World needs to stabilise population and cut consumption, says Royal Society
Economic and environmental catastrophes unavoidable unless rich countries cut consumption and global population stabilises
World population will reach 9 billion by 2050. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
John Vidal, environment editor Wednesday 25 April 2012
World population needs to be stabilised quickly and high consumption in rich countries rapidly reduced to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills", warns a major report from the Royal Society. [ http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/people-planet/ ]
Contraception must be offered to all women who want it and consumption cut to reduce inequality, says the study published on Thursday, which was chaired by Nobel prize-winning biologist Sir John Sulston. [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2002/oct/09/genetics.science ]
The assessment of humanity's prospects in the next 100 years, which has taken 21 months to complete, argues strongly that to achieve long and healthy lives for all 9 billion people expected to be living in 2050, the twin issues of population and consumption must be pushed to the top of political and economic agendas. Both issues have been largely ignored by politicians and played down by environment and development groups for 20 years, the report says.
"The number of people living on the planet has never been higher, their levels of consumption are unprecedented and vast changes are taking place in the environment. We can choose to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption ... or we can choose to do nothing and to drift into a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills leading to a more unequal and inhospitable future", it says.
At today's rate of population increase developing countries will have to build the equivalent of a city of a million people every five days from now to 2050, says the report. "Global population growth is inevitable for the next few decades. By 2050, it is projected that today's population of 7 billion will have grown by 2.3 billion, the equivalent of a new China and an India."
But the sheer number of people on earth is not as important as their inequality and how much they consume, said Jules Pretty, one of the working group of 22 who produced the report. "In material terms it will be necessary for most developed countries to abstain from certain sorts of consumption, such as CO2. You do not need to be consuming so much to have a long and healthy life. We cannot conceive of a world that is going to be as unequal as it is now. We must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than a $1.25 a day out of absolute poverty. It's critical to slow population growth in those countries which cannot keep up with services."
The report gives the example of Niger in West Africa which has increased life expectancy in the past 30 years but is doubling population every 20 years. "Even assuming its total fertility rate (Tfr) falls to 3.9 by 2050, which may be optimistic, the population will grow from 15.5 to 55.5 million by 2050. A future in which population increase outstrips the production of food [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/food ] and other necessities of life is a real possibility for Niger. It is difficult to see a bright future for the country without sharp reductions in fertility and population growth together with increased investment in health and education," it said.
Most of the global population growth in the next century will come from the 48 least developed countries, of which 32 are in Africa, said Ekliya Zulu, one of the authors and president of the Union for African Population studies. "Taking Africa alone, the population will increase by 2 billion this century. If we fail and fertility levels do not go down to 2.1, (from 4.7 now) the population [there] may reach 5.3 billion. When we slow down population growth we empower women and provide more money for least developed countries to invest in education. The majority of women want fewer children. The demand to reduce fertility is there", he said.
The authors acknowledge that it would take time and massive political commitment to shift consumption patterns in rich countries, but believe that providing contraception would cost comparatively little. "To supply all the world's unmet family planning needs would be $6-7bn a year. It's not much. It's an extremely good investment, extremely affordable. To not provide family planning is an infringement of human rights", said Sulston.
The authors declined to put a figure on sustainable population, saying it depended on lifestyle choices and consumption. But they warned that without urgent action humanity would be in deep trouble. "The pressure on a finite planet will make us radically change human activity", said Pretty.
"The planet has sufficient resources to sustain 9 billion, but we can only ensure a sustainable future for all if we address grossly unequal levels of consumption. Fairly redistributing the lion's share of the earth's resources consumed by the richest 10% would bring development so that infant mortality rates are reduced, many more people are educated and women are empowered to determine their family size – all of which will bring down birth rates", said an Oxfam spokeswoman.
Antarctic: Grand Canyon-sized rift 'speeding ice melt'
The interaction between ice and sea is complex, but key to understanding sea level rise
The shape of the rift is shown in a radar cross-section of ice and underlying rock
The nearby Pine Island Glacier appears set to calve a 900 sq km iceberg
A rift in the Antarctic rock as deep as the Grand Canyon is increasing ice melt from the continent, researchers say.
By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News 25 July 2012 Last updated at 13:11 ET
A UK team found the Ferrigno rift using ice-penetrating radar, and showed it to be about 1.5km (1 mile) deep.
