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ics imply that the total population will eventually decrease to zero the actual carrying capacity of the environment may fluctuate in the real world which means that practically msy may actually vary from year to year 42 43 44 annual sustainable yields and maximum average yield attempt to take this into account citation needed other similar concepts are optimum sustainable yield and maximum economic yield these are both harvest rates below msy 45 46 these calculations are used to determine fishing quotas citation needed humans edit see also human overpopulation and overshoot population graph of human population from 10 000 bc to 2000 ad it shows exponential rise in world population that has taken place since the end of the seventeenth century world population since 1800 in billions data from the united nations projections human carrying capacity is a function of how people live and the technology at their disposal the two great economic revolutions that marked human history up to 1900 the agricultural and industrial revolutions greatly increased the earth s human carrying capacity allowing human population to grow from 5 to 10 million people in 10 000 bce to 1 5 billion in 1900 47 the immense technological improvements of the past 100 years in applied chemistry physics computing genetic engineering and more have further increased earth s human carrying capacity at least in the short term without the haber bosch process for fixing nitrogen modern agriculture could not support 8 billion people 48 without the green revolution of the 1950s and 60s famine might have culled large numbers of people in poorer countries during the last three decades of the twentieth century 49 recent technological successes however have come at grave environmental costs climate change ocean acidification and the huge dead zones at the mouths of many of world s great rivers are a function of the scale of contemporary agriculture 50 and the many other demands 8 billion people make on the planet 51 scientists now speak of humanity exceeding or threatening to exceed 9 planetary boundaries for safe use of the biosphere 52 humanity s unprecedented ecological impacts threaten to degrade the ecosystem services that people and the rest of life depend on potentially decreasing earth s human carrying capacity 53 the signs that we have crossed this threshold are increasing 54 55 the fact that degrading earth s essential services is obviously possible and happening in some cases suggests that 8 billion people may be above earth s human carrying capacity but human carrying capacity is always a function of a certain number of people living a certain way 56 57 this was encapsulated by paul ehrlich and james holdren s 1972 ipat equation environmental impact i population p x affluence a x the technologies used to accommodate human demands t 58 ipat has found spectacular confirmation in recent decades within climate science where the kaya identity for explaining changes in co 2 emissions is essentially ipat with two technology factors broken out for ease of use 59 this suggests to technological optimists that new technological discoveries or the deployment of existing ones could continue to increase earth s human carrying capacity as it has in the past 60 yet technology has unexpected side effects as we have seen with stratospheric ozone depletion excessive nitrogen deposition in the world s rivers and bays and global climate change 53 5 this suggests that 8 billion people may be sustainable for a few generations but not over the long term and the term carrying capacity implies a population that is sustainable indefinitely it is possible too that efforts to anticipate and manage the impacts of powerful new technologies or to divide up the efforts needed to keep global ecological impacts within sustainable bounds among more than 200 nations all pursuing their own self interest may prove too complicated to achieve over the long haul 61 one issue with applying carrying capacity to any species is that ecosystems are not constant and change over time therefore changing the resources available research has shown that sometimes the presence of human populations can increase local biodiversity demonstrating that human habitation does not always lead to deforestation and decreased biodiversity world population supported with and without synthetic nitrogen fertilizers another issue to consider when applying carrying capacity especially to humans is that measuring food resources is arbitrary this is due to choosing what to consider e g whether or not to include plants that are not available every year how to classify what is considered e g classifying edible plants that are not usually eaten as food resources or not and determining if caloric values or nutritional values are privileged additional layers to this for humans are their cultural differences in culinary preferences e g some consume flying termites and individual choices on what to invest their labor into e g fishing vs farming both of which vary over time this leads to the need to determine whether or not to include all food resources or only those the population considered will actually consume measuring water resources carrying capacity is likewise highly arbitrary choices in temporal resolution e g monthly versus annual spatial resolution e g how subbasins are delineated and whether to include human activities such as inter basin water transfers and reservoir storage in the assessment can all lead to vastly different wrcc results 62 carrying capacity measurements over large areas also assumes homogeneity in the resources available but this does not account for how resources and access to them can greatly vary within regions and populations they also assume that the populations in the region only rely on that region s resources even though humans exchange resources with others from other regions and there are few if any isolated populations variations in standards of living which directly impact resource consumption are also not taken into account these issues show that while there are limits to resources a more complex model of how humans interact with their ecosystem needs to be used to understand them 63 recent warnings that humanity may have exceeded earth s carrying capacity edit between 1900 and 2020 earth s human population increased from 1 6 billion to 7 8 billion a 390 increase 64 these successes greatly increased human resource demands generating significant environmental degradation 65 millennium ecosystem assessment edit the millennium ecosystem assessment mea of 2005 was a massive collaborative effort to assess the state of earth s ecosystems involving more than 1 300 experts worldwide 65 their first two of four main findings were the following the first finding is over the past 50 years humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food fresh water timber fiber and fuel this has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on earth 66 the second of the four main findings is the changes that have been made to ecosystems have contributed to substantial net gains in human well being and economic development but these gains have been achieved at growing costs in the form of the degradation of many ecosystem services increased risks of nonlinear changes and the exacerbation of poverty for some groups of people these problems unless addressed will substantially diminish the benefits that future generations obtain from ecosystems 66 according to the mea these unprecedented environmental changes threaten to reduce the earth s long term human carrying capacity the degradation of ecosystem services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this 21st century they write serving as a barrier to improving the lives of poor people around the world 66 ecological footprint accounting edit ecological