NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, CALICUT

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION

Population Growth and Environment quality

EVS Assignment I

Semester: S6 || Batch: B || Year: 2013

SUBMITTED BY,

SURAJNATH P.

SWATHY U. LAL

TAUSIF AHMED

TED KURIAKOSE RAJAN

THEJUS GORE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We are greatly privileged to thank our faculty in charge, Mr. Anuj Verma for giving us such an

opportunity to do our report on the topic Population Growth and Environment quality. We think

that we could provide an awareness to atleast some of our friends through our report and

survey.

INTRODUCTION

There is a long history of study and debate about the interactions between population growth

and the environment. According to the British thinker Malthus, for example, a growing population

exerts pressure on agricultural land, causing environmental degradation, and forcing the

cultivation of land of poorer and poorer quality. This environmental degradation ultimately

reduces agricultural yields and food availability, causes famines and diseases and death,

thereby reducing the rate of population growth.

Population growth, because it can place increased pressure on the assimilative capacity of the

environment, is also seen as a major cause of air, water, and solid-waste pollution. The result,

Malthus theorised, is an equilibrium population that enjoys low levels of both income and

environmental quality. Malthus suggested positive and preventative forced control of human

population, along with abolition of poor laws.

The American thinker Henry George, for example, observed with his characteristic piquancy in

dismissing Malthus: "Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens; but the more jayhawks, the

fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens." Similarly, the American

economist Julian Lincoln Simon criticised Malthus's theory.He noted that the facts of human

history have proven the predictions of Malthus and of the Neo-Malthusians to be flawed.

Massive geometric population growth in the 20th century did not result in a Malthusian

catastrophe. The possible reasons include: increase in human knowledge, rapid increases in

productivity, innovation and application of knowledge, general improvements in farming

methods (industrial agriculture), mechanisation of work (tractors), the introduction of high-yield

varieties of wheat and other plants (Green Revolution), the use of pesticides to control crop pests.

More recent scholarly articles concede that while there is no question that population growth

may contribute to environmental degradation, its effects can be modified by economic growth

and modern technology. Research in environmental economics has uncovered a relationship

between environmental quality, measured by ambient concentrations of air pollutants and per

capita income. This so-called environmental Kuznets curve shows environmental quality

worsening up until about $5,000 of per capita income on purchasing parity basis, and improving

thereafter. The key requirement, for this to be true, is continued adoption of technology and

scientific management of resources, continued increases in productivity in every economic

sector, entrepreneurial innovation and economic expansion.

How about our resources?

Many basic resources are strained by our current population:

Food: one billion people, one out of every seven people alive, go to bed hungry.Every day,

25,000 people die of malnutrition and hunger-related diseases. Almost 18,000 of them are

children under 5 years old. Food production and distribution could catch up if our population

stopped growing and dropped to a sustainable level.

Water Shortages: About one billion people lack access to sufficient water for consumption,

agriculture and sanitation. Aquifers are being depleted faster than they can be replenished.

Melting glaciers threaten the water supply for billions. Wouldn't an ethic of population reduction

now, make people's lives much better? India is recognised as has having major issues

with water pollution, predominately due to untreated sewerage. Rivers such as the Ganges,

the Yamuna and Mithi Rivers, all flowing through highly populated areas, are all heavily polluted.

Water supply and sanitation continue to be inadequate, despite long-standing efforts by the

various levels of government and communities at improving coverage.

Air quality: In many regions of the country, childhood

asthma rates have risen dramatically in the past 20

years. The problems are not limited to the industrialized

countries with their automobiles and factories. Children

in undeveloped countries, where people depend on

burning wood and dung for their heat and cooking, are

also at risk.

A rural stove using biomass cakes, fuelwood and trash as cooking fuel. Surveys suggest over

100 million households in India use such stoves (chullahs) every day, 2–3 times a day. It is a

major source of air pollution in India, and produces smoke and numerous indoor air pollutants at

concentrations 5 times higher than coal.

