People and the Planet

By J. Sulston, M. Rumsby, N. Green. Environmental and Resource Economics, 2013

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The starting point for this special issue is the Royal Society’s report ’People and the planet’.1 In this introductory paper we recapitulate some of the points covered by the report, which is broadly concerned with the achievement of sustainable human development on a finite planet, and its main conclusions. The report concludes that sustainable development will come about not simply through advances in science and technology, important as they are, but also through changes in the prevailing socioeconomic system. This is the domain of environmental and resource economics. The 21st century is a critical period for people and the planet. The global population reached 7 billion during 2011 and is likely to reach between 8 and 11 billion by 2050 (Fig. 1). In one sense this is a success story for earth’s dominant species, but at the same time human impact on the Earth is now raising grave concerns. The earth’s capacity to meet human needs (let alone those of its other inhabitants) is finite. Yet in the richest parts of the world material consumption is far above the level that can be sustained for everyone in a population of seven billion or more. This is in contrast to the world’s 1.3 billion poorest people who need to consume more in order to be raised out of extreme poverty. Despite a decline in fertility almost everywhere, global population is still growing at a rate of 1 billion in 12 years because of the demographic momentum inherent in a large cohort of young people. The highest fertility rates are now seen primarily in the least developed countries (Fig. 2). The global rate of population growth is already declining, but the poorest countries are neither experiencing nor benefiting from this decline. A key message to come out of the People and the planet report is that population and consumption must not be treated as separate issues. Human impact on the earth comes from the combination of increasing global population and increasing per capita material consumption

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/46bd3bf083339cdea782c2e1a2fc749ff3285e7c

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