Big Numbers : Consumption and Population

The rapid increase in people’s use of the productive capacity of the biosphere is shown here. The late 1980’s saw us consuming more than the world’s biocapacity could provide. In a mirror image, the populations of many supporting organisms are declining, making them less able to cope with or expanding footprint. According to the WWF Living Planet report, we are already 30% above the planet’s biological capacity- likely to be an underestimate considering their calculations excluded aspects of consumption that did not have regenerative capacity. But, as the nef report The Consumption Explosion puts it, the average per capita levels of consumption in developing countries have changed little over many decades. “In rich countries, however, we are each consuming vastly more, yet with little or nothing to show for it in terms of greater life satisfaction.”   

So what is to be done?
Well, that depends on which camp you fall into really. The debate is extremely polarised. On the one hand there are the likes of the Optimum Population Trust saying that there are just too many people on this planet. On the other, you’ve got development activists– rightly frightened by the prospect of neo-colonial population control measures – saying it’s all about the over-consumption of those living in rich countries. As is often the case when debates are polarised, the evidence suggests that this framing – where it is either population or consumption – is a false dichotomy and actually unhelpful if our goal is about living well and within environmental limits. Let me take you through the numbers.

Starting with population…
The world population is currently around 6.7 billion. Some expect this to increase exponentially, like bacteria, until resource constraints kick in. When resources become a limiting factor and waste concentration rises, the bacterial growth phase plateaus, followed by collapse with the depletion of resources. Concerned that, like bacteria, human population might be headed for a similar demise some have started to ask what human population our world’s resources can sustain. While this question is legitimate, it is also misleading in our current circumstances (and we’re leaving aside for the moment the fact that we don’t really know the answer and that it could be completely unpalatable). It is misleading because, unlike bacteria, we are not in a fixed-capacity test tube but, rather, through our actions can impact on resource availability in quite dramatic ways  It is true that we do not have infinite resources, but we can make more or less of what we’ve got.

Consumption vs. Population
So we’ve established that human populations and bacterial populations are not quite the same thing, which is a bit of a relief. We have the ability to manage our resources, and our technology is ever-progressing. Our economic system is geared to manage scarcity, acting as the middle man. Natural resources are accessed ‘freely’, processed, and then sold to the consumer. The amount of money flowing from consumers dictates how much of a resource is taken.

So let’s look at the figures on population and consumption. The WWF Living Planet report graphed the ecological footprints and population sizes by region in 1961 and 2005. Quite clearly the main driving force for a large ecological footprint is not population (though it is a factor) but consumption.