According to the UN projects our grandchildren will have 9.6 billion playmates to contend with in the year 2050 Quite a change when compared to the 2.5 billion our grandparents had to make do with in the 1950s. Humanity has grown in leaps and bounds over the last two centuries and nothing underlines it more clearly than looking at the population growth over the centuries. The great success of our species At the cusp of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, humanity's ability to multiply was at the end of its rope. After nearly six thousand years of written history, we had developed the skills, technology and social structure to sustain nearly 1 billion individuals! Most of the increase in population can be accredited to the slow accumulation of available workforce, better tools and more advanced farming methods. The more pronounced leaps, around 16th century for example, are thanks to the spread of new food sources to new areas, most notably the humble potato from South America to Europe and beyond. Bleak lives of the individual
The Reverend Thomas Malthus was one of the first to explain the fact that the farmers of the 18th century England and 400 BCE Athens had the same income; precisely because of humanity’s relentless drive to breed. Every productivity increasing invention, new arable locations or new food source was literally eaten away by the ever increasing population; the advances simply weren’t large enough to have time to translate into increased prosperity for the existing individuals. The great irony of Thomas Malthus’s life was to be that, while his theory explained the previous 58 centuries of human history, the following two seemed to prove him wrong. He didn’t see productivity outstripping population growth. The Great Escape As the last two hundred years have shown, the Malthusian Trap is avoidable. With the drastically increased production capacity brought on by the use of fossil fuels, we finally managed to escape the cycle. The Industrial Revolution generated a virtuous cycle in which investment in human capital, education and healthcare generated technological progress, which in turn increased the demand for human capital. In other words: the more people we have, the faster we come up with new technology, tap into new resources and improve our production efficiency. We seem to have managed to sneak around the Malthusian Trap and continue to distance ourselves from it; education, among other factors, has led to declining fertility rates and science seems impervious to the law of diminishing returns, unlike labor intensive farming for example. There’s always a ‘but’. For a while we seemed to forget one important fact: the resources of our planet are finite. The UN estimates that by the year 2025 there will be 1.8 billion people living in conditions of absolute water scarcity. That’s more than 2 out of every ten humans. Oil, natural gas, phosphorus, arable land and many rare earth minerals are at a premium already. While the last 100 years seem to prove that total resource exhaustion is unlikely, the undeniable fact remains that market prices of practically all natural resources are going up. Thankfully we still have options. First of all we can buy time by investing in resource efficiency and environmental technology; we can make what we have last longer and reduce the negative impacts of human activities on our environment. We can buy even more time by continuing and increasing our efforts to lower the fertility rates in the lesser developed parts of the world; Africa chief among them. All of the above would go a long way to postponing the disaster ahead but do nothing to solve it. We are already feeling the first teeth of the Malthusian Trap: the current economic hardships of the west are partly a result of world’s resources being spread more evenly around the globe. Already we have to fight harder for our market share, for our piece of the cake. The choice We have a choice to make: the choice between a slow slide back into the Malthusian Trap, or getting serious and starting to think of our future as a species and as individuals. If we content ourselves with attempting to perpetuate the status quo, we're unavoidably headed towards escalating conflicts over resources, war, famine and the welcoming arms of the Trap. On the other hand, if we face up to the fact that we're headed towards a disaster, we can do a lot of things to mitigate and delay that disaster. We can adopt green-tech solutions, many of which are presented in this very blog. We can ramp up our efforts to support education in Africa; if the current fertility rates persist there for the rest of the century, the UN estimates a population of 17 billion in Africa alone in 2100. These measures can unfortunately only delay the inevitable. The only choice which allows for continued growth and evasion of the Malthusian Trap is to look beyond Earth. The future of the human race is either to go into space or face a long and slow decline into a shadow of our former selves. Want to know more? Click YES, YES, YES and/or OH GOD(S) YES Mikko Hynninen Phytoplankton are microscopic algae found floating and drifting in the upper layer of the oceans. They perform a very essential task of preparing food for those organisms which don’t have the means to do it by themselves. Phytoplankton achieves this by following the process of photosynthesis, in which they utilize sunlight and carbon di oxide to create food for themselves and for other marine organisms as well. Ever wondered what the consequences will be if there was no phytoplankton left on earth? If phytoplankton concentration starts declining there won’t be enough food left for the marine ecosystem organisms such as zooplankton, fishes, whales and even seabirds, as a result there population will also shrink. This will also affect the fish farms all over the world which require phytoplankton in order to feed their fishes. One more reason why phytoplankton decline is an issue of global concern is that they influence the earth’s climate to a great extent. By consuming the carbon dioxide during photosynthesis they get rid of the excess CO 2 from the atmosphere, and thus help in controlling global warming. There are phytoplankton species which are know to influence cloud formation by creating cloud condensation nuclei where rain droplets may condensate. Some of them are known to reflect and some to absorb the solar radiations creating a balance in the earth’s overall temperature.
