Overpopulation is not a great thing. It is when there are more people than there are resources. It can be caused by an increase in the fertility rate, a decrease in mortality rate, more immigrants, or a depletion or limited amount of resources. In essence it means that if the amount of people is more than the amount of resources in the world then we will eventually stabilize because there will be more deaths. If there are too many people in the same habitat then the amount of resources and availability of things will decrease. You should be aware of this because if we reach our carrying capacity then that would be bad for all of us. A lot more people will die. The carrying capacity is the maximum amount of a species that an area can …show more content…
As the population increases so does the demand of food.
The increase in population is caused by a few things. One of them is that the world’s level of fertility has risen and more people and teens are having kids. Although some countries are growing slower or even decreasing, there are places like Africa that is increasing at an alarming rate. They have more and more kids each year.
Another cause of world population growth is that we have had advances in science and medical technology which is good but it also means that there are more successful births. The medical technology that is coming out is very innovative. The new vaccines and antibiotics are life savers which helps with increasing our world population. That isn’t a bad thing but if more people are having babies when they’re younger or if they are having a lot of babies then there will be an increase in the growth rate.
There are even more reasons for the alarming increase in our population growth. Because of the higher demand of food, the food and produce production has increased quite a bit which has caused more people to have food and less people dying of starvation which is good but again, there are too many people on this planet. The increase in food production has been caused by things like new types of seed, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and machines that work better than previous models.
For many years it has been thought that the maximum human population would be determined by the amount of drinkable fresh water. Earth can only hold, manage, and support so many people. This is called carrying capacity. If we go over this carrying capacity it could cause worldwide issues with the environment along with many other issues. For example if the human population goes over the carrying capacity of the earth then problems like lack of clean drinkable water, lack of land that humans could live on or occupy, and lack of available jobs could become much more serious and have terrible effects on the system which everything works.
There are various reason why overpopulation is occurring. One is due to the overall decline in death rate on the planet. “The discovery of agriculture by our ancestors was one factor that provided them with the ability to sustain nutrition without hunting and, in essence, there was a large drop in injury or death because of the fact” (“Overpopulation: Causes”). “This led to the first imbalance of both the birth and death rate” (“Overpopulation: Causes”). Another reason overpopulation is occurring is due to the advances humans have made in medicine. “After the industrial revolution, technological advances and science was able to better produce food and prevent diseases” (“Overpopulation: Causes”). In similar fashion, immigration and the lack of family planning also contribute to
As the human race continues to grow older the population starts to grow. Population growth is a change in the size of a population over time, depending on the balance of births and deaths over a period of time. For the world, population grows when the amount of births exceeds the amount of deaths. As shown in figure 1, the world’s population grew very slowly until about 1750 that is when the population growth started to increase rapidly. Figure 2 shows the growth of the global population from 1950 onwards, it also shows the projected population growth up to 2050. The global population is estimated to rise to approximately 9 billion people by 2050.
The article by Dennis Dimick brings up some very good points about the increasing population. He states that with our current population of 7 billion people, we currently do not have enough food to eat. With the population increasing day-by-day, we will face more shortage in the future. He also brings up the issue of natural resources. We are currently using so much natural resources that we will run out very soon. The use of natural resources tend to increase with increase in social standing (wealth).
One of the Many reason that growing population will be a good reason because if their are more people this means more workers and then of course there would be more produce because of the working people ;however, there is also the fact that just because there is more people there would be less crop space ; so if there is less crop space that means less food which means more hunger which will lead to more crimes. Although, the other people in the world that
The human population is growing rapidly, and Earth doesn't have enough space for it. In 1967, Earth had a population of 3 billion, and only about 50 years later, that number had doubled into 7 billion. There are many reasons why our population is increasing so fast, in so little time, but I'll only go over two. The first, and foremost the most recognised reason, is the birth to death rate ratio. Every minute there is almost twice as many births then there are deaths; 200 births to 100 deaths. There is an estimated 350,000 born every day with only 150,000 deaths, making there 4 births every second and 2 deaths every second. Overwhelming right? Well the second reason which goes hand in hand with the birth to death rate, is, over the last few hundred years, we have become more intelligent, and more self aware. Our knowledge on medicine has grown like no other, and our life expectancy has grown with it. With many more factors modifying our population rate, these two show it best. We are living longer and having more babies, but soon we’ll need to stop.
