ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE 1

(SCIE 102)

ASYNCHRONOUS MODULE (WEEK 7)

HUMAN POPULATION

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:

1. Define Population and Human ecology;
2. Discuss the factors influencing human population growth; and
3. Explain the impacts of human population growth in the environment.

INTRODUCTION

Take a minute and think about all of the different people you interact with in a given day.
For most people, this would include family, friends, co-workers, and strangers. A population is
often described as a group of individuals of the same species that inhabit the same area.
Therefore, all of the people you encounter each day are part of your population.

What is Population?

 It is composed of individuals belonging to the same

species living in the same area.
 Organisms of the same species interbreed with one
another and produce live, fertile offsprings.
 A population in an ecological sense is a group of
organisms, of the same species, living in the same
geographic area at the same time. Individual
members of the same population can either interact
directly or may interact with the dispersing other Figure 1. Population
members of the same population.

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POPULATION ECOLOGY

Population ecology studies dynamics of species’ populations and how these populations
interact with the environment. Most organisms live in groups (flocks, schools, nests, etc.) and
living in groups provides several advantages:

 Increased protection from predators

 Increase chances for mating
 Division of labor

Population ecology plays an important role in the development of the field of conservation biology,
especially in predicting the long-term probability of species persisting in a given habitat.

Ecologists are interested in the growth of a population, fluctuations in population size, the
spread of the population, and any other interactions with the population or between it and other
populations.

Ecologists may also study different groups of populations that are not located in the same area
but interact at certain times throughout the year. If this group of populations are the same species
and can still interbreed, they are a metapopulation.

 Metapopulation- Individuals within a metapopulation may migrate from one population to

the other, which can help stabilize the size of the overall population.

Characteristics of Population

The characteristics of a population are shaped by the interactions between individuals and
their environments on both ecological and evolutionary time scale, and natural selection can
modify these characteristics in a population.

Ecologists describe the organisms of populations in several different ways. The

distribution of a population is the total area that population covers. The abundance of a
population is the number of individuals within that population. Ecologists may also define the
number of individuals within a certain space, which is the density of the population.

Ecologists also identify the age structure or sex ratio of a population. The age structure describes
the number of individuals in different age classes, while the sex ratio describes the proportion of
males to females in that population.

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Thus, population ecology also goes beyond consideration of just population parameters
and additionally considers how the characteristics of individual organisms impact on population
parameters.

HUMAN ECOLOGY

Human ecology arise because the behaviour of organisms is so complex. Humans interact
intimately with other organisms, since humans started to interact with environments.

The Human Population

On a larger scale, you can think of all humans on Earth as the human population. As of
2011, the human population exceeded seven billion people! Although the human population has
been around this size for most of us for our entire lives.

Around 10,000 years ago, before the invention of agriculture, it is estimated that the
human population was only a few million people worldwide. After the invention of agriculture, the
human population began to grow slowly until the 1900s, when a rapid increase in the human
population began. With increases in technology and medical advances, the human population
was able to reach three billion in the 1960s. Since that time, the population has more than doubled
and continues to increase.

Now that we know how the human population has changed over time, it is important to investigate
the factors that have influenced these changes. There are many factors that can influence the
size of a population. Some factors result in an increase in the population, while others can cause
a decrease in population size.

Factors that Increase Population Size

There are two factors that result in an increase in the size of a population:

1. Natality- which is the number of individuals that are added to a population over a period
of time due to reproduction. This term is often used to describe reproductive rates over a
variety of time periods.

The term most commonly used when describing natality in the human population is 'birth
rate'. Birth rate is the number of individuals born per 1,000 individuals per year. An example of

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birth rate would be if a population of 5,000 people resulted in the birth of 50 children in a year,
which would yield a birth rate of ten individuals per 1,000 per year. Birth rate is often reported as
a percentage of the population. In 2010, the birth rate in the United States was 1.38%, which is
considerably lower than the birth rate in many developing countries. For example, in 2010, the
birth rate in Ethiopia was 4.34%. Birth rates can vary a great deal by region and can have drastic
effects on the overall human population.

2. Immigration is the migration of an individual into a place. When an individual immigrates

to a new location, they increase the population within that area. Immigration is a factor
that can influence the size of a specific population of humans, but does not influence the
overall human population.

For example, if an individual decides to move from Manila to New York, they would be
immigrating to the United States of America and would therefore increase the population of the
U.S.A. Their immigration would have no influence on the overall human population because no
matter where they live, they are included in the size of the human population. The only way that
immigration could influence the overall human population on Earth is if humans lived on a different
planet and immigrated to Earth. In that scenario, the human population on Earth would increase.

Factors that Decrease Population Size

Now that we have learned about the factors that increase population size, let's investigate
the factors that have the opposite influence.

1. Mortality is the number of individual deaths in a population over a period of time. In terms
of the human population, mortality is often described as the death rate, which is the
number of individuals that die per 1,000 individuals per year.

Death rates are often used to describe how many individuals die in specific age groups.
For example, the death rate of infants is often an important statistic to investigate when looking
at changes in the population. Similar to birth rates, the death rate is also often described as a
percentage of the population. In 2010, the death rate for infants in the Philippines was 0.6%,
while in India the infant death rate was 7.1%.

