Hans Rosling: What Is The Cause Of Overpopulation?

Since the Industrial Revolution, human population has been growing exponentially. The advent of increasingly advanced technology to improve quality of life, prolong deaths, and lower childhood mortality has significantly raised the limits to population, allowing humanity’s numbers to skyrocket. As with any growing population, the challenge arises of being able to adequately provide for the needs of each individual. Poverty and hunger have been prevalent issues all throughout history, but even more recently, attention has been given to the environmental impacts humans have made. While many see overpopulation as a serious issue that needs to be prevented, others such as the Swedish doctor and statistician, Hans Rosling, believe improvements in
He charted a projection of the future population, illustrating that although it will continue to increase, it is on course to stabilize at eleven billion. The cause of this growth is not, as many people assume, because of high birth rates in less developed nations. In fact, there has been a cultural shift all across the world towards having smaller families due to in part by effective family planning services. In several countries, women are beginning to have many more opportunities than previous generations. Being allowed to get an education, marry older, and pursue a career has not only helped improve the status of women, but also keep the birth rate low enough to where it is near the rate of replacement. Moreover, childhood survival has contributed to a low birth rate by reducing the need for parents to have several children to compensate for the amount of children they lose. At the current birth rate, “peak child” has been reached; meaning the population of children at 2 billion is not likely to increase in future years. To clarify, human population growth is occurring on account of adults and children surviving longer, not more children being born. For this reason, Rosling claims that that the growing population is a good sign for humanity, although it will present several
I also do not think he is credible enough to speak for environmental issues. As a statistician, he can effectively interpret numbers to mean one thing, but he does not go deep enough to understand the various repercussions. He did mention that there would be challenges to overcome with a growing population, and that it would require living more sustainably, but his main focus was that the improving conditions for humans meant that they would be able to survive much longer. I think this argument is too hopeful and ignores much of the environmental problems that are already too severe to fix. He has no substantial solution for dealing with a large population, other than expecting technology to solve the problems. In my opinion, technology will not be able to keep up with the rate of environmental degradation and resource use, unless measures are taken to drastically reduce consumption. Even if a problem is not as bad as people think, having a “don’t panic” attitude is dangerous because it reduces the urgency of solving those problems. It would be better to prepare now to live more sustainably than to think there is not an issue and fall to