If you haven't noticed by now, it’s been long since we hit the 7 billion mark for the number of humans on Earth. While this does sound crazy exciting, it also has some negative effects on our planet. When our species first began, there were no more than ten thousand human beings in Africa. Now we are at more than seven billion; all on the same Earth and all using the same amount of area. The trend of exponential growth for the human race has brought a lot of problems to Earth itself. The giant amount that humans leads to decreasing resources and livable areas. With this, we need to understand the problems that the growing population brings to the planet as well as fixing or just reducing the impacts of these problems.
Having a bigger population seems like a good thing at first, the more the better right? Although we do have more new ideas from more people for more innovations, the price of too many people being in one place is not worth it. Having many people in one defined area uses more resources than the earth can replenish. If we look today, the amount of fossil fuels we are using is the highest it has ever been in all of human history. Fossil fuels are not replenishable, so once they are gone, there is no more. Humans contribute to a huge amount of the carbon going into the atmosphere, resulting in global warming. The problem is that with over 7 billion people affecting the world, global warming is increasing so fast that it is theorized to be irreversible. More people also means more space taken up. With more and more humans creating more and more cities, there is less arable land for people to live in.
With these problems, many of us ponder how to solve such a seemingly complicated and humungous problem. Luckily, there are a bunch of smaller tasks each of us can do to reduce the impact of our population size. Reducing our population size is possible with careful planning if everyone takes small steps. If we reduce our population size, we will collectively use fewer resources and impact our world less negatively. To do this, the world needs to bring average births and amount of children to a lower standard. By having fewer kids, the rate at which our population dramatically slows down. Having programs that teach safe sex and providing necessary tools to do so can help prevent unwanted births that unfortunately increase birth rates around the world. By doing these simple steps, our population can decrease in the future and begin to mitigate the problem of overpopulation.