. But even those measures may not be enough to provide for everybody. The global economy also needs to account for the true costs of water so that water-demanding products are made in water-rich areas and imported into more parched regions.


Measuring a finite resource

Right now, nobody even knows how much water is really in the ground. There are estimates at the global or the regional level — for instance, Californians pump about 14.5 billion gallons (54.9 billion liters) of groundwater a year, according to the National Groundwater Association (NGA).

But an individual farmer or people drawing from private wells may not know how much water is in their well until it runs dry or becomes contaminated with arsenic or nitrogen. In the United States, there are about 15.9 million water wells, and about 500,000 new wells are drilled every year for residential purposes, according to the NGA.

In most parts of the world (including much of the United States), individual well usage isn't metered, and anyone can pump groundwater without notifying an authority. Few places measure agricultural water usage.

Many places also rely on distant locales for their water sources, making sensible conservation policies tricky to enact on a local level. For example the Tigris River flows from Turkey to Iraq, so ensuring Iraq's supply requires conservation from Turkey — a political problem that requires international negotiations.

Because groundwater is the single biggest thing that moves around on the Earth's surface, new satellite systems can detect changes in Earth's gravity due to groundwater depletion. But because measurements rely on distant satellites in space, they have relatively poor spatial resolution, said David Maidment, a hydrologist at the University of Texas at Austin.



What 11 Billion People Mean for Water Scarcity


"It's a big regional measure. You can't say, 'This farmer here is stealing the water,'" Maidment told LiveScience.

Maidment and his colleagues are creating a way for local government, cities, states and countries around the world to share their water data. The goal is to get a detailed picture of the world's freshwater resources. Once that happens, officials will be able to decide how to allocate resources efficiently, he said.


Water-sparing plants

Of course, using more water efficiently also means not squandering it, particularly through wasteful agricultural practices.

Agriculture uses about 70 percent of the freshwater on the planet, said Giulio Boccaletti, managing director of the Global Freshwater Program at the Nature Conservancy.

Flood irrigation, a practice in which farmers drench fields with water from hoses or other sources, creates runoff that carries pesticides into local rivers and often out of the local watershed, Boccaletti told LiveScience. Other water evaporates into the atmosphere and is then carried away to distant parts of the globe.

To stem those wasteful processes, farmers would need to cover crops with plastic to prevent evaporation and use drip irrigation to target water directly to a plant's roots.

Conversion to drip irrigation is happening, albeit slowly. In the United States, the National Resources Conservation Service offsets some costs of implementing water-sparing irrigation. However, many farmers don't know about these programs, and installing drip irrigation requires placing irrigation tape underground, which is labor-intensive and costly. This method may not work with crops in which tilling could frequently cut the underground infrastructure, Greenberg said. Only a fraction of farm acreage in Colorado is drip irrigated, although Greenberg said she sees more and more sprinkler systems replacing wasteful flood-irrigation systems.



The thick white band ringing Lake Mead’s shoreline shows the drop in water levels


In another solution, seawater or treated wastewater could replace freshwater for crops, Davies said.

Currently, the United States treats 70 percent of its wastewater but uses only about 4 percent, mostly for applications such as farming, according to a study in the September issue of the journal of Agricultural Water Management. But that number could increase as water becomes scarcer, the study cautioned. And Australia, the driest continent, has already commissioned several desalination plants along its eastern coastline.   

Drought-prone regions will also have to shift crop production, relying on less-thirsty plants for agriculture, Davies said.


Tweaking plant growth

But changing how water is used may not be sufficient: Many climate-change models predict that some regions, such as the Southwest, may face more frequent droughts. Even today, water scarcity is a threat farmers routinely face. To provide for 11 billion people, farmers will have to know how to manipulate plants' own systems for dealing with drought.

For instance, slightly water-stressed plants redirect their sugar formation into seeds and fruits at the expense of leaves and branches, which lose water easily. So, for example, farmers who grow wheat or grapes could increase their yield by actually watering their crops less at key times in the growing season, Davies said.