Something for which phytoplankton must be considered very important is that they produce a major part of the oxygen which we breath. Prochlorococcus, a phytoplankton, is estimated to provide oxygen for one amongst the five breaths we take. It is this fact which makes them so important for all the living creatures on earth. There has been a global decline in their concentration in the past century. The rate of decline being approximated to be 40% since 1950. This trend has been observed in 8 large oceanic regions, grater in polar and tropical regions. What is the cause of this decline? Raising sea surface temperature makes the oceans stratified or stable which means there will be less intermixing of the lower level oceanic water with the surface water. The lower waters contain nutrients which the phytoplankton needs to grow and the less frequently they mix with the surface water the less food phytoplankton will get, and as a result there concentration will decline. Global phytoplankton decline is a serious problem, their existence is not only important for ocean ecosystem, but also for earth’s climate, fish farms and most for everything which need oxygen to survive. Rishabh Sinha A question of economic against environmental sustainability Here are the facts. Palm oil is widely regarded as the most versatile oil, with its applications ranging from cooking oil, margarine, cosmetics, detergents, industrial lubricants and even biofuels for cars and power plants. Compared to other oil, palm oil is the highest-yielding vegetable crop, needing less than half the land required by other crops to produce the same amount of oil. This makes palm oil relatively cheap compared to other vegetable oils such as rapeseed and sunflower oil. In addition, palm oil is superior health-wise as it contains more vitamin A and vitamin E compared to any other edible oils and helps reduce the risk of a variety of diseases such as Alzheimer’s or cancer. Bearing all these environmental and economic benefits in mind, no wonder the demand for palm oil, and its level of production have increased significantly in the last few years. Indonesia tops the list by providing more than half (85%) of the world’s supply of palm oil As an edible vegetable oil, palm oil represents the largest share of worldwide edible oil production, at more than 30%, followed by soybean and rapeseed oil at 28% and 15% respectively. And among all other palm oil producers, including Nigeria and Malaysia, Indonesia tops the list by providing more than half of the world’s supply of palm oil. In fact, palm oil is a very crucial part of this G20 member, accounting for 11% of its export earnings of 5.7 billion USD. The industry has also helped Indonesia to relieve its unemployment problem by giving jobs to about 3.2 million people. Not just that, but the worldwide demand for this so called “sacred food” has increased so much that the growth of palm oil production in Indonesia alone averaged up to 8.1% per year from 1987 to 2007. This in turn will bring even more revenue and job employment for Indonesia. So as you can see, it is obvious how important Indonesia’s palm oil production is to the world and to Indonesia’s own economy. The deforestation of Indonesia’s valuable rainforests accounts for the loss of 8 million hectares of forest land in Borneo and Sumatra However it’s not all good news in the palm oil business. There have been a lot of critics and protests on how this particular industry impacts the environment, animals and ultimately the people of Indonesia. The most common criticisms are directed at the weak law enforcement in forestry management, which is causing the deforestation of Indonesia’s valuable rainforests, accounting for the loss of 8 million hectares of forest land in Borneo and Sumatra. This loss of biodiversity and ecosystems is so bad that a third of all mammal species in Indonesia are considered to be “critically endangered”. One species in particular, the orangutan, had become an icon of deforestation in Borneo and Sumatra. Around 2500 orangutans are killed each year and 90% of orangutans’ habitat has been destroyed in the last 20 years due to the development of the palm oil industry. This has alarmed the UN so much that it has started an “emergency conservation” programme in Indonesia’s rainforests. It seems very heartbreaking that such an important part of Indonesia’s economy is stabbing itself in the back by destroying its own very valuable resource. Efforts have been raised to create a sustainable way of developing palm oil production. The “Roundtable on sustainable palm oil” for example has committed to preserving 50% of all the rainforest in Indonesia and utilize the palm oil plantations as a carbon sink. Several NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth continually protest and raise awareness of the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests while promoting a sustainable way for palm oil production.
The numbers are there. Indonesia clearly needs all the economic drive the palm oil industry is providing for them. And the numbers are there again. Indonesia cannot afford not to act upon the rate at which their rainforests are being destroyed. And so the questions remain. For how long can Indonesia maintain their current practices? At what cost? Ultimately, to what extent can the importance of economic sustainability surpass the importance of environmental sustainability? Adhitya Prayoga Sources:
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May 2019
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