EXPANDING WORLD OP-ED: What is Earth’s sustainable population carrying capacity? Much bigger than you thought, actually

As the human population breached eight billion in 2022 and the evidence of biodiversity losses, soil degradation, rising temperatures, droughts, fires, floods and disease stacks up, it seems important, and perhaps innately human, that the question “what is the Earth’s carrying capacity?” be revisited.estimated the Earth’s carrying capacity at 13 billion in 1679.

Our model of population growth recognised that there are biophysical limits that constrain human population but did not assume to know which of these — land, water, a particular crop nutrient, disease or civil strife for example — would become binding on population growth first. Of course, the nature of human agency is difficult to predict. There is evidence, including from recent droughts in Cape Town, to suggest that people confronting environmental collapse and scarcity are capable of extraordinary collaboration, adaptation and sacrifice.But there are also many examples in which environmental pressures led to social instability, opportunism and vicious cycles of ecological degradation.

The respective scenarios do not have probabilities attached to them, but the current socioeconomic trajectory is assumed to be somewhere between six and 12 billion. If this is grounds for concern, it should be clear that there are socioeconomic configurations and technologies available that could enable a doubling of the current population.

Indeed, progress on this front is behind the precipitously falling fertility rates in all regions of the world. Given that the human population is likely to top out at 11.2 billion, some of the scenarios modelled in our study are purely hypothetical.

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