Faced with climate crisis, too many humans or who consume too much?

Rather than accusing the too many human beings, many demographers insist on the issue of lifestyles and consumption. p>

Eight billion humans in 2022, about 10 billion in forty to sixty years, according to the scenarios … For many scientists, it is too much with regard to the climate crisis. This question of human overcrowding arises from the 19th e century. The British economist Thomas Malthus, in particular, had warned, as early as 1798, with his essay on the principle of population, against the inadequacy between an exponential growth of the population and a linear growth of resources. The concerns then mainly concerned the exhaustion of natural resources, then, in the 1970s, pollution. Today, it is mainly in greenhouse gas emissions that the impact of the world population is measured on its environment.

In window Its latest 2022 report , the Intergovernmental Experts Group on Climate Evolution (IPCC) thus estimates that “the gross domestic product per capita and population growth remained the main engines of CO 2 due to the combustion of fossil fuels in the last decade “.

For its part, the American NGO Drawdown, founded in 2014 by the ecological author Paul Hawken, made famous, in 2017, by his work Drawdown. How to reverse the course of global warming (South acts), consider that The seventh most important lever to limit global warming to 1.5 ° C by the end of the century is to control population growth through investments in family planning and education . Measures that would save 68.9 Gigatons of equivalent co 2 by 2050, or 4 % of the necessary reductions. In a column published in 2017, more than 15,000 scientists even proposed to “determine in the long term a size of sustainable and scientifically defendable human population”, demographic growth being judged as “one of the main factors of environmental threats”.

“Erones of emissions”

So, should you be afraid of population growth? Admittedly, the fact that there are fewer humans on earth could help reduce the carbon footprint. But it is not enough to decree the end of population growth to achieve it in a few decades. According to the main projections, established in particular by the UN, it is very likely that humanity earns another 2 billion individuals by 2100. Even the world of world fertility, it is -Ades the estimate of the number of children that each woman will have in her life, drops continuously since the 1960s, going from 5.3 to 2.3, less than half.

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