Abrupt change 2012: population growth and resource squeezes

Tremendous global stress is created by the growth of the world’s population. At the end of the 20^th century population was expanding by about 900 million per decade, equivalent to a new London every month. It passed 6 billion before the turn of the century, and demographic calculations indicate that it would reach 9.1 billion by the middle of the 21^st century. Urban dwellers number more than half of the world’s population, and U.N. forecasts speak of 60 percent of the global population living in cities by 2030.

Modern cities are the largest conglomerations of humans ever seen on this planet. There are mega-conglomerations such as the Greater Tokyo Area with 35 million inhabitants, and Sao Paolo with 23 or 25 million. Other cities are rapidly catching up: Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Dhaka, Jakarta and Lagos, among others. By 2015 there may be 23 mega-cities in the world, 19 of them in the developing world, and 37 other cities with populations between 5 and 10 million.

Rapid urbanization in developing countries exposes vast numbers of poor people to shortages of drinking water and sanitation, as well as to rising air pollution and air-born toxins. Large cities produce enormous social inequalities; over one billion people now squat in squalor in slums, favelas and bidonvilles.

Urban overcrowding and sub-minimal conditions of life in urban conglomerations are major factors that stress people in many parts of the world. They produce frustration and conflict, resulting in higher levels of violence and unusual forms of crime: mass murders where seemingly ordinary people run amok, renewed suicide bombings in populated city centers, and suicidal terrorism on land and in the air.

The rapid growth of the world’s population, especially the growth of cities, creates growing problems of resource availability, first of all of clean water and energy.  Already one third of the global population lacks access to adequate supplies of clean water, and the share of water-deprived populations is expected to rise to half of humankind within decades. UNESCO and other global organs speak of the danger of “water wars” as desperate populations become violent in the fight for clean-water supplies.

Urban centers consume three-quarters of the world’s energy and are responsible for at least three-quarters of its pollution. The supply of abundant cheap energy has entered a critical end-phase. As the world continues to run on fossil fuels, demand for oil rises and supply diminishes. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21^st Century most of the world’s oil-producers had passed their peak. The largest oilfields were discovered over half a century ago: the peak of discovery was in 1965. New fields have not been found at the same rate, and as a result global oil production will peak, or has already peaked. As the peak is passed, oil becomes more difficult and expensive to extract. The supply of cheap oil drops, and extraction becomes less profitable. Yet demand for oil is still rising: the International Energy Agency found that in the last few years global demand has been increasing by 2 million barrels a day. If no significant changes in the patterns of energy production and consumption come about, global demand for oil would rise in the next two decades, from the present 80 million barrels a day to 125 million barrels.

Growing demand and decreasing supply drives prices up. Surges in oil prices impact almost instantly on people, enterprises and economies in every part of the world. Higher prices also trigger conflict related to discovery and extraction. The Arctic Ocean seabed, which may hold billions of gallons of both oil and natural gas, is becoming a globally contested region. In March 2007 Russia made public that it plans to set up a military force to protect its interests in the Arctic, and in August of that year the Russian flag had been planted on the ocean bed 4 km beneath the North Pole to indicate Russia’s claim to the undersea oil-formation known as the Lomonosov Ridge. The U.K. in turn is claiming sovereign rights over more than 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) of the seabed off Antarctica. The opening up of the Northwest passage due to the melting of Arctic ice is already provoking international contestation and conflict.

Population expansion drives all unsustainable human activity, and is perhaps the most difficult problem to solve. I’ll address possible solutions in a future post.

Tagged as: cities, energy, peak oil, UNESCO, urbanization, violence