Air pollution in India is a serious issue with the major sources being fuelwood and biomass

burning, fuel adulteration, vehicle emission and traffic congestion. India is the world's largest

consumer of fuelwood, agricultural waste and biomass for energy purposes. Traditional fuel

(fuelwood, crop residue and dung cake) dominates domestic energy use in rural India and

accounts for about 90% of the total. In urban areas, this traditional fuel constitutes about 24% of

the total. Fuel wood, agri waste and biomass cake burning releases over 165 million tonnes of

combustion products into India's indoor and outdoor air every year. Vehicle emissions are

another source of air pollution. Vehicle emissions are worsened by fuel adulteration and poor

fuel combustion efficiencies from traffic congestion and low density of quality, high speed road

network per 1000 people.

On per capita basis, India is a small emitter of carbon dioxide greenhouse. In 2009, IEA

estimates that it emitted about 1.4 tons of gas per person, in comparison to the United States’

17 tons per person, and a world average of 5.3 tons per person. However, India was the third

largest emitter of total carbon dioxide in 2009 at 1.65 Gt per year, after China (6.9 Gt per year)

and the United States (5.2 Gt per year). With 17 percent of world population, India contributed

some 5 percent of human-sourced carbon dioxide emission; compared to China's 24 percent

share.

The Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act was passed in 1981 to regulate air pollution

and there have been some measurable improvements.[25] However, the 2012 Environmental

Performance Index ranked India as having the poorest relative air quality out of 132 countries.

Oil and gas are the underpinnings of what is, historically-speaking, the extremely cheap and

fast transportation that today's huge population depends on. Imagine how we could feed and

supply our huge cities (N.Y., L.A., London, Mexico City, Peking) if all the hauling was done in

horse-drawn carts and sailing ships. Yet there is a finite amount of these fossil fuels in the

Earth, and we have already extracted the easy-pickings in much of the world. The concept

"Peak Oil" means that after some year, perhaps between 2005 and 2020, world oil production

will max out and then start to decline.

"M. King Hubbert created and first used the models behind

peak oil in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil

production would peak between 1965 and 1970. His

logistic model, now called Hubbert peak theory, and its

variants have described with reasonable accuracy the peak

and decline of production from oil wells, fields, regions, and countries"

Hubbert's predictions were accurate for U.S. production, and his prediction for World peak

production was around 2006. There is ample disagreement among experts as to if and when

this will happen, but some experts point to the sharp rises in oil prices since 2007 as an

indication that oil is now passing it's peak production. See these Feb. & March 2010 articlesfor

three current estimates.

As our population and our needs for energy rise, we try to exploit ever more difficult sources of

energy. At least half of the cause of the oil-spill disaster in the Gulf is

May 25: "Let's make no mistake about it,

what is at threat here is our way of life"

Gov. Bobby Jindal

the unprecedented rise in population. If we had only 150 million people in the country, we would

not be rushing to drill wells one mile deep in the ocean before we have developed safe

technologies to do so. Of course our inefficient energy consumption patterns play a part in the

urgency of our needs, and we will have to adjust them over time. But equal efforts must be put

into keeping our population below critical levels.

(news about oil & gas)

Other Fuel: Half the World's population relies on burning wood and dung for cooking and for

heating. More and more people live in these regions and have to travel further each day to

collect wood, and are often exposed to hardship and danger. Articles at National Geographictell

these stories from around the World.

February 01, 2009 THIES, SENEGAL - Adam and 100 Friends launched a region-wide initiative

to provide pregnancy prevention tools called CycleBeads and also to build more energy-efficient

wood stoves that will help address desertification in Senegal.