And cities could rely on massive glass towers to grow their food. Those futuristic buildings would lose no water to evaporation, would recycle nutrients from fertilizer and crops, and could rely, in part, on treated wastewater from a city, Davies said. Indoor farming is starting to transition from sci-fi to reality. At one of the first commercial vertical farms, a Singapore-based company called Sky Greens grows about a half-ton of bok choy and cabbage in three-story greenhouse towers.


Good news, bad news

In theory, there could be enough water for everyone on the planet. The trick is to use it intelligently and get it to the people in most dire need, Boccaletti said.

Ideally, water-rich areas, such as Argentina, should export items that require lots of water to produce (such as beef), while parched areas should devote their efforts to more water-sparing products, said Nico Grove, a researcher at the Institute for Infrastructure Economics and Management in Germany. Beef — which requires roughly 4,000 gallons (15,000 liters) of water for every 2.2 lbs. (1 kilogram) produced, according to the United Nations' UN-Water program — could be produced in the Amazon River Basin, the largest watershed in the world. In contrast, drier regions, such as the Middle East — which, from 2002 to 2009, pumped enough groundwater from the ground to fill the Dead Sea, according to a 2013 study in the journal Water Resources Research — could harvest fruits from drought-resistant crops such as xerophyte plants, cactus-related plants that are water-sparing.

For this water-transfer idea to work, an index of global water usage is needed, Grove said. One way to do this is by measuring virtual water, or how much water went into the production of an item. Using that metric in the economy could help countries shift their manufacturing and agricultural priorities to keep their production in line with their water resources. Some regions, such as the Middle East, could wind up importing most of their food based on this metric, he said.

But improving the water situation takes money, political will and good governance. The richest countries may be able to spend their way out of water shortages, Boccaletti said, but the places that need water the most, such as sub-Saharan Africa, are least equipped to fix the problem. Those regions are caught in a bind: They need cheap, safe water to grow economically, but they lack the money to create new infrastructure — such as reservoirs, canals and dams — that would help them get that water, he said.

"Water is nature's currency for the entire economy," Boccaletti said. "Economic growth depends on us getting water for the right purposes."

People who rely on the Colorado River are facing that problem now. A June 2013 study in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society suggests that the low flows will worsen in the future. To protect the resource, everyone who relies on the river must agree on a new way to allocate its waters, Greenberg said.

Politicians, conservation groups and grassroots organizations have proposed several ideas, from far-fetched schemes, such as moving cellophane-wrapped icebergs to the coasts or diverting water from the Mississippi River, to politically unpopular solutions, such as decommissioning water-based power plants and limiting population growth.

Greenberg said that improving crop efficiency and creating positive incentives for farmers to save water are key. One option is water leases, in which farmers, anticipating a dry year, could temporarily fallow their land and lease their water to municipalities that need it. The laws should be changed as well, she said. Currently, the legal regime that governs water use for the Colorado River States, the "Laws of the Rivers," make water a use-it-or-lose it commodity, in which farmers risk losing water rights if they use less. Those rules discourage water conservation, she said.

But only time will tell whether measures like these will be enough, and whether people and governments will be willing to act.


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[Buster's Uncle]

What 11 Billion People Mean for Food Security
LiveScience.com
By Rachael Rettner, Senior Writer  November 20, 2013 7:31 AM



Editor's note: By the end of this century, Earth may be home to 11 billion people, the United Nations has estimated, earlier than previously expected. As part of a week-long series, LiveScience is exploring what reaching this population milestone might mean for our planet, from our ability to feed that many people to our impact on the other species that call Earth home to our efforts to land on other planets. Check back here  each day for the next installment.

Beetles, scorpions and other insects may not be found on most restaurant menus — at least in the Western world — but they may need to find a place in human diets, if society is to feed the world's booming population.

At least that's one solution, albeit an unconventional one, offered up in a 200-page-plus report released in May by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, in which the group outlined the potential of edible insects to help alleviate food insecurity in the present and future.

"To meet the food and nutrition challenges of today — there are nearly 1 billion chronically hungry people worldwide — and tomorrow, what we eat and how we produce it needs to be re-evaluated," the report reads. "We need to find new ways of growing food."

