Many Effects of Population Growth

Human Population Growth is becoming a everyday problem. According to Myers, " we shall find out that environmental degradation and natural-resource depletion will suddenly and sharply worsen as a result of the demands of growing number of people." (1) Intensified agriculture is the main reason for environmental degradation and deforestation. Once people or colonies have used up the resources in a certain area, they migrate to a different location and continue to use and abuse the territory. Population growth and degradation end up having an effect on each other, "population growth and environmental degradation are engaged in a multiple linkage relationship where one serves to aggravate the adverse impacts of the other." (1)


Many challenges people face today are mainly due to human population growth. John Harte states in his article, " For the past several centuries, humanity has been increasingly polluting the air and water, altering the Earth's climate, eroding the soil, fragmenting and eliminating the habitat of plants and animals, and depleting the natural bank account of non-renewable resources." (2) Majority of these problems are going to continue to increase unless we set forth policies and restrictions on population growth.


Habitat fragmentation is a major issue concerning plants and animals. " Habitat fragmentation is usually defined as landscape-scale process involving both habitat loss and the breaking apart of habitat." (5) Majority of habitat fragmentation is human-caused and it is only going to increase as population increases. More people means more land being occupied by humans and less by plants and animals. Some species are advantageous in certain areas and regions in the world, but since humans are a higher priority we would assume that species can adapt somewhere else if we relocated them in order to use the space.


Eliminating the habitat of plants and animals is causing an alarming rate of endangered and extinct species. According to an article by Steven Chown, " The maintenance of biodiversity rests on understanding and resolving conflict between patterns of species occurrence and human activity." (3) By educating ourselves on how we are preventing biodiversity, we can take a stand and slowly find ways to improve in this depletion of biodiversity globally. It must start with our leaders finding way to create policies and uniting with other countries in this outcry for helping these species flourish once again.


In order to educate ourselves, we have to find ways to generate future population trends. " In attempting to establish the central role of population growth rate in population ecology, we first consider how it should be used in the definition of basic concepts such as environmental stress and environmental niche, and then consider its role in population dynamics, examining in particular the form of the relationship between population growth rate and population density." (4) The main idea is to scout the problem, research and investigate the problem, and finally try to solve the problem. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but as long as we have scientists out their trying to figure out solutions daily, leaders making policies that could create estimates of a declining population, we have a good chance of succeeding. 


Some policies in place are in China, where they have the policy of a family can only have one baby. Even with this policy to lower population growth, there are still controversies of whether or not this is humanly wrong. Besides that, policy makers and governments are still working out solutions to this growing problem.