WHuman overpopulation is a state in which there are too many people, consuming too much, for the environment to sustain. In more scientific terms, there is overshoot when the ecological footprint of a human population in a geographical area exceeds that place's carrying capacity, damaging the environment faster than it can be repaired by nature, potentially leading to demographic push and possibly ecological and societal collapse. Overpopulation could apply to the population of a specific region, or to world population as a whole.
WThe crude birth rate in a period is the total number of live births per 1,000 population divided by the length of the period in years. The number of live births is normally taken from a universal registration system for births; population counts from a census, and estimation through specialized demographic techniques. The birth rate is used to calculate population growth. The estimated average population may be taken as the mid-year population.
WThe carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained in that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. In population ecology, carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which is different from the concept of population equilibrium, which may be far below an environment's carrying capacity. The effect of carrying capacity on population dynamics may be modelled with a logistic function.
WDesertification is a type of land degradation in drylands in which biological productivity is lost due to natural processes or induced by human activities whereby fertile areas become increasingly arid. It is the spread of arid areas caused by a variety of factors, such as climate change and overexploitation of soil as a result of human activity.
WThe family planning policy, which is based on the two-child policy and the one-child policy, is a population planning policy of China. It was introduced from the 1950s "recommendation", and evolved to the one-child policy introduced between 1978 and 1980 and began to be formally phased out in 2015. The policy allowed many exceptions and ethnic minorities were exempt. But according to an investigative report by The Associated Press published in June 2020, the Chinese government is taking measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country's Han majority to have more children.
WHuman impact on the environment or anthropogenic impact on the environment includes changes to biophysical environments and ecosystems, biodiversity, and natural resources caused directly or indirectly by humans, including global warming, environmental degradation, mass extinction and biodiversity loss, ecological crisis, and ecological collapse. Modifying the environment to fit the needs of society is causing severe effects, which become worse as the problem of human overpopulation continues. Some human activities that cause damage to the environment on a global scale include population growth, overconsumption, overexploitation, pollution, and deforestation, to name but a few. Some of the problems, including global warming and biodiversity loss pose an existential risk to the human race, and human overpopulation is strongly correlated with those problems.
WThis is a list of countries and dependent territories ranked by population density, measured by the number of human inhabitants per square kilometer, and also sortable by total area and by population.
WThe low birth rate in South Korea demonstrates the intersection of the low fertility rate in South Korea and government policies. South Korea's birth rate has declined since 1960. Until the 1980s, it was widely believed that this demographic trend would end and that the population would eventually stabilize. However, Korean society faces a decline in its future population because of the continuously decreasing birth rate. After the baby boom in the 1950s, the population increased drastically, and the Korean government implemented an anti-natalistic policy in the 1960s. This government program mandated that Korean healthcare centers provide a family planning consultation by introducing traditional contraception methods, including intrauterine devices (IUDs), vasectomies, and condoms to the public. Along with this policy and economic growth, the fertility rate declined because more married women pursued a higher standard of living rather than raising children. After the economic crisis in 1997, the fertility rate declined rapidly.
WA Malthusian catastrophe occurs when population growth outpaces agricultural production, causing population to be limited by famine or war. It is named after Thomas Robert Malthus, who suggested that while technological advances could increase a society's supply of resources, such as food, and thereby improve the standard of living, the resource abundance would enable population growth, which would eventually bring the per capita supply of resources back to its original level. Some economists contend that since the industrial revolution, mankind has broken out of the trap. Others argue that the continuation of extreme poverty indicates that the Malthusian trap continues to operate. Others further argue that due to lack of food availability coupled with excessive pollution, developing countries show more evidence of the trap.
WMalthusianism is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off. It derives from the political and economic thought of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, as laid out in his 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus believed there were two types of ever-present "checks" that are continuously at work, limiting population growth based on food supply at any given time:preventive checks, such as moral restraints or legislative action — for example the choice by a private citizen to engage in abstinence and delay marriage until their finances become balanced, or restriction of legal marriage or parenting rights for persons deemed "deficient" or "unfit" by the government.positive checks, such as disease, starvation, and war, which lead to high rates of premature death — resulting in what is termed a Malthusian catastrophe. The adjacent diagram depicts the abstract point at which such an event would occur, in terms of existing population and food supply: when the population reaches or exceeds the capacity of the shared supply, positive checks are forced to occur, restoring balance.
WHuman migration involves the movement of people from one place to another with intentions of settling, permanently or temporarily, at a new location. The movement often occurs over long distances and from one country to another, but internal migration is also possible; indeed, this is the dominant form of human migration globally. People may migrate as individuals, in family units or in large groups. There are four major forms of migration: invasion, conquest, colonization and emigration/immigration.