According to the lecture, “If the birth rate is higher than the death rate, then population growth will be exponential.” What sets us apart from history is the fact that our death rate has greatly decreased due to our ability to fight leading causes of death. In historic times, the average projected age of survival was far lower than it is now due to the lack of knowledge on how to deal with and prevent different diseases. As time passed, humans began to learn more about medicine and treating sicknesses, but this was a slow and steady process. Plagues like the Black Plague during the 1300s killed off millions of people in Eurasia, preventing the population from growing exponentially. Couple with war and crime that was at its peak during the 1940s, the population did not have room to grow up. But as time continued, the rate of war and crime decreased, leading to one less reason of death to worry about. Famine was also a huge cause of death during 1870 but begins to decrease in 2010. The combination of the decrease in causes of death that stems from the better technology to deal with diseases, less wide-scale wars, less famine, and the continuous birth of new live caused the population to seem rapidly grow from around the 1950s onwards (this makes sense as it was right around the end of WWII, the last major war to affect the entire world). The migration of people and intermixing
How many people can the planet support? The carrying capacity for any species is defined as the maximum number that can be sustained indefinitely, and in the case of humans is usually said to be about ten billion. As the global population grows from 7 billion to almost 9 billion by 2040, and the number of middle-class consumers increases by 3 billion over the next 20 years, the demand for resources will rise exponentially.
In 1810, the world’s population was 1 billion; 200 years later, it is over 7 billion. What caused this tremendous jump in population growth? Better healthcare caused death rates to plummet, and caused successful birthrates to soar. Population growth rate is calculated with a simple formula (Birth rate – Death rate = Growth rate). The human population increases by about 80 million per year; and that number is actually increasing steadily. In another 140 years, the population could be close to 27 billion.
The term overpopulation is a undesirable condition where the number of existing human population exceeds the carrying capacity of the earth or a country. Three countries currently that are suffering from overpopulation today would be: China, india and the United States. Three major Social issues that contribute to overpopulation are Poverty, Immigration and the lack of family planning. Poverty may be the leading cause of overpopulation because these people are likely to be uneducated on topics, such as family planning. In many countries having a big family is somewhat essential because of gender roles and how a male is valued more to a family then a female. The lack of fertility treatment and education leads to overpopulation because both male and female are uneducated on the topic. Without exposure or education on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies it leads to overpopulation.
However, exponential growth does not last long in the nature. Exponential growth is bad since continuously high reproduction rate for a species places extreme pressure on ecosystems. Logistic growth curve explains how exponential growth is stopped by limiting factors like natural resources. A population might grow sharply at the beginning but as the limiting factors (like water, space, food, predators, and disease) come into play, the growth levels off (Withgott & Brennan, 2009, p. 85). As for human population, exponential growth is promoted by new medicines that staved off many diseases, dependable supply of food all around the year through scientific agriculture involving artificial fertilizers, and the eradication of predators. As for the limiting factors, lack of urban space, collapse of habitats supporting human life, war, occasional epidemics (like AIDS or flu), and declining fertility of overused agricultural areas are all serious obstacles to higher population growth.
There are now more than 7 billion of us on Earth. As our numbers continue to grow, we continue to increase our need for far more water, far more food, far more land, far more transport and far more
It is a widely known fact that the population of the world increases by a great factor every year. However, not many people know what exactly is causing this upsurge. In the past century, the population has radically grown. The main things increasing the world’s population are medical care and infant mortality rates because both have changed drastically over the past century.
One of the problems facing our world is population. It began about ten thousand years ago when the humans settled and began farming. The farming provides more food for the people thus making the population grow. Now we are about 6 billion in population and in a few years we will be around 10 to 11 billion. Therefore, our population will
(n.d.). So many things go into human population growth such as deaths, births, and migration; for, all three play a factor when calculating the growth. The more people that live in the area, can affect more on the environment then anything. “For the last 50 years, world population multiplied more rapidly than ever before, and more rapidly than it is projected to grow in the future.” Jordan, J. (n.d.). Human population growth affects things that go un noticed such as in the workforce, environment, and our