Science of the Total Environment journal homepage: Reeds, Christopher
Humanity must commit Or transformative change on all levels in
order to address the climate emergency and biodiversity collapse. In
particular, stabilizing and ultimately reducing the human population size
is necessary to ensure the long-term wellbeing of our species and other
life on Earth. We show how this transition can be accomplished in an
equitable framework that promotes human rights. Specifically, we issue a
global appeal for women and men to have at most one child and call for
policy-makers to implement population policies that improve education for
girls and young women and ensure the availability of high-quality
family-planning services. A recently published world scientists' warning of
a climate emergency, with >11,000signatories, submitted, as one of six
actions to mitigate climate change upheavals, that the human population
“must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that
ensures social integrity” While the speed at which climate disruption and
biodiversity destruction are unfolding is alarming, the population factor
continues to be ignored, sidestepped, or denied This makes no
sense—population is a primary variable underlying humanity's net
consumption and waste output and thus a significant driver of global
change. It took 200,000 years for human numbers to reach one billion in the
early 19th century, then just 200 years (1/1000th as much time) to grow
exponentially by over seven-fold to 7.9 billion today One result is that
half the fossil fuels ever consumed by humans have been burned in just the
past 35 years, accompanied by half of all climate driving anthropogenic CO2
emissions. Despite the connection of population size to eco-catastrophe,
the trajectory of global population growth toward 10 to 11 billion by the
end of the century is usually treated as a given, even though socially
desirable policies and actions exist that can alter our demographic destiny
On a nation-by nation basis, demographic trends vary greatly
around the world, and actions to reduce population size and growth in
different places are both overlapping and divergent . Beyond societal
variances, the international imperative in this time of converging
calamities is to lower the total fertility rate (TFR) beneath the
replacement Environmental analysts regard a sustainable human population as
one enjoying a modest, equitable middle-class standard of living on a
planet retaining its biodiversity and with climate-related adversities
minimized. Analysts' estimate of that population size vary between 2 and 4
billion people, a figure obviously well below the present 7.9;. While the
global fertility rate has been declining since the late 1960s, it continues
to remain well above the replacement level, and the total population size
is likely to reach 8 billion by early 2023. By pursuing the actions and
policies we propose below, the human population can stop growing within
this century and begin to gradually decline, more reliably and with far
less suffering than the “invisible hand” of modernization and urbanization
(or, as it is appearing likely, eco-catastrophe) would effect sometime in
the 22nd century
Past and projected global population to the year 2100 under three
different scenarios, including where total fertility is projected to reach
levels that are 0.5 births above and below the total fertility in the
median scenario. The world population sizes at year 2100 for the three
scenarios are approximately 15.6 billion, 10.9 billion, and 7.3 billion for
the high, median, and low scenarios respectively. Data source: United
Nations (2019). raising and a global social shift. It is a choice that
challenges received pronatalist norms and childbearing expectations that do
not presently serve the greater good. Such a voluntary movement could occur
globally, and thus reflect local cultures and values. Consequently, it is
at low risk of being misapplied to justify coercive government mandates, in
the way that some have argued U.S. scientists' recommendations were a
driving force behind China's one-child policy that restricted many families
to having at most one child (Greenhalgh, 2003). Thus where moderate to
rapid population growth is still occurring, the most effective and
human-rights enhancing antidoteis achieving full gender equality, including
economic opportunities and legal rights for women, beginning with ensuring
education of all girls and young women (Dasgupta and Ehrlich, 2013). The
average number of children a woman brings into the world drops
proportionately with her years of schooling, with the most dramatic drop
occurring with completion of secondary education (Cohen, 2008). Alongside
ambitious investment in schooling girls (and more broadly, of course, all
children), priority should be given to making high-quality family-planning
services available to every woman on the planet, while economic,
geographic, and cultural barriers to access should be removed
(Bongaarts,2016;CampbellandBedford, 2009). The combination of institutional
support to plan one's child-bearing choices and educational attainment,
including enhanced opportunity for higher education for women, yields
immediate fertility declines. There as on this occurs is that when women
are empowered both socio culturally and pragmatically to decide how many
children to have, they overwhelmingly choose few (or no) children,
regardless of their religious, national, and ethnic background. What
certain demographers describe as, on average, women's “latent desire” for
fewer children surfaces when women's empowerment conditions line up
(Campbell and Bedford, 2009).
