What Are the Problems Related to Overpopulation, and How Does It Affect the Earth Limited Resources?

1. What are the problems related to overpopulation, and how does it affect the earth limited resources?

Overpopulation is related to many problems that affect planet earth. One of the biggest consequences of overpopulation is the exhaustion of natural resources. The more human population grows, the harder is for natural resources like water, fossil fuels, and forests to regenerate, eradicating many species of plant and animal life. Another consequence of overpopulation is increased intensive farming, being that the food production industry is responsible for about 70% of all human water use and the leading cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss (Briggs, 2018). Intensive farming is also considered a big contributor to climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions and the machinery required. While higher life expectancy in developed countries is a cause of overpopulation, lower life expectancy is a big consequence of overpopulation. A big portion of the world’s population growth is in less developed countries where they lack access to proper health care, clean water and food, which results in a growth on child mortality.

1. What solutions would you suggest to stabilize overpopulation?

I think that the biggest help to stabilize overpopulation would be better education, mostly in less developed countries. Educating the masses on family planning, safe sex, and how something so simple as using birth-control would make a huge impact on everyone’s future on this planet. Also, open dialogue about sterilization and abortion should not be seen as something weird of taboo. Lastly, imparting sex education to young kids and also education their parents on how to bring up to topic to their children. Most of the time, parents feel shy in discussing these things with their kids and the children will end up looking up information on the internet, which sometimes is incomplete or inaccurate.

1. Which of the strategies do you support and why?

In the video, they talked about the one- child policy that China currently uses and how this would dramatically decrease the population. I think this strategy would have many pros and cons. The biggest pro would be to ease the overpopulation problem, as well as receiving incentives and benefits for complying to the policy and lowering poverty rate. Even though, it sounds like a great idea, I think the cons would bring up many other problems. Some of the cons of the one-child policy would be an alarming spike on infanticide and abandoned children (mostly girls), as well as abortion and other issues like high pressure for the child and gender imbalances.