Global population hits 8 billion, but per-capita consumption is still the main problem

If this trend continues, we may end up with a smaller global population but significantly more destructive effects on the planet.

As is often the case, there are heated debates about the planet’s so-called “carrying capacity” – the total number of people who can live on Earth sustainably. Experts are generally divided into two camps.

There are those who argue that we need to drastically reduce the human population to avoid ecological catastrophe.

And then there are those who believe that technology will find smart solutions without any need to actively tackle the issue head-on.

Scientists have been debating such demographic issues at least since the 18th century, when Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, arguably the first global treatise on the relationship between population growth and scarcity.

A few decades later, however, the Industrial Revolution (which the British economist had failed to anticipate) ushered the world into an era of abundance, relegating Malthus’s grim predictions about the inevitability of scarcity to the margins of scientific debate.

In a bestselling book published in the late 1960s, ‘The Population Bomb,’ Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich brought the topic back, advocating for immediate action to limit population growth on a finite planet.

This recommendation was reiterated a few years later by the Club of Rome, an international network of scientists and industrialists.