Antarctica [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/ecozones/Antarctic_ecozone ] is home to a geological rift system where new crust is being formed, meaning the eastern and western halves of the continent are slowly separating.
The Ferrigno rift lies close to the Pine Island Glacier where Nasa scientists found a giant crack last year; but the newly discovered feature is not thought to be influencing the "Pig", as it is known.
The rift lies beneath the Ferrigno Ice Stream on a stretch of coast so remote that it has only been visited once previously.
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) project revisited the area two years ago in the person of Aberdeen University glaciologist Robert Bingham.
The plan was to make ground observations that could link to the satellite data showing unexpectedly pronounced ice loss from the area.
The team towed ice-penetrating radar kit behind a snowmobile, traversing a total of about 2,500km (1,500 miles).
"What we found is that lying beneath the ice there is a large valley, parts of which are approximately a mile deeper than the surrounding landscape," said Dr Bingham.
"If you stripped away all of the ice here today, you'd see a feature every bit as dramatic as the huge rift valleys you see in Africa and in size as significant as the [US] Grand Canyon.
"This is at odds with the flat ice surface that we were driving across - without these measurements we would never have known it was there."
The Ferrigno rift extends into a seabed trough, called Belgica.
The scientists suggest that during Ice Ages, when sea levels were much lower than at present, the rift would have channelled a major ice stream through the trough.
Now, they suggest, the roles are reversed, with the walls of the Belgica trough channelling relatively warm sea water back to the ice edge.
Penetrating between the Antarctic bedrock and the ice that lies on it and lubricating the join, the water allows ice to flow faster into the sea.
"We know that the ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is governed by delivery of warm water, and that the warm water is coming along channels that were previously scoured by glaciers," said Prof David Vaughan of BAS.
"So the geology and the present rate of ice loss are intricately linked, and they feed back - if you have fast-flowing ice, that delivers ice to the edge where it can be impacted by warm water, and warm water makes the ice flow faster," he told BBC News.
Prof Vaughan doubted there would be more such features around the West Antarctic coast, though in the remoter still regions of the east, it was a possibility.
Ice loss from West Antarctica is believed to contribute about 10% to global sea level rise.
But how the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets respond to warmer temperatures is the biggest unknown by far in trying to predict how fast the waters will rise over the coming century and beyond.
A total melt of either sheet would raise sea levels globally by several metres.
East Antarctica, by contrast, is so cold that the ice is projected to remain solid for centuries.
"Since the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report [in 2007], which highlighted uncertainties connected with ice sheets, almost every significant piece of research we've produced has increased the significance of the ocean for West Antarctica and Greenland," said Prof Vaughan.
"There are changes in precipitation now and in future; but the really big, potentially fast, changes are connected to the oceans, and the goal for us is to model that system."
Scientists believe they have found the world's oldest ice core, which will provide information on future climate change.
The discovery, made in eastern Antarctica, is 1.5 million years old, almost twice the age of the previous oldest sample.
It follows five years of research and field work, involving scientists from 22 countries.
Dr Tas van Ommen, from the Australian Antarctic Division, says airborne radars were used to shine light through the ice and reveal its thickness.
"There are large areas of east Antarctica where we really didn't know anything about the ice thickness or at least very little. There were big voids in the coverage," he said.
"We've had a cooperative project between the US and the UK using old DC-3 aircraft flying out of Casey station and mapping bedrock underneath ice over a very large area called Aurora Basin.
"We used information we had from existing ice cores, estimates of the heat coming up from the earth, the geothermal heat, then some of the team ran very detailed models of how the ice flows to look at how old the ice would be."
The ice core is about three kilometres thick.
Dr van Ommen says it could hold valuable information about the earth's climate and greenhouse gases.
"An old ice core, over a million years old, would tell us more about how the climate responds to CO2 levels, and we can then use that information to understand how it is going to change in the future," he said.
Scientists say the discovery is also significant for future ice-core exploration.
The study's lead author is Hubertus Fischer, a climate physics professor from the University of Bern in Switzerland.
He says a deep drilling project in Antarctica could commence within three to five years.
"This time would also be needed to plan the drilling logistically and create the funding for such an exciting large-scale international project," he said.
The research findings have been published in the journal Climate of the Past.
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