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2. Emigration is the migration of an individual from a place. When an individual emigrates

from a location, they decrease the population within that area. If you think back on the
immigration example, with the person moving from Manila to New York, we said that the
person was immigrating to the United States. Using this same example, the person would
also be emigrating from the Philippines. Similar to immigration, emigration also does not
have an influence on the overall human population on Earth because people are not
leaving Earth to move to a new planet.

The Population Growth Rate

Although there are factors that either increase or decrease the human population, when
these factors are combined, they represent the overall population growth rate. The population
growth rate is the rate at which the population changes in size. The rate of change is determined
by subtracting the number of people that leave the population, through death or emigration, from
the number of individuals that enter the population, through birth or immigration. This calculation
makes it possible to combine all of the statistics that influence population size and to determine
how the overall population is changing over time. The population growth rate can result in either
a positive or negative rate depending on the factors.

Population growth occurs when available resources exceed the number of individuals able to
exploit them. Reproduction is rapid, and death rates are low, producing a net increase in the
population size.

Figure 2. The World Population in 2018 Cartogram

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POPULATION GROWTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

Based on https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ the human species around the

world has reached about 7.8 billion and according to the Population Reference Bureau we are
currently growing at an annual rate of 1.12%, which means we’re adding about 83 million more
people to the planet every year. Humans are now one of the most numerous vertebrate species
on the earth. Also, we are widely distributed and manifestly have a greater global environmental
impact than any other species.

As Earth’s human population continues to grow, as technology advances and severe,

despite improvement in some areas (Bueno, 2019). Environmental Science impacts, in turn, affect
human health and well-being.

A few of the major challenges of humans in the themes of Environmental Science:

The Human Population is growing at a rapid rate

Human population has grown exponentially to the current population of 7.8 billion people.
No one knows how many people the earth can support indefinitely. No one knows how much
resource consumption per person will seriously degrade the planet’s natural capital. However,
humanity’s large and expanding ecological footprints and the resulting widespread natural capital
are disturbing warning signs.

Affluence and unsustainable resource use

The lifestyles of many of the world’s expanding population of consumers are built on
growing affluence or resource consumption per person because more people earn higher
incomes. As total resource consumption increase per person, it will also do environmental
degradation, resource waste and pollution unless individuals can live more sustainably.

On the other hand, affluence can allow for widespread and better education which can
lead people to become more concerned about environmental quality. Also, it makes more money
available for developing technologies to reduce pollution, environmental degradation and
resource waste.

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Poverty has harmful environmental and health effects

Poverty is a condition in which people lack enough money to fulfil their basic needs for
food, water, shelter, health care and education. It causes a number of harmful environmental and
health effects. The daily lives of the poorest people canter on getting enough needs to survive.
These individuals are too desperate for short-term survival to worry about long-term
environmental quality and sustainability. Thus, collectively they may degrade forests, topsoil and
grasslands and deplete fisheries and wildlife populations to stay alive.

Poverty does not always lead to environmental degradation. Some of the poor increase
their beneficial environmental impact by planting and nurturing trees and conserving the soil that
they depend on as a part of their short-term and long-term survival strategy.

Environmental degradation can have severe health effects on the poor:

 Life-threatening malnutirition- a lack of protein and other nutrients needed for good health.

 Illness- caused by limited access to adequate sanitation facilities and are forced to use
backyards, alleys, ditches and streams. As a result, one of every nine of the world’s people
gets water for drinking, washing and cooking from sources polluted by human and animal
feces.

 Indoor air pollution- mostly from the smoke from open fires or poorly vented stoves used
for heating and cooking, this form of indoor air pollution kills about 4.3 million people a
year in less-developed countries.

Prices of goods and services rarely include their harmful environmental and health costs

Basic cause of environmental problems has to do with how the marketplace prices goods
and services. Companies using goods for consumers generally are not required to pay for most
of the harmful environmental and health costs of supplying such goods. For example, timber
companies pay the cost of clear-cutting forests but do not pay for the resulting environmental
degradation and loss of wildlife habitat. Because the primary goal of a company is to maximize
profits for its owners or stockholders, so it is not inclined to add these costs to its prices voluntarily.

Another problem can arise when governments give companies subsidies such as tax
breaks and payments to assist them with using resources to run their businesses. This helps to

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create jobs and stimulate economies, but environmentally harmful subsidies encourage depletion
and degradation of resources.

Economists propose two ways to implement and support the principles of sustainability:

1. One is to shift form environmentally harmful government subsidies to environmentally

beneficial subsidies that sustain or restore our resources.

For example, environmentally beneficial subsidies are those that reward sustainable forest
management, replanting degraded lands, sustainable agriculture and increased use of
wind and solar power to produce electricity.

2. Implement full-cost pricing is to increase taxes on pollution and wastes and reduce taxes
on income and wealth.

People are increasingly isolated from nature

Today, more than half of the world’s people and three out of four people in more –
developed countries lived in urban areas, and this shift from rural to urban living is continuing at
a rapid pace. Urban environments and the increasing use of cellphones, computers and other
electronic devices are isolating people, especially children, from the natural world.

It has led to a phenomenon called nature deficit disorder. People with this disorder may
suffer from stress, anxiety, depression and other problems. Research indicates that experiencing
nature can reduce stress, improve mental abilities, activate one’s imagination and creativity and
lead to better health. It also shows that when people are isolated from nature, they are less likely
to act in ways that will lessen their harmful environmental impacts, because they are not aware
of their impacts.

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