How does our population effect our environment?

How does our population effect our environment?

Having too high of a population greatly affects our environment. Population growth is solely responsible for all environmental ills. Over population may not be the root cause of our declining, negative impacts of our environment but it is one of the main negative impacts. Most of our world population already lives in poor, impoverished countries. This means food insecurity, poor sanitation, water supplies and housing. This makes the competition for land and the use of limited resources increase.

Here is a little more insight on today’s population in our environment:

The biggest challenge we may find is meeting the increasing demand for food supplies and resources. Population growth in itself is not evenly distributed across our earth. The growth expands by 74 million people each year. We have also consumed more resources in the last 50 years than ever before. If we take into consideration the fact that in the year 2015, we have a world population of 7.3 billion people.

This means all of us people need to be fed, kept warm, bathed, etc. While we are trying to consume all of these resources to give us our life line necessities, we are busy polluting our earth as well. Therefore, while we are trying to gain a positive impact on our lives, we are making negative impacts along the way. Think about that damage that 7.3 billion people can do when it comes to pollution. A lot. There are two major forms that us humans make as an impact on this earth, which are:

1. Consumption of resources, such as land, food, and water.
2. Waste products as a result of our resources such as, air and water pollutants and greenhouse gases.

If you would like a more in depth analysis of our population challenges, click here

So how did we get big so fast? Watch this:

As the population of our environment has increased, the health of our environment has decreased. We need to find a way to keep our necessities positive while not conducting negative impacts along the way. Listed below are a few ways that we can increase our knowledge of our population impacts.

What can we do? What are our options?

In order to move towards a liveable future, we need to take actions. If we do not take actions as soon as possible, we could face an environmental catastrophe. We can start by being more energy efficient. By using energy efficient appliances or even lightbulbs, this would greatly help us. We can also phase out subsidies that encourage large amounts of waste. Another great solution would be a “2 Child Policy.” Much similar to China’s one child policy, we could have the same thing except having 2 children as the minimum amount. Although it may seem that we would be over stepping our boundaries by telling families they are limited to only two children, this would greatly slow down our population growth. We do not want to completely minimize our population because we still need one another to even be able so sustain an environment. However, we need to slow down the growth in order to maintain a positive environment. We need to further educate our people. If people are more educated it would allow everyone to at least take into consideration what our world could turn into a few years from now.

Here is an example of just how awful my ecological foot print really was:

We also can work on our ecological foot prints. When I took my foot print test, it was pretty bad. My family drives a lot which causes mass pollution. We have our lights on for most of the day. We don’t use energy efficient appliances. Had we have known the impact were causing, or had more knowledge on our negative impact, we probably would have a much smaller foot print.