WStep migration is a migration pattern conceptualized in 1885 by Ernst Georg Ravenstein who observed migration as occurring stage by stage as rural inhabitants move closer to urban areas of growth. It is a migration pattern regarded by some scholars to be a widely popular form of international migration in the twenty-first century globalized world. There is a large breadth of study proving the existence of step migration in many international migration patterns, although there is lack of consensus over its exact specification and measurement. Step migration scholars deem it to be an important international trend that has the power to aid in the design of policy development efforts in both rural and urban areas worldwide.
WThe one-child policy was part of a birth planning program designed to control the size of the rapidly growing population of the People's Republic of China. Distinct from the family planning policies of most other countries, which focus on providing contraceptive options to help women have the number of children they want, it set a limit on the number of births parents could have, making it the world's most extreme example of population planning. It was introduced in 1979, modified beginning in the mid 1980s to allow rural parents a second child if the first was a daughter, and then lasted three more decades before the government announced in late 2015 a reversion to a two-child limit. The policy also allowed exceptions for some other groups, including ethnic minorities. Thus, the term "one-child policy" has been called a "misnomer", because for nearly 30 of the 36 years that it existed (1979–2015), about half of all parents in China were allowed to have a second child.
WThe Population Bomb is a best-selling book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, in 1968. It predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" were widespread in the 1950s and 1960s, but the book and its author brought the idea to an even wider audience.
WHuman reproduction planning is the practice of intentionally controlling the rate of growth of a human population. Historically, human population planning has been implemented with the goal of increasing the rate of human population growth. However, in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, concerns about global population growth and its effects on poverty, environmental degradation and political stability led to efforts to reduce human population growth rates. More recently, some countries, such as China, Iran, and Spain, have begun efforts to increase their birth rates once again. While population planning can involve measures that improve people's lives by giving them greater control of their reproduction, a few programs, most notably the Chinese government's "one-child policy and two-child policy", have resorted to coercive measures.
WPopulation Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits is a nonfiction book by Steven W. Mosher, first published in 2008. Population Control is a detailed exposition on the global effort to combat overpopulation, arguing that not only population control is immoral in many cases, but that overpopulation is a myth.
WPopulation density is a measurement of population per unit area, or exceptionally unit volume; it is a quantity of type number density. It is frequently applied to living organisms, most of the time to humans. It is a key geographical term. In simple terms, population density refers to the number of people living in an area per square kilometre.
WPopulation growth is the increase in the number of individuals in a population. Global human population growth amounts to around 83 million annually, or 1.1% per year. The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in 2020. It is expected to keep growing, and estimates have put the total population at 8.6 billion by mid-2030, 9.8 billion by mid-2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100. Many nations with rapid population growth have low standards of living, whereas many nations with low rates of population growth have high standards of living.
WPopulation projections are attempts to show how the human population living today will change in the future. These projections are an important input to forecasts of the population's impact on this planet and humanity's future well-being.
WA steady-state economy is an economy made up of a constant stock of physical wealth (capital) and a constant population size. In effect, such an economy does not grow in the course of time. The term usually refers to the national economy of a particular country, but it is also applicable to the economic system of a city, a region, or the entire world. Early in the history of economic thought, classical economist Adam Smith of the 18th century developed the concept of a stationary state of an economy: Smith believed that any national economy in the world would sooner or later settle in a final state of stationarity.
WThe total fertility rate (TFR), sometimes also called the fertility rate, absolute/potential natality, period total fertility rate (PTFR), or total period fertility rate (TPFR) of a population is the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime if:She was to experience the exact current age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) through her lifetime, and She was to survive from childbirth until the end of her reproductive life.
WPlanning theory is the body of scientific concepts, definitions, behavioral relationships, and assumptions that define the body of knowledge of urban planning. There are nine procedural theories of planning that remain the principal theories of planning procedure today: the Rational-Comprehensive approach, the Incremental approach, the Transformative Incremental (TI) approach, the Transactive approach, the Communicative approach, the Advocacy approach, the Equity approach, the Radical approach, and the Humanist or Phenomenological approach.
WThe Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) is an environmental movement that calls for all people to abstain from reproduction to cause the gradual voluntary extinction of humankind. VHEMT supports human extinction primarily because, in the group's view, it would prevent environmental degradation. The group states that a decrease in the human population would prevent a significant amount of human-caused suffering. The extinctions of non-human species and the scarcity of resources required by humans are frequently cited by the group as evidence of the harm caused by human overpopulation.
WIn demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living, and was estimated to have reached 7,800,000,000 people as of March 2020. It took over 2 million years of human prehistory and history for the world's population to reach 1 billion, and only 200 years more to reach 7 billion.