The Ozone Layer. 50 years ago parents told their kids to go play outside because sunshine is

good for you. Many parents today don't think that way, because the ozone layer of the

atmosphere no longer protects us as well from the harmful ultraviolet (UV) rays of the sun. The

ozone layer is a region of concentrated molecules of a form of oxygen (O3) high above the

earth. Without it there would be no life as we know it here because the UV rays from the sun

can be very harmful. But various chemicals from human industries, especially

chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), destroy ozone over the course of years. Some of the most

dangerous ones have been banned in many countries, which has slowed their rate of increase

in the atmosphere, but they are very long lasting and will continue to deplete the ozone layer for

many years. Currently the layer is being destroyed at a rate of about 4% per decade.

The World's forests are another resource that is strained by our growing population. Not only

are they a source of fuel and building material, recent research has focused on forests' ability to

sequester greenhouse gases and protect us from global warming.

(News about forests and carbon sequestration)

We are straining our Oceans' ability to breed the fish we eat, to sequester carbon, and to

replenish the air. In the 50's and 60's, Florida was a by-word for the abundance of the sea. Now

even some of the "trash fish" of that era are too rare to fish commercially or recreationally. Isn't

this a clarion call that we need to lower our human population so that we can again enjoy the

abundance of nature? [article on Florida seafood, 2010]

June 2011, The Second Annual European Fish Week, organized by Ocean2012, a coalition

hoping to change the Common Fisheries Policy of the European Union.

Even the earth's topsoil itself has limits: most people don't realize that in many regions good

growing soil is limited to the top 6 inches of topsoil and that heavy crop growing is depleting this.

Solid waste pollution

Trash and garbage is a common sight in urban and rural areas of India. It is a major source of

pollution. Indian cities alone generate more than 100 million tons of solid waste a year. Street

corners are piled with trash. Public places and sidewalks are despoiled with filth and litter, rivers

and canals act as garbage dumps. In part, India's garbage crisis is from rising consumption.

India's waste problem also points to a stunning failure of governance.

In 2000, India's Supreme Court directed all Indian cities

to implement a comprehensive waste-management

program that would include household collection of

segregated waste, recycling and composting. These

directions have simply been ignored. No major city

runs a comprehensive program of the kind envisioned

by the Supreme Court.

Indeed, forget waste segregation and recycling directive of the India's Supreme Court, the

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that up to 40 percent of

municipal waste in India remains simply uncollected. Even medical waste, theoretically

controlled by stringent rules that require hospitals to operate incinerators, is routinely dumped

with regular municipal garbage. A recent study found that about half of India's medical waste is

improperly disposed of.

Municipalities in Indian cities and towns have waste

collection employees. However, these are unionised

government workers and their work performance is

neither measured nor monitored.

Some of the few solid waste landfills India has, near its

major cities, are overflowing and poorly managed.

They have become significant sources of greenhouse

emissions and breeding sites for disease vectors such

as flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, rats, and other pests.

In 2011, several Indian cities embarked on waste-to-energy projects of the type in use in

Germany, Switzerland and Japan. For example, New Delhi is implementing two incinerator

projects aimed at turning the city’s trash problem into electricity resource. These plants are

being welcomed for addressing the city’s chronic problems of excess untreated waste and a

shortage of electric power. They are also being welcomed by those who seek to prevent water

pollution, hygiene problems, and eliminate rotting trash that produces potent greenhouse gas

methane. The projects are being opposed by waste collection workers and local unions who

fear changing technology may deprive them of their livelihood and way of life.

Along with waste-to-energy projects, some cities and towns such as Pune, Maharashtra are

introducing competition and the privatization of solid waste collection, street cleaning operations

and bio-mining to dispose the waste. A scientific study suggests public private partnership is, in

Indian context, more useful in solid waste management. According to this study, government

and municipal corporations must encourage PPP-based local management through collection,

transport and segregation and disposal of solid waste.

Noise pollution.

The Supreme Court of India gave a significant verdict on noise pollution in

2005.[31]Unnecessary honking of vehicles makes for a high decibel level of noise in cities. The

use of loudspeakers for political purposes and for

sermons by temples and mosques makes noise

pollution in residential areas worse.

