Solutions for overpopulation…
While overpopulation is a growing issue that continues to plague humanity, it still hasn’t garnered as much attention to the general public compared to other worldwide issues like hunger and poverty. But just because the general public is not made fully aware of this issue, that didn’t stop some brilliant minds into brainstorming some ideas to our population crisis and the results are some very interesting solutions in which we will take a look at in this round…
Fighting poverty
Disturbingly, poverty and overpopulation are two issues that are closely related to each other. How so? The united nations project that population growth will mostly be driven by the very poorest countries (1), why is this? In most countries that are poverty-stricken, women lack their basic rights and so this gives way to practices like child marriage and while infant mortality rates are high in these countries, fertility rates among women are also incredibly high (1,2). Also, the lack of education in these poverty-stricken countries means less awareness of practices like having safe sex (1), controlling birth and planning a family that contributes to a higher fertility rate among women which leads us to the next solution.
Educating women:
While women in a lot of countries now have similar, if not the same rights as men, it seems that some of the poorer countries did not get the memo and so rights for women are scarce (1,2). It is important to put women through education and make all forms of education available to women. It is also important to recognize that women have rights and to break out of the idea that one gender is superior over another (1,2,3).
A one-child policy:
A one-child policy or a two-child policy is a principle proposed by the government where families must have a certain amount of children and no more in order to receive benefits and perks (2). China used to have a one-child policy where parents get benefits and cash rewards for having only one child, those who had two children or more however got punished in the form of increased taxes and unemployment. This solution, however, did not sit too well with the general public which led to fraud and undocumented births and public uproar (4).
Adoption:
A lot of children are unfortunate enough to have families that can’t support them and end up being put for adoption (2). A nice way to combat overpopulation and do the world a big favour is by showing love and affection to the unfortunate children by adopting them and taking care of them (2). Adoption is the best way to start a family without contributing to overpopulation by having kids. It’s also a good way to show to your community that you have got a big heart! Adoption also helps make a household more diverse and open.
Distributing the population evenly:
Have you ever noticed that while some countries are intensely populated, other countries have lots and lots of forests and remote areas free of people? The idea is that instead of going to heavily populated countries, we can fit more people into our planet if we spread them out evenly. For example, Canada has a vast land that only houses 30 million while the United States, though having a population more than ten times the size has a smaller land area than Canada. The idea is to get more people who require a move to come to Canada instead of the USA to cram more people into our planet. Other countries that are not so densely populated include Greenland, Russia, Australia, Norway, Iceland etc.: (5) The point is to get refugees and those in densely populated areas to areas that can hold more people and thus can distribute people more evenly. While this isn’t necessarily a solution to our growing population, it does, however, help our planet to be able to hold more people and help with even resource distribution.
Just because I want to do this…TERRAFORMING:
This solution is quite out of the world (pun intended). The idea of terraforming is to get people to live on other planets instead of Earth as Earth is currently the only planet in the milky way that appears to be habited by humans. But it doesn’t take a genius to realize the challenge that terraforming poses to us. First of all, getting to another planet is a formidable barrier to our current technology and while our technology gets exponentially better, terraforming a planet that is incredibly hostile to humans is a whole different challenge once we get there. Besides, there are only a few places in the milky way that we can terraform, for example, gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune cannot be terraformed as they are made out of gas. Pluto, mercury, and venus are also out of the question as their temperatures and atmospheric makeup is extremely hostile to humans (6). This leaves Mars which is currently the go-to planet for terraforming (6). Though the atmospheric makeup of Mars makes it inhabitable, optimists think that they can release gases trapped from sources to balance out the atmospheric pressure which is currently less than 1% of Earth’s atmospheric pressure (6). Other than mars, some of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons are taken into consideration but don’t expect terraforming to happen anytime soon!
Personal thoughts…
This project has been of great pleasure to me and while I, unfortunately, have to put an end to this project I have learned a lot of fun and cool stuff from doing this project like china’s one-child policy and steps needed in order to be able to terraform Mars and I hope you as the reader has learned a lot too. Before doing this project, I had no clue about overpopulation which is an issue that is almost unnoticed in the eye of the general public. After this research round though, I am now more informed and up to date on overpopulation and its good to spread the word and raise about this issue because we as humanity can fight overpopulation…TOGETHER!
Sources:
- https://populationmatters.org/solutions
- https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/solutions-overpopulation-can/
- https://overpopulation-project.com/solutions-to-overpopulation-and-what-you-can-do/
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/one-child-policy
- http://statisticstimes.com/demographics/countries-by-population-density.php
- https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming