EMT -405 Environmental Education and Awareness

According to the United Nation, the world population is estimated to reach 8 billion in 2023, and projected to hit 10 billion in 2057. The present population has already passed what is termed as the “comfortable” carrying capacity of the planet. It's a common sense that as the world population continues to grow, the limits of essential global resources such as potable water, fertile land, forests and fisheries will become more stressed. This unit will discuss the relationship between population and the already stressed environment. 2.0 Objectives By the end of this unit, you will be able to: · explain the relationship between population and environment · discuss the impact of population growth on environment · explain the relationship between population and sustainable use of the environment. 3.0 Main Content 3.1 Population and Environment – A Brief Tour Humans have sought to understand the relationship between population and the environment since the earliest times but it was Thomas Malthus‟ “Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798 that is credited with launching the study of population and environmental resources as a scientific topic of inquiry. Malthus‟ famous proposition was that population numbers tend to grow exponentially while food production grows arithmetically. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which focused public attention on the issue of population growth, food production, and the environment. By 1972, the Club of Rome had published its World Model, which represented the first computer-based population-environment modelling, predicting an “overshoot” of global carrying capacity within the next 100 years. With the use of overlay of graphs depicting global trends in population, energy consumption, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, nitrogen (N₂), or land area deforested has often been used to demonstrate the impact that population has on the environment. Over the years the question that the academia have sought to answer a more complex set of questions, which include among others, how do specific population changes (in density, composition, numbers or behaviour) relate to and influence specific changes in the environment such as deforestation, climate change, or the concentrations of pollutants in air and water. How do environmental conditions and changes, in turn, affect the population? How do intervening variables, such as the cultural and social environment mediate these relationships? And what is the nature of the spatio-temporal variations of the relationships? They were able to answer some of these questions using techniques such as geographic information systems, remote sensing, computer-based models, and statistical methods and with evolving theories on human-environment relationships (Natl Acad Sci. 1963).