In January 2010, Government of India published norms

of permissible noise levels in urban and rural areas.

Land or Soil pollution

In March 2009, the issue of Uranium poisoning in Punjab came into light, caused by fly

ash ponds of thermal power stations, which reportedly lead to severe birth defects in children in

the Faridkot and Bhatinda districts of PunjabLand pollution in India is due to the poisonous

pesticides and fertilizers as well as corrosion during 2009, the issue of Uranium poisoning in the

state of Punjab came into light, caused by fly ash ponds of thermal power stations, which

reportedly lead to severe birth defects in children in the Faridkot and Bhatinda districts of the

state. Other main reason of this type of pollution is poor garbage disposal services in both the

rural and urban areas of India. It is very common in India to find out a heap of garbage on the

Street corners. .

SOCIAL PROBLEMS

Overcrowding:

I don't know about you, but back in school I heard about experiments on Norway Rats that were

put in overcrowded cages, and suffered many physical and behavioral problems.The same has

been shown for Sitka Deer and for mice. Some folks think this is happening to people too.

It's a common observation that people in small towns are friendlier than people in cities.

However, that's just a hunch for most of us. One recent study from U.C.Irvine found that less

densely packed people are friendlier towards their neighbors. One specific finding was, "For

every 10 percent decrease in population density, the likelihood of residents talking to their

neighbors at least once a week jumps by 10 percent. And involvement in hobby-oriented clubs

increases even more significantly -- by 15 percent for every 10 percent decline in density."

Conflicts and Wars:

Some of the most brutal and persistent conflicts and full-out wars of the past decades include

the stresses of overpopulation and conflict over resources.

- One of these was the genocide in Rwanda. As John M. Swomley wrote in War and the

Population Explosion: Some Ethical Implications, Michael Renner noted that "The Hutu leaders

that planned and carried out the genocide against the Tutsis in 1994 relied strongly on heavily

armed militias who were recruited primarily from the unemployed. These were the people who

had insufficient land to establish and support a family of their own and little prospect of finding

jobs outside agriculture. Their lack of hope for the future and low self esteem were channeled by

the extremists into an orgy of violence against those who supposedly were to blame for these

misfortunes."

- Another source of resource conflict is the Jordan

River,which passes through Syria, Jordan, the West Bank

and Israel. Researchers report that most of the 37 actual

military conflicts over water since 1950 took place between

Israel and its Arab neighbors over the Jordan River and its

tributaries, which supply millions of people with water for

drinking, bathing, and farming. These are desert regions and

the limits on water should guide the population policies of the nations involved.

- The confilict between Pakistan and India are especially sensitive since both highly-populated,

fast growing countries have nuclear weapons. Pakistan's major water source is the glacial

waters of the Indus river, which originates in Indian territory. Further information about the

scarcity of water. Sandia Postel in her 1992 book, The Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity,

indicates that early in the 90's, twenty-six countries with combined population of about 230

million people had water scarcity.

Democracy?

We tend to think that Democracy offers us freedom of choice, but in the last 40 years, we have

had little effective input into most of the political decisions that affect our lives.

Do we have a truly Democratic system when most of us never even meet our Representatives

at the various levels of Government? Even our State and City representatives probably don't

know us and our views about the laws and regulations they pass. The only people most of them

see on a regular basis are the lobbyists, who consequently have a disproportionately large

influence on those laws and regulations.

Democracy and Optimum Population Size: 2500 years ago, Aristotle considered the best

size for a city and concluded that a large increase in population would bring, "certain poverty on

the citizenry, and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil." He considered that a city of over

100,000 people would exclude most citizens from a voice in government.

