The UK’s Royal Society has announced that it will begin a major study into the impacts of human population. A largely taboo topic for decades, the Royal Society wants to provide a ‘comprehensive review of the science’ of population growth, according to a press release. The study, due in 2012, will focus especially on sustainable development in the face of population growth.
Environmentalists have long argued that the growing human population is one of the biggest reasons—along with overconsumption—behind the current world’s environmental problems extending from climate change to deforestation to mass-extinction.
Head of the project Sir John Sulston acknowledges that the issue of population is a controversial one worldwide.
“This is a topic that has gone to and fro in the last few decades, and appears to be moving back up the political agenda now,” the Nobel Prize laureate told the BBC. “So it seems a good moment for the Royal Society to launch a study that looks objectively at the scientific basis for changes in population, for the different regional and cultural factors that may affect that, and at the effects that population changes will have on our future in term of sustainable development.”
The group studying population is eclectic, including environmentalists, social scientists, economists, theologians, demographists (someone who studies population), and even popular wildlife documentarian and naturalist David Attenborough, one of the few public figures actively speaking out on overpopulation.
Today 6.8 billion human beings inhabit our planet, over three times the number in 1930. Experts have projected that by 2050, the population will grow to 9 billion people. Researchers believe that the global population has been going steadily upwards since the Black Death in the 14th Century.
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