Admit it—We're Overpopulated!

New research calls into question our ability to both feed humanity and conserve nature

SO OFTEN you hear the argument that our vast population of nearly 8 billion people is not, in and of itself, an environmental problem. Rather, the real issue is overconsumption and pollution caused by affluent people, particularly in western countries. And it is mostly about climate change: the wealthiest 10% of the world is responsible for about half of global carbon emissions.

Certainly, affluent people have a disproportionally greater global impact than poorer people, most of whom, by the way, aspire to become affluent. It would be a huge blessing for the planet if they substantially cut their consumption of energy and natural resources. Even so, one might reasonably assume that rising consumption among the world’s less affluent (a necessity for social justice) would cancel out the benefits.

Globalization allows people who have the financial means to buy products derived from exploiting nature all over the world. Sometimes local people gain from those exploits, and sometimes they are disadvantaged and harmed. However, for most other life on Earth, globalization has been disastrous. Habitat destruction, poaching, overfishing, and spread of invasive species are among the most prominent of horrors.

This week I read a research paper that calls into question our ability to restore wildlife and nature on a large scale without jeopardizing human well-being. Before getting to that, however, I’ll mention some disturbing news that also caught my attention.

Reuters: Millions facing severe hunger in Horn of Africa

The U.N. World Food Programme said that 13 million people across the Horn of Africa face severe hunger, calling for immediate assistance to avoid a repeat of a famine a decade ago that killed hundreds of thousands of people…Between 2010 and 2012, around 250,000 people died of hunger in Somalia, half of them children.

One might blame climate change or inequality in the world’s food distribution system for this dire situation. Nevertheless, an undeniable truth is that humans have overshot the region’s ecological carrying capacity:

The Wilson Center: Population, development, and environment in Ethiopia

Ethiopia's population of 72 million is increasing by 2 million people, or 2.5 percent, each year. As the population increases, more and more land is deforested and over-farmed. Forest coverage has declined from 40 percent 75 years ago to only 3 percent today. People must travel farther and farther to find firewood, the principal fuel, which reduces time spent farming. Without firewood, many resort to burning animal dung, instead of using it to fertilize their depleted soil. Without trees to help hold it in place, the soil erodes from the steep highlands. As a result, many previously habitable areas have now been transformed into dry lands and deserts.

This vicious cycle exacerbates the effects of Ethiopia's droughts, leading to severe and ever more frequent crises. The 2003 famine affected more than 13 million people, and at least 6 million people now suffer from permanent food insecurity. But drought is not entirely to blame: Ethiopia "faces famine when we have a bumper harvest and when we have drought" since the amount of arable land per person is so low (1/2 hectare for 8 people). Ethiopia's population growth compromises its ability to achieve the productivity gains necessary to break the cycle and eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.

Clearly, wealthy nations should help people of Ethiopia and other countries in the Horn of Africa. But they also need to understand that mitigating famine is not going to prevent ecological collapse in the face of local or regional overpopulation.

Neither the Reuters nor the Wilson Center articles mention anything about conditions for other life in the Horn of Africa: its 220 species of mammals, 697 birds, 285 reptiles (a world biodiversity hotspot), 100 fishes, 30 amphibians, and 2,750 endemic plants (found nowhere else). Some of which, if not most, are endangered or declining.

It’s shocking how intelligent people fail to accept that “protecting the environment” means protecting it for all life. There’s a moral deficiency in our culture that allows us to define environmental problems, and calibrate solutions to them, only in terms of human needs and desires. Even the growing concern about loss of global biodiversity is couched in anthropocentric terms.

In recent years, conservation biologists have found that restoring global biodiversity requires dedicating at least 30% if not 50% of the Earth’s surface to the interests and well-being of other life. Protecting half would be an ethical as well as ecological giant step for humanity. This would allow other species to recover their populations, thrive, and follow their natural evolutionary trajectories.

This brings me to that research paper by R.C. Henry, A. Arneth, M. Jung, and others: Global and regional health and food security under strict conservation scenarios. Nature Sustainability (2022). The paper presents persuasive evidence for an insuperable conflict between the scale of humanity today and the conservation of nature:

Under strictly enforced 30% and 50% land protection…we find protection scenarios cause additional human mortality due to diet- and weight-related changes. Low-income regions such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa experience the highest levels of underweight-related mortality, causing an additional 200,000 deaths related to malnutrition in these regions alone. High-income regions, by contrast, are less affected by protection measures. Our results highlight that radical measures to protect areas of biodiversity value may jeopardize food security and human health in the most vulnerable regions of the world.

Strict conservation protection for 30-50% of the Earth's land surface would mean that global and regional food prices would increase as a result, in turn affecting food security and human health…higher food prices would increase the number of underweight individuals across world regions and also reduce fruit and vegetable consumption, which would cause an increased number of human deaths from diseases associated with malnourishment and low fruit and vegetable consumption.

The findings highlight that radical measures could lead to undesirable and unequal health and food security outcomes if implemented globally. Moreover, the results from this work emphasize the need to evaluate human health and food security outcomes associated with area-based conservation, particularly in food insecure regions of the world.

Notice that the authors characterize measures that would yield 30-50% of the world to nature as “radical.” Yet, such deference can only be considered extreme if one insists that other life is devoid of value unless it’s assigned by people.

Another paper published in 2018 also warned about potential dire effects on humanity from large-scale conservation of nature:

We find that, globally, 15–31% of cropland, 10–45% of pasture land, 23–25% of non-food calories and 3–29% of food calories from crops could be lost if half of Earth’s terrestrial ecoregions were given back to nature.

In short, given our vast numbers and ubiquitous geographic distribution across the globe, it is improbable that humanity can afford countless other species the opportunity to flourish without affecting its own security. Both research papers undercut the belief that we can protect half of the Earth and halt the extinction crisis while sustaining human livelihoods.

So where does this leave us in terms of a world conservation strategy? I fear that people concerned with conservation (in the full sense of the word) will revert to the misguided ideology of “sustainable development” that has failed so miserably to protect the world’s biodiversity.

Coauthor Martin Jung, a researcher in the Biodiversity, Ecology, and Conservation Research Group at IIASA, points in that retrograde direction:

Our modeling work confirms, similar to previous studies, that stringent biodiversity protection everywhere is not a good strategy and risks progress towards other Sustainable Development Goals such as good human health and wellbeing. Instead protected areas need to be designed with people and biodiversity in mind, context-specific, and within multifunctional landscapes, while integrating scientific knowledge of local and global origin and across disciplines. Strict protection through protected areas will remain necessary in some areas, for instance, for species and ecosystems sensitive to disturbance, but not as a blanket solution globally.

To put it bluntly, and aside from flowery language, we will continue cutting corners and cheating nature.

Us or them, humans or other life. There is, of course, a fair and just way out if this woeful dilemma. We can admit that our ability to conserve nature is extremely limited when our population is so immense. And act accordingly.

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The campaign to preserve half the Earth’s surface is being criticized for failing to take account of global inequality and human needs. But such protection is essential not just for nature, but also for creating a world that can improve the lives of the poor and disadvantaged — Carl Safina, author, ecologist.