To get an idea of what the founders of the United States had in mind for our representative

Democracy, at the low end, the Constitution says (Article 1, Section 2) that a Representative to

the House should represent a minimum of 30,000 people. When the Constitution was written,

the United States had a total population of around 2.5 million, and the Constitution allocated 65

Representatives to the 13 states. So each Representative of "the People's House" had about

38,500 constituents. Currently each Representative has 712,650 constituents. It's really a form

of irony today to call it "the People's House" when only wealthy donors and paid lobbyists really

have the ear of your "representatives." What we have now is not Democracy in the sense

intended by the country's founders.

Health and Population density:

Sometimes viruses spread faster in denser populations, which enables deadly mutations to

continue. Doctor Nathan Wolfe, of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, studies virus mutations

which jump from animal to human populations. The AIDS virus is one of the deadliest of these.

On a recent episode of CNN's Planet in Peril, Dr. Wolfe said "Individuals have been infected

with these viruses forever. "What's changed, though, is in the past you had smaller human

populations; viruses would infect them and go extinct. Viruses actually need population density

as fuel."

Bringing it back home – Overcrowding

If you live in a growing metropolitan area, you notice:

The cost of housing is rising significantly. Usually, the denser the city, the higher the cost of

housing and taxes.

The length of your commute: the average

Americanspends over 100 hours per year commuting to and

from work. Not only does this needlessly waste energy (gas or

electricity) but especially it wastes our time. Certainly most of

us have better uses for our time than inching through stop-

and-go traffic. Yet they keep on building housing, without

paying for our wasted time and energy.

Recreation:

The distance you must travel to enjoy natural open spaces. In his 2005 book: "Last Child in the

Woods", Richard Louv introduced the term "Nature deficit disorder" to identify a phenomenon

we all knew existed but couldn't quite articulate. His book has created a national conversation

about the disconnection between children and nature, and his message has galvanized an

international movement. Now, three years later, we have reached a tipping point, with the book

inspiring Leave No Child Inside initiatives throughout the country. Not only adults, but especially

our children, need easy casual access to natural environments.

How about parking in your town? Where we live, the developers with a complicit city council

just build, build, build new housing; block after block of 5 & 6 story buildings. They do not

contain ample parking for their residential units, and they bring many more people into the town.

And the developers have gobbled up several of the convenient down parking lots and turned

them into more gigantic housing blocks, doubly compounding the problem.

Unfortunately for the residents of the city, the outcome for many local businesses has been

termination. We certainly try our best to support local businesses and would strongly prefer to

shop where we can see the merchandise and talk to an informed salesperson, but we won't

fruitlessly try to park, circle the block, and pay to park in a lot 3 blocks from the store. It's much

faster and easier for most residents over the age of 45 to go online and have goods delivered.

Many downtown stores are closed, and either vacent or replaced with fast food shops for the

students who walk through on their way to and from school.

The never-ending new buildings block our views, our light and our air. Twenty years ago,

my town had a sense of space, with views of hills and water from most streets even downtown

and nearby. But thanks to a few developers' and planners' emphasis on "growth", many entire

blocks are now walled in with 5 and 6 story behemoths.

Many of us bemoan these losses and have felt helpless in the face of the financial powers

backing these developments. However, if these developers had to fully pay the rest of us for the

loss of our amenities, they might slow down. There is a way to put a monetary value on the

losses the community has suffered. In an appraisal, a residence with a view and a spacious

surrounding is more valuable than one that is boxed in between high-rise buildings.

The problem so far has been that when an individual buys or sells a single house, they

control what they are willing to spend or what they can ask for that asset. But when a building is

built in town, the 4,000 or 5,000 people per day who pass by it are not compensated for their

loss. However, that is what government can do, and we suggest permitting and licensing fees to

compensate us for our losses. The city can charge this to the developer, and apply the

resulting city income to mitigating these losses by purchasing other sites & the development

rights to other sites.

These are, of course, very rough estimates, and a permitting law would require better

estimation of the current value of spaciousness in the community, and of the foot and vehicle

traffic past any proposed building site.

