We don't know if today's population of seven billion is remotely sustainable, or what the limit is.
Are there really too many people on our planet? It is clear to all of us that the planet is not expanding. There is only so much space on Earth, not to mention only so many resources that can support a human population.
"It is not the number of people on the planet that is the issue – but the number of consumers and the scale and nature of their consumption," or "The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed." are phrases of experts in this matter.
While the planet might hold over 11 billion people by the end of the century, our current level of knowledge does not allow us to predict whether such a large population is sustainable, simply because it has never happened before.
The most of the growth over the next two decades is predicted to be in urban centres in what are currently low and middle-income countries.
There are many low-income urban dwellers whose consumption is so low that they contribute almost nothing to greenhouse gas emissions.
It is not the rise in population by itself that is the problem, but rather the even more rapid rise in global consumption (which of course is unevenly distributed), says Will Steffen.
This leads to an uncomfortable implication: people living in high-income nations must play their part if the world is to sustain a large human population.
Even if those changes occur, it seems unlikely that our planet could really sustain a population of 11 billion, one solution is that we should stabilise the global population, hopefully at around nine billion, and then begin a long, slow trend of decreasing population. That means reducing fertility rates. What is urgently needed, then, is ways to speed up the decline in fertility rates.
For the foreseeable future, Earth is our only home and we must find a way to live on it sustainably.
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