Unsurprisingly, the cultural practice of “child brides” plagues
societies where rapid population growth is occurring. The international
community must mobilize to abolish this form of child abuse, and toaffirm
in action girls' (and boys') rights to be protected, educated, and cared
for into adulthood. In the developed and emerging-economy regions, where
theTFR is a tor below replacement, this is a demographic attainment to be
celebrated. To allay fears about pension and social security shortfalls,
precautionary policies can forestall problems arising from an inevitable
period of age imbalance and senior-heavy societies(Smeeding, 2014).
The future of all complex life depends on unprecedented
international collaboration in the application of our best science and
reasoning capabilities in a global redirection toward the common good.
Through an intentional global course away from the 11-billion median
projection, we can chart a far more hopeful trajectory than the one to
which we are presently committed: toward inhabiting a planet of
still-thriving biodiversity, in which climate change has been rendered less
turbulent, and a solid foundation for inclusive justice, human and
nonhuman, has been deliberately laid.
.(environment research paper problem and solution for ) .K Rajaram IRS 18626
On Thu, 18 Jun 2026 at 05:01, Markendeya Yeddanapudi <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Below is my own original essay without editing by Chat GPt.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> The Outsider Science Conditioning
>
>
>
> Your finger is a limb of yours. You want it to be healthy and strong. You
> will do everything to keep it healthy and strong. But if you are not
> healthy, your finger also will be unhealthy and weak. Suppose your finger
> wants to do science and tries not to be a limb of yours but an outsider
> doing science on you?
>
> Similarly you are a limb of nature. Nature will do everything to keep you
> strong and healthy. When you just realize and feel this basic fact that you
> are part and limb of nature, that everything else too is part and limb of
> nature, imagine your self-image. Every life form from the tiniest insect
> you see, the birds you gaze and every life form of the flora and fauna
> becomes expression of emotions and feelings creating continuously wonderful
> emotional or spiritual symbiosis, as you. You identify yourself as the
> author participating in the gigantic continuing creativity.
>
> In that free and healthy nature every organism feels the feelings of every
> other organism, creating continuously conversation of feelings via the
> troposphere. Life becomes the wonderful rapture of voyage in diverse
> feelings and emotions. You simply do not do anything to wound and disturb
> that living and functioning and growing symbiosis. The language of
> conversation will not be in words, phrases, clauses and sentences but in
> feelings, which often become musical tunes and expressions, in dances,
> often accompanied by smells and sounds. The eloquence will not be in words
> and sentences but in feelings and sensings creating diverse art forms or
> spontaneously new and new art expressions. Every organism participates in
> the symphony and harmonica of continuous art expressions.
>
> And you identify all this as your own, when you just realize that you are
> limb and part of nature and not an outsider. Even now if you start in your
> small way to nurture nature as your own body, you begin creating first tiny
> waves of symbiosis which grows and grows and develops into Tsunamis of
> creativity. Listening becomes feeling, and no organism needs the need to
> request for listening. The expressions merge and combine creating diverse
> processes of consciousness.
>
> Just see the absurdity today. In the Cartesian sciences which hijacked
> education, the subject consciousness itself is excluded from the
> cartesianism or sciences. As a result the foundations of feelings and
> emotions have been cut by the so called scientific indifference towards
> emotions. Every subject is made mechanical without feelings while learning.
> As machines are better in not having any feelings, so actually they score
> the top grades and marks, they have become role models for the students.
> And Robots are edging out humans from education itself.
>
> We need to immediately end our Anthropcentricism.We need to realize that
> the Biosphere is one single organism, and that every life form is a limb of
> the Biosphere with its own art of living as expressing. Every University
> must facilitate the participation of every organism in the education as
> continuous expressions by starting the Free Nature Parks without any
> tampering. There the students prodigal themselves realizing that the free
> nature is their own anatomy.
>
> When we do not feel at all we do not care. Today we are destroying nature
> continuously and we do not even care when the atrocity of presenting the
> destruction as serious education is rammed down the throats of students.
> Every course in every University has economic objectives and the graduates
> invariably join the economic destruction of nature. Every student lost the
> basic capacity for spontaneous rapture as he/she is made to participate in
> the social Darwinism as education.
>
> The Abyss is waiting.
>
> YM Sarma
> *Mar*
>
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