World population expected to hit 8 billion on Tuesday

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It took an estimated 500,000 years for the Earth’s population to reach 1 billion.

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On Tuesday, the planet’s population is expected to reach 8 billion according to a United Nations model, just 12 years after reaching 7 billion.

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The UN says the unprecedented growth is due to a gradual increase in human life expectancy due to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medical care. It is also a result of high and persistent fertility rates in some countries.

According to the United Nations, it will take 15 years (by 2037) to reach 9 billion people, indicating that the overall rate of global population growth is slowing.

Nathan Pelletier is an industrial ecologist and economist at UBC Okanagan whose research focuses on food system sustainability.

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He says that even with eight billion people on this planet, there is enough food for everyone. But even in a wealthy country like Canada, food insecurity is a serious crisis.

And it’s a crisis that must be addressed urgently, as it can lead to the spread and spread of social unrest, Peletier said.

“Access to adequate quality and quantity of food is a basic human right currently denied to hundreds of millions of people,” Pelletier said.

Pelletier said meeting this challenge will require a focus on how food is distributed so that everyone has access to healthy food.

“It’s not as simple as saying we have to produce more food. In fact, we produce enough food to feed 8 billion people. I’m not very good at making it accessible,” he said.

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1 in 6 households — 5.8 million people, including 1.4 million children — will be food insecure by 2021 PROOF latest report.

“The first thing we have to do is deal with food waste,” Pelletier said.

An estimated 40 to 50 percent of the calories produced end up not being food for humans, Pelletier says. And more than 60% of food waste comes from homes, according to WRAP, a UK-based global climate action NGO.

Awareness of this issue has grown in recent years, and it was a top discussion at Metro Vancouver’s 2022 Zero Waste Conference.

Pelletier predicted that future plans to address population growth will include reducing livestock and shifting to vertical farming, as well as growing crops that are more resilient to climate change.

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British Columbia has already said it wants to move to a vertical farming model and announced plans earlier this year. Change BC’s Farmland Conservation Rules to allow vertical farm building proponents to pursue plans without first seeking permission from the Farmland Commission.

“I suspect many horticultural products will be produced on vertical farms closer to cities, as it becomes increasingly impractical to grow these crops outdoors,” Pelletier said. said. “That is, unless we make really concerted efforts to limit climate change.”

sustainable solution

Fellow Alex Boston With the Morris J. Wosk Center for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University As populations grow, states need to develop housing stock that reflects demographics and focus on climate-resilient efforts such as increasing urban canopy and protecting agricultural land, said the Executive Director of Renewable Cities. said.

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Much of B.C.’s food comes from California and Florida, two of the most vulnerable U.S. states to the impacts of climate change, Boston said. And that, combined with the rapid loss of farmland in B.C., should be a major concern when it comes to food security, he added.

“If we continue to lose farmland at the same rate as during the last census, we’ll be out of farmland after mid-century,” said Boston.

He agreed that the government should consider new technologies such as vertical farming, but also that urban planning such as gardens should include more food production and increase tree canopy.

“This is not only important in terms of food production, but it is really important in terms of resilience to the impacts of climate change,” he said.

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He refers to the climate crisis-related heat dome that occurred in June 2021, killing hundreds of people, most of them vulnerable senior citizens. After the disaster, the BC coroner recommended increasing tree canopy along with cooling for all new buildings.

Similarly, the fastest growing households in British Columbia are one-person households, followed by two-person households, which will influence how housing is developed, Boston said. He said the most sustainable solution is to look to homes that have already been built.

He said it also needs to be able to create social connections, such as helping people living in single-family homes rent out suites, or programs that connect seniors with trusted tenants. .

“You can develop a relationship with the tenants and seniors. They were able to give you a discount on the rent by providing some basic services. Or walk the dog or do some basic yard work.

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In 2020, global population growth fell below 1% annually for the first time since 1950. united nations.

Rapid population growth is also contributing to environmental degradation, including global warming, climate change, deforestation and loss of biodiversity, the global agency said. This is something all countries have to deal with.

According to a United Nations policy brief, global wildlife populations have declined by two-thirds between 1970 and 2020, while populations have more than doubled. Since 1990, an estimated 420 million hectares of forest have been lost to conversion to other land uses, reducing the world’s primary forest area by more than 80 million hectares.

ticrawford@postmedia.com

—Using files from Derrick Penner and The National Post