Although eating insects may sound like a strange prospect to some people, such broad-minded thinking may be necessary at a time when human population growth shows no signs of slowing down.

The world's population is projected to hit 11 billion by 2100, and exactly how the planet will feed this growing population is one of the biggest questions society faces in the coming years, experts say. The new 2100 population estimate, released in a new U.N. report in June, is 800 million more people than previously predicted by that time. Much of the increase is due to birthrates in Africa not falling as quickly as expected.

However, the world's future food security is not a simple matter of producing more food. Rather, food security relies upon a number of intertwining factors, including population size, climate change, food production, food utilization (for things like animal feed and biofuels) and prices, experts say. Humans also have to pay close attention to their use of the Earth's resources, or risk making the situation worse, according to the World Resource Institute, a nonprofit organization that aims to protect the Earth for current and future generations. 

Experts agree the planet can definitely produce enough food for 11 billion people, but whether humans can do it sustainably, and whether consumers will ultimately be able to afford that food, are not guarantees. Feeding the growing population will likely require a number of different strategies — from creating new crop varieties and reducing food waste to, yes, eating insects — with efforts from governments, farmers, the private sector and consumers themselves.

"The world's facing a great balancing act," said Craig Hanson, director of the People & Ecosystems Program at WRI. "On the one hand, the world needs to feed more people," Hanson said. "At the same time, you want agriculture to continue to advance economic and social development. And we've got to reduce agriculture's impact on the environment." There's no easy way to meet all of those demands, Hanson added.


Challenges

To feed just 9 billion people (the estimated population in 2050) would require a 60 percent increase in the number of food calories available for human consumption, according to WRI, based in Washington, D.C. When taking into account food needed to feed livestock, the world needs to increase crop production by 103 percent, or 6,000 trillion calories per year, according to WRI, which released a series of reports this year about the world's food security future.

One obstacle to increasing food production will be climate change, which is predicted to reduce crop yields in certain parts of the world. A 2009 study published in the journal Science found that, in 2100, regions in the tropics and subtropics are very likely to experience unprecedentedly warm temperatures during the growing season, reducing crop yields in the tropics by 20 to 40 percent. About 3 billion people, or nearly half the world's population, live in the tropics and subtropics, and the population in these regions is growing faster than anywhere else, the researchers said.

Extreme weather events, such as heavy rains and flooding, as well as drastic changes in weather in a short period will also pose challenges for crop production, said Walter Falcon, deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University.

Falcon pointed out that while U.S. agriculture was affected by drought in 2012 — the most extensive drought since the 1950s — farmers had to contend with the opposite, heavy rains, this year. Rains can prevent farmers from planting their crops at the optimal time, or prevent them from planting altogether in certain areas that are flooded, said Falcon, who owns a farm in Iowa that was hit by the drought.

Changes to the food supply — which can occur when crop production is reduced by extreme weather events or when countries designate a portion of food crops to be turned into fuel, like the United States does with 40 percent of its non-exported corn crop — can push up food prices and affect people's ability to afford food. Using corn to produce ethanol has caused corn prices to increase, Falcon said.

In the midst of last year's drought, corn prices rose 50 percent, to $8 a bushel. Because corn is also used for animal feed, an increase in corn prices can affect the cost of other foods. "Corn is kind of a linchpin commodity," Falcon said. Most experts don't think the United States will increase the amount of corn that goes to ethanol in the near future, but over the course of the century, that could change, Falcon said.


Improving trade cooperation

To continue to feed a growing population in light of the food shortages that are likely to occur with climate change, global crop production in the future will have to be much more coordinated than it is today, said Jason Clay, an expert in natural resources management at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

"We're going to have to work to make sure that we have a global food system that takes care of everybody," Clay said. Because extreme weather events may cause crop yields to be destroyed in certain parts of the world in a given year, such a system should be able to shift food from areas that have plenty to those that have less, Clay said.

Falcon agreed. Currently, certain restrictions on trade exist that may prove problematic in the future, such as when countries ban exports if their crop production is down. The idea that each country should be self-sufficient in food production is not the answer, Falcon said.

"In a world of lots of [climate] variation, there is a lot of work to be done in getting trade flows straightened out," Falcon said.


Reduce food waste

Another strategy to help ensure food security in a world with so many hungry mouths to feed is to simply reduce food waste. One out of every four calories that's produced for human consumption today is lost or wasted, according to WRI. (Food loss refers to food that spoils, spills, etc., before it reaches the consumer, while food waste refers to food that is discarded by the consumer, either when it is still edible, or after it spoils due to negligence, according to WRI.) The average American household loses $1,600 a year on wasted food, Hanson said.

Some 56 percent of global food loss and waste occurs in the developed world — particularly in North America and Oceania, where about 1,500 calories are lost or wasted per person per day, WRI reported. In developed countries, the majority of food is wasted at the consumption stage, whereas in developing countries, most food loss occurs during production, handling and storage.

A number of changes could reduce food loss and waste around the world. For example, better storage facilities on farms in Africa — and even putting harvested crops in plastic storage bags — would reduce the amount of food that falls victim to pests there, Hanson said.

And using simple plastic crates — instead of bags and sacks — to transport food to market can reduce food damage, such as bruising and smashing, that would otherwise cause goods to be inedible. Introducing plastic crates to farmers in a town in Afghanistan — a $60,000 project sponsored by the nonprofit international development organization CNFA — reduced tomato losses from 50 percent to 5 percent, according to WRI.

At home, Americans can reduce the amount of food they throw away, perhaps by eating leftovers, or not preparing more food than they'll need for a given meal, Hanson said.

Americans also commonly have misperceptions about the meaning of labels with dates on foods, and may throw away food before it has really "gone bad," according to a WRI report. These labels, which typically read "sell-by," "best if used by" or "use-by," refer to the quality or flavor of the food, but not to food safety (whether the food would cause someone to be sick). "So while food that has passed its 'sell-by' date might be less desirable than newly purchased food, it is often still entirely safe to eat," WRI reported. Governments may be able to help by creating guidelines on what types of labels should appear on packages, and then explaining to consumers what the labels mean, according to WRI.


Eat differently

Even with less wasted food, the world could not support 11 billion people who eat the way Americans do today, said Jamais Cascio, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif. Feeding 11 billion people would require a different diet, which may involve eating less meat, or consumers growing more of their own food, Cascio said.

Beef, in particular, is a very unsustainable food to eat, Cascio said. "If we get away from thinking that feeding 11 billion people means giving them all Big Macs and steak sandwiches, then we're at a better starting point," Cascio said. According to an analysis by Cascio, the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the production of cheeseburgers in the United States each year is about equal to the greenhouse gas emissions from 6.5 million to 19.6 million SUVs over a year (There are about 16 million SUVs on U.S. roads, Cascio said.)

Scientists have been working on developing cultured meat, or meat grown in a lab, Cascio said. Earlier this year, researchers in the Netherlands showcased their lab-grown burger, and allowed a taste test. However, right now, the cost is exorbitant (a single burger costs $325,000), and it does not taste exactly like meat (taste-testers said the burger was dry). But with future research, the price is likely to come down, and the product's taste could improve, Cascio said.

And don't forget the insects. Beetles, wasps, grasshoppers and other insects are very efficient at converting the food they eat into body mass, take up very little space and emit fewer greenhouse gases than livestock, according to the U.N.'s FAO report. Although eating insects comes with an "ick factor" for many Westerners, bugs are a part of the diet of about 2 billion people worldwide, according to the report.


Grow differently

Farmers could also focus on growing crops that provide the most calories while using the fewest resources, said Clay, of the WWF. Bananas and plantains are examples of crops that provide a lot of calories compared with the resources it takes to grow them, Clay said.For instance, 1 kilogram of bananas (2.2 lbs.) contains about 1,000 calories, and uses about 500 to 790 liters of water to grow. On the other hand, producing 1,000 calories of beef takes about 5,133 liters of water. (One kilogram of beef contains about 3,000 calories and requires about 15,400 liters of water to produce.)

