Impact of population growth on climate change

message from United Nations Secretary-General Mr Ban Ki -moon recently after the world’s population ballooned by over one billion people to reach seven billion in just more than a decade.
This is no doubt a brilliant message, pregnant with hope. Its major weakness is its wide distance from reality.

While we celebrate the gift of life, rapid population growth will put immense pressure on the world’s already inadequate resource distribution, including the environment.
Mr Ban, being who he is, and presiding over a vast international body should know better that singular community actions taken, especially in Africa can easily be and have been reduced to one “big” rubble by some indifferent office vote at the UN Headquarters somewhere very far.

He has more than enough examples to choose from. Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, Somalia, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, it is a very long list where lives and livelihoods have been sacrificed at the expedience of the elixir of Western-modelled democracy.
Zimbabwe has sometimes been unsuccessfully smuggled into the UN agenda. While the UN is celebrating current population patterns as “7 billion possibilities”, this may in fact represent, for Africa, an expansion into poverty, hunger, famine, war and disease.

Africa’s newborns are being ushered into this vicious cycle of disaster. They are coming into a world with less and less, versus the need for more food and more of everything.
Surely, the continent cannot afford to celebrate this chaos. The growth in the world population may actually mean 7 billion problems.
Too many people cause too much damage. If unmatched with corresponding economic activity, rapid population growth could pile pressure on most social amenities such as the provision of clean drinking water, sanitation, food production, access to uncrowded shelter etc.

The environment is not spared, as the risk of industrial pollution and forest clearing expands.
There is always a problem with surplus human beings on the earth. Imagine what it means for the population of a country to double, say, in 20 years.
In order to keep living standards at the present weak levels, a nation like Zimbabwe would have to double its food supplies.

The amount of power, the capacity of the transport system must also double. Everything must double.
These are the negative factors feeding anguish into the environmental and climate change challenges, heavy on the world’s shoulders today, says Harare climate change specialist Dr Leonard Unganai.

“The world is so dependent on fossil fuels for energy. It is the same fossil fuels that have been blamed for the climate change challenge the world is faced with. Without alternative energy sources any increase in the human population means an increase in energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions.
“This will make efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change a bit harder. Without careful planning and matching advances in scientific development a huge population can pose all sorts of problems for the world’s economy and environment.”

Social scientist Mr Obrian Nyamucherera believes population growth can bolster a country’s productive labour force.
He says it may, however, have a negative impact on public services such as health facilities.

Mr Nyamucherera said population growth must be celebrated with caution, because life was a gift from God.
“We should be mourning when developing nations with less capacity to look after their citizens are leading in population growth because it means you are bringing new people into poverty and hunger.

“So we celebrate with one eye on increasing our capacity to handle the growth,” he said.
Zimbabwe’s population growth has been steady and slightly manageable. Over the past decade the country’s population rose by just over a million people to 12,1 million as at July 2011, according to statistics from CIA World Factbook.

The fastest growth of 4 percent was reported this year, surpassing the more active 1960s and the 1970s, where growth averaged 3 percent.
Population growth actually fell in 2008 and 2006 by 7 percent and 4 percent respectively, mainly due to migration and higher deaths than births per every 1 000 people.
Slower population growth may make the country’s task of looking after its own a bit manageable.

It may also reduce the people’s interference with the natural functioning of the ecosystem.
Dr Unganai said: “I think Zimbabwe has done very well in terms of population control without going to extremes like China where now there is a one family one child policy.

“Awareness and provision of affordable birth control technologies are critical elements to avoid a population explosion. Zimbabwe seems to have done this successfully for large sections of the population, even in religious circles birth control is allowed.”

The country, however, faces the challenge of rapid urbanisation, as this exerts more pressure on a number of facilities including health, sewerage infrastructure, energy and food production systems.
Most of these systems are vulnerable to climate extremes, Dr Unganai said, making urban populations particularly exposed to impacts of climate change such as floods or extreme droughts or even heat waves or cold.

The prospects for the world’s population, if it survives climate change and global warming, are scary, given its continual expansion from a very long time ago.
There were only five million people in the world in 8000 BC. This number grew to 500 million by 1650 AD and to seven billion at present with most of the growth having taken place in the 19th century.

At current growth rates, biologist Dr Paul Ehrlich estimates in his book “The Population Bomb” that the world’s population will hit 60 000 trillion in 900 years’ time.
By then, Dr Ehrlich says “the earth will be full and everything in the universe be converted into people”.