SPA NSW media release – 7 billion
HOW MANY MORE PEOPLE CAN THE PLANET SUSTAIN?
Global Population Exceeds 7 Billion
Monday 31 October: Today the world’s population reaches a record seven billion people. While this milestone may be viewed by some as a testament to humankind’s ingenuity and technical achievement, Lobby group Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) shares its concerns that continuous population growth will have disastrous consequences for the welfare of future generations.
Nick Car, NSW spokesperson for Sustainable Population Australia is calling for a limit to global population growth or else our children and their children risk being unable to meet future food, energy and water demands. Aged 29 and expecting his first child in next May, Car says that he is very concerned about what kind of future his children will have in a world that has 10 billion people and even in Australia with a projected 36 million. With a career background in agricultural research and time working at the CSIRO, he is particularly worried that population growth may eventually outstrip our ability to produce food. Now running his own IT business, he joined SPA because of his concerns that Australia’s population was growing so rapidly that our children and grandchildren will face hardship in meeting the food, water and energy requirements for the growing population predicted.
“When you look at everything that’s required to produce food – good soil, fertilizer, reliable rainfall, oil for production and transport, you realize that a shortage of any of them could make us extremely vulnerable and the more people we have, the more vulnerable we will be.”
The likelihood of shortages on these resources by the time his own child will reach middle age, has motivated Car to call for urgent action to stabilise the world’s population as the only viable plan to give humanity a chance of having security and prosperity in the future.
He is particularly angry at people who suggest that our success in handling population growth in the past means that we will always be able to cope with more in the future, calling these ideas “dangerous, delusion and intellectually indefensible.” He also expresses concern about the effect expanding human numbers are having upon nature. “I don’t want my children to grow up into a future where the natural world has been beaten back into a corner with only token amounts of flora and fauna remaining”. Car is clear about how we should go about achieving his desire to stabilize the world’s population as soon as possible: “All the evidence suggests that when you give people education and ensuring all women have access to modern family planning methods, birth rates fall and the global population eventually stabilises.”
Instead of being given a government-funded ‘baby bonus’ for his new child Car says he would prefer to see the Australian government increase its foreign aid, giving targeted assistance to countries that are struggling to cope with unmanageable levels of population growth:
“This is an Australian problem as well as an international one. If people start running out of food they will soon start jumping on boats to get to places that have more food. It may make the number of refugee boat arrivals this year look like a trickle.”
ENDS
For media interviews please contact Nick Car:
0438 227 737, (02) 8407 9911 or email nsw@population.org.au