In addition, crop production in certain parts of the world is not very efficient, Clay said. Efforts should be made to improve crop production in those areas, using the foods that are already grown and eaten by the people there, Clay said. Some native crops — such as pigeon peas and pulses in South Asia, and cowpeas and millet in Africa — have not yet benefited from plant-breeding techniques that could improve productivity, he said.

Innovations from scientists to come up with hardier crops, either through genetic engineering or traditional crop-breeding techniques, may also help protect against crop losses in the future due to extreme weather conditions, said Tim Thomas, an economist at the Washington, D.C.-based International Food Policy Research Institute, an international nonprofit organization that aims to find sustainable solutions for ending world hunger and poverty.

"You could picture developing varieties that are resilient to more than one shock," Thomas said, referring to varying weather and climate conditions, such as rains, flooding and heat.

Such a strategy would be similar to the one employed in the green revolution, in which research and development was used to increase crop production worldwide from the 1940s to 1970s.But this time, humans will have to work with the land they have, rather than bringing new land into production, Thomas said. Improving crop varieties will help use land more efficiently, he said.

"We need a new green revolution," Thomas said.


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[Buster's Uncle]

What 11 Billion People Mean for Climate Change
LiveScience.com
By Denise Chow, Staff Writer  November 22, 2013 8:40 AM






Editor's note: By the end of this century, Earth may be home to 11 billion people, the United Nations has estimated, earlier than previously expected. As part of a week-long series, LiveScience is exploring what reaching this population milestone might mean for our planet, from our ability to feed that many people to our impact on the other species that call Earth home to our efforts to land on other planets. Check back here each day for the next installment.

On the western coast of Alaska, nestled against the Bering Sea, residents of the remote village of Newtok may soon become the country's first climate refugees.

Like many Alaskan villages, Newtok sits atop permanently frozen soil called permafrost. In recent years, however, warming oceans and milder surface temperatures have melted the icy subsoil, causing the ground beneath Newtok to erode and sink. In 2007, the village already sat below sea level, and studies warned that the subarctic outpost could be completely washed away within a decade.

Now, despite political and financial hurdles, the community is looking to relocate its roughly 350 residents. With climate change rapidly altering human ecosystems around the globe, Newtok may not be alone in its fight against warming temperatures, melting ice and rising seas.

For the roughly 7.2 billion people who live on Earth today, the impacts of a changing climate may be taking different forms, but the consequences are already being felt across the globe — from severe monsoons in Southeast Asia, to the increasing pace of melting ice at the poles, to hotter-than-average temperatures throughout the contiguous United States.

Over the course of the next century, if the levels of greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, and nations have failed to address the myriad challenges of climate change, scientists say Earth's fragile ecosystem could be in serious jeopardy. But, what if in those same 100 years, nearly 4 billion people are added to the world's population? Could this type of rapid growth overwhelm the carrying capacity of our "Pale Blue Dot" and our ability to mitigate and cope with climate change?

A recent United Nations analysis of world population trends indicates global population growth shows no signs of slowing, with current projections estimating a staggering 11 billion people could inhabit the planet by the year 2100, faster growth than previously anticipated. The majority of this surge in population is likely to occur in sub-Saharan Africa, with the population of Nigeria expected to surpass that of theUnited States before 2050, according to the statistical analysis.

The new report also suggests India will eventually become the world's largest country, matching China's estimated population of 1.45 billion people in 2028, and continuing to swell beyond that point, even as China's population begins to decrease.

Some scientists say rapid population growth could be catastrophic for the planet, because it will likely lead to overcrowding in cities, add stress to Earth's already dwindling resources, and worsen the effects of climate change. But within the scientific community, a debate is brewing, and there is little consensus about how — or even if — population growth is linked to global warming.

Assessing the impact of population growth on climate change has been tricky. Most scientists agree that humans are to blame for most of the planet's warmingsince 1950, but precisely which events were aggravated by human activities (and how much) are unknown.

"It's a question that's really hard to answer, because climate science is not to the point of being able to identify specific impacts, or changes that have occurred so far, as being directly caused by climate change," said Amy Snover, co-director of the Climate Impacts Group and a researcher at the Center for Science in the Earth System at the University of Washington in Seattle. "What we can do is look at the many things that have happened recently that are similar, and what we expect to happen, and see that these things are problematic and will certainly raise concerns for the future."

