Over Population

Mitigation Strategies and Solutions

For

Human Population

Lillie Taylor

SCI/275 Environmental Science

May 13, 2010

Our human population is one of the most important environmental issues facing the world today. Human population not only affects you and me, but our entire ecosystem. Understanding the rate of population growth is important for our survival, and the survival of future generations. It has been estimated that the world population has increasing by over 80 million people each year and will continue to grow at this rate for the next 30 years. At this rate, we will have a global population of 8.5 billion by the year 2030(Brooks, 2009). In 1 hour, more than 10,000 new people enter the world, a rate of 3 per second. This is a major increase in birth rate, which forces us to take a look at our earth’s carrying capacity.

Overpopulation is defined as the number of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities. Overpopulation is when the number of people cannot be permanently maintained without depleting resources and without degrading the environment and the people's standard of living. Population growth is a problem when thousands of people starve to death every day in different places around the world, forests everywhere are disappearing and our fresh water supply is a danger. In addition, the air we breathe being hazardous to your health. There are a number of effects associated with human over population. As birth rates increase, natural resources get used up faster than they can be replenished again, which causes economic pressures and global environmental problems. We are over consuming our natural resources: our forests,...