Personal Freedom

As the problems of higher population density become worse, there are more and more

restrictions placed on our freedoms. You may think some of these are good ideas. Some of

them are, given the circumstances. But they are necessary only in order to accommodate the

larger population that our policies are encouraging.

Putting limits on water consumption. California is mandating that residential users cut back

20% on water consumption. At the same time they mandate that Cities build more and more

housing. That is severely mistaken priorities on the part of our non-representatives.

Cities put limits on driving London charges people to drive into downtown. Annually,

politicians in New York repeatedly propose doing the same thing.

Limits on travel: Traffic and congestion themselves put limits on our freedom to travel when

and where we please. Cities that are overly crowded are not good places to go shopping, for

meals or entertainments, because it is overly difficult to get there and park.

One seemingly small loss of freedom that comes with increased housing density is limits

onburning fires in fireplaces. Laws are passed, neighbors snitch on neighbors, and one more

of life's little pleasures is lost to increasing housing density.

Restricting what people can do on their land: In rural areas, people are freer to build what

they want and do what they want on their own land. When people are packed in close together,

our actions impinge much more directly on our neighbors and more restrictions must be

enacted.

How about other species?

Species Extinction:

We are in the midst of one of the greatest extinctions of other species in the history of the

planet. The last one of this magnitude was over 60 million years ago, when the dinosaurs

became extinct. Yep, we're the cause of this one, as we either kill them off outright, or cover

over their living space with houses, roads and development. Did God give us dominion over this

beautiful garden that we might destroy it, or that we might take care of the glory of creation? It's

our choice.

Habitat destruction:

Our exploding population in the U.S. is converting about 1.2 million acres of rural land per year

to subdivisions, malls, workplaces, roads, parking lots, resorts and the like. The rural area lost to

development between 1982 and 1997 is about equal to the entire land mass of Maine and New

Hampshire combined. (Approximately 39,000 square miles or 25 million acres)

Habitat Fragmentation

Not only is habitat being built over, it is also being divided

into ever-smaller pieces. Habitat fragmentation reduces

species richness and diversity, by isolating a species

population into subpopulations that may be too near the

minimum viable population size, and so die off in each

fragment. A fundamental finding of ecology is thespecies-area relationship, that the size of a

habitat is a primary determinant of the number of species in that habitat. Some critics point out

that we can accommodate more people without so much habitat loss and habitat fragmentation

if we all live in cities or densely packed developments. This is

certainly true, but the point we emphasize here at HowMany.org is

that this is not what most people want. Many people, given the

choice, prefer to live on larger parcels. Many people want larger

yards and gardens, and get-away cabins where you can't see

your neighbors. And we can continue to have these amenities if

we re-energize a vision of a smaller, more sustainable population.

CONCLUSION:

Human population is growing like never before. We are now adding one billion people to the

planet every 12 years. That's about 220,000 per day.

The list of problems this is causing, or at least complicating, is a long one. It includes shortages

of all our resources, war and social conflict, limits on personal freedom, overcrowding and the

health and survival of other species and many more as it has been discussed in the report.

This report summarizes many of these problems, and more could easily be added. While

overpopulation is not the sole cause of these, it is certainly a root cause. We hope to see more

media coverage of this link in the future. We can do something about population, and we can

solve all these problems more easily if we do.

That populatlon growth arises from the same causes that lead to poverty on the one hand. and

environmental degradation and resource alienation on the other hand should be apparent from

the India data which shows that populatlon control programmes have systematically failed

because people In destitution make a rational choice to have more children.

The focus on populatlon as the case of environmental destruction is erroneous at two levels.

Firstly it blames the victims. Secondly by failing to address the economic insecurity and denial of

rights to survival that underlie population growth, policy prescriptions avoid the real problem.

False perceptlons of the problem lead to false solutions. As a result environmental degradation,

poverty creation, and population growth continue unabated.

Giving people rlghts and access to resources to generate sustainable livelihoods is the only

solutlon to arrest environmental destruction and the simultaneous process of population growth.