Furthermore, scientists on both sides of the equation — those who study demographics and those who study climate science — do not necessarily agree on how, or even if, population growth and climate change are connected.


A growing debate

Increasing the number of people on the planet does not, in itself, intensify climate change, said David Satterthwaite, a senior fellow studying climate change adaptation and human settlements at the International Institute for Environment and Development, in the United Kingdom. Rather, changes in consumption are the key drivers of global warming, he explained.

"Higher consumption is what drives anthropogenic climate change," Satterthwaite told LiveScience. "The high-consumption lifestyles of the richest half-billion people scare me much more than the growth in population in low-income nations."



Estimated dates of coming climate extremes under the RCP8.5 model


This is because developing nations, where the U.N. estimates most of the next century's surge in population will occur, have much smaller carbon footprints than developed countries, such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

"If you think of population as the driving force, it makes sense to look at the fast-growing nations and say: 'We have to slow that population growth,'" Satterthwaite said. "But most of the nations with the fastest growing populations have far lower per capita greenhouse gas emissions."

During the Industrial Revolution, which began in the mid-1700s in England and later spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases soared as manufacturing and transportation boomed. The technologies used during the Industrial Revolution were also inefficient and largely based on coal and fossil fuels, which emit large amounts of greenhouse gases that linger in the atmosphere.

This flurry of activity has taken a toll on the planet. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, human activities have increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide by a third, according to NASA.

Now, as developing countries seek their own industrial revolution, there are concerns that too much damage has already been done.

"There are opinions that we're already past a sustainable population now, in terms of being able to provide a high quality of life for every citizen on the planet," said David Griggs, a climatologist and director of the Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body jointly established by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization to assess the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of climate change.

Others say improvements in technology will yield better crop production and distribution, enabling cities and towns to accommodate more people, he added. But more is not necessarily better.

"I'm not a fan of thinking about this as a tipping point — there isn't a point where we just go over the edge," said Griggs, who was previously the deputy chief scientist of the United Kingdom's national weather service. "It's a slow deterioration, and the more people there are, the more challenging it is for those people to have their basic needs met."


Population versus consumption

To understand the potential environmental impacts, it is important to consider both population growth and trends in consumption, said Robert Engelman, president of the Worldwatch Institute, an environment and sustainability think tank based in Washington, D.C.

"Some people will say one matters more than the other, but they multiply each other," Engelman said. "It would be dangerous to ignore population as a major factor."

In 2008, China, the United States, the European Union (excluding Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), India, the Russian Federation, Japan and Canada were among the top emitters of carbon dioxide. Combined, these nations contributed more than 70 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes. In contrast, the rest of the world represented only 28 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.

"In some of the poorest countries in the world, emissions are very low, but the idea is we want these countries to develop," Engelman said. "As we've seen happen in India and China as they've industrialized, countries that are populous and poor can experience a rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions. We can't just consider how much the average person is emitting in these populous countries now. We have to think about what will be happening to the people in these countries over the next 70 years."

Beginning in the 1960s, China embarked on a rapid path toward industrialization. By the end of the century, the country had secured its place as a manufacturing powerhouse and a veritable economic superpower. But, China's speedy industrialization has come at an environmental cost.



Flooding in the village of Newtok, Alaska, after a storm in 2005.


Within 20 years, China more than tripled its emissions of carbon dioxide — from 2.46 million tons of carbon dioxide in 1990 to 8.29 million tons in 2010, according to United Nations estimates.

Since 2000, China's energy-related greenhouse gas emissions have increased at an average rate of more than 10 percent each year, according to the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, which is designed to identify "scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic post-2012 international policy architecture for global climate change."


Adding politics to the mix

But, developing climate policies has been a challenging, and an often fruitless, process.

Jerry Karnas, the Center for Biological Diversity's population campaign director in Miami, is all too familiar with these political pitfalls, particularly in addressing the impact of population growth on climate change.

In 2008, Karnas was appointed to a statewide commission to help design a plan for Florida to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to 80 percent of 1990 levels by the year 2050. The final report was more than 1,000 pages and comprehensively tackled every sector of Florida's economy, except population.

"Population was the only thing not on the table," Karnas said. "We had to take growth as a given, and not challenge the notion that for Florida to succeed, it had to grow."

One of the reasons the state government accepts rapid population growth has to do with the way Florida's economy is set up, Karnas said.

"Florida is a sales tax state. We have no income tax, but much of the state is also funded by the documentary stamp tax," he said. "Documentary stamps are real estate transactions, so every time a real estate transaction occurs, it gets taxed, and that goes into the state coffer. So, the two major funding sources for Florida are dependent on increasing the population numbers in the state."

While the population of the United States is not expected to leap significantly in the next century, diminishing natural resources are already adding stress to the country's food and water supplies, and the availability of future energy resources.

In regions of the world where vast population growth is projected, such as sub-Saharan Africa, the issue of dwindling natural resources will likely be magnified.


Feeding a hungry planet

If the global population increases by 3 billion people, food production will also need to rise to meet these growing demands. Finding adequate agricultural land, however, will be a challenge, as soil erosion and more frequent droughts related to climate change render larger tracts of land unusable, Griggs, the Monash University climatologist, said.

"If we look at the next 50 years, we'd need to grow more food than we have in the whole of human history to date to feed those 9 billion people," Griggs said. "But since we have no more agricultural land, we'll have to produce all this food on the same land we're producing food on at the moment."

In particular, southern Asia, western Asia and northern Africa have virtually no spare land available to expand agricultural practices, according to the 2013 Statistical Yearbook of the Food and Agricultural Organization for the United Nations, published in June.

More people on Earth also means more competition for water, Griggs added. Currently, one of the main uses for water is in agriculture, and ensuring that populations have access to clean drinking water will be another significant challenge, he said, since global warming may cause arid regions of the planet to become even more parched.

In the United States, the Bureau of Reclamation released a report on the status of the Colorado River Basin in December 2012. The study concluded that over the next 50 years, water supply from the Colorado River will be insufficient to meet the demands of its adjacent states, including Arizona, New Mexico and California.

"The U.S. government was effectively saying, there will be no way to completely satisfy the water needs of the population that is currently projected in that part of the country," Engelman said.

Worldwide, the situation is not much better. A 2011 report on the state of the world's land and water resources, released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, established that more than 40 percent of the world's rural population lives in water-scarce regions.


Ways to mitigate the impacts

While the impact of population growth on climate change remains a topic of debate, experts agree that finding ways to mitigate the effects of climate change will be critical for the sustainability of the planet.

For one, nations need to address climate change issues now, in order to make communities more resilient in the future, said Declan Conway, a professor of water resources and climate change at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. This includes investing in renewable energy alternatives, such as technologies to efficiently harness solar and wind energy, he added.

As part of his work at the Worldwatch Institute, Engelman also promotes the idea of carbon taxes, which would introduce fees based on the carbon content of fuels. While these types of resource taxes have been suggested as an incentivized way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they remain politically divisive.

Still, others see positive changes on the horizon.

"Twenty years ago, climate change wasn't seen as an issue at all, but since then, technology has improved rapidly," Griggs said. "We don't have to hang around and wait for something bad to happen. There's no question that we can deal with all of these climate change issues now, if we want to. The real issue is: Will we? Will there be the political will and the leadership to take on these things?"

As for whether he remains optimistic overall, Griggs is a little more hesitant. "I'm schizophrenic about it," he said. "[At] times, I look at what's happening in the world and the lack of progress, and I say, we're stuffed. On my good days, I'm optimistic and I see us moving in a direction that will allow us to solve these problems."


http://news.yahoo.com/11-billion-people-mean-climate-change-134039454.html

[Lord Avalon]

If people to go war over water, will we still reach 11GP?  Also, I heard a poll found that 41% of Americans believe the end times are coming (srsly? WTF?!?! ), so why would they care about saving the planet/humanity if they believe they're going to be raptured away?

[Buster's Uncle]

Dunno.  We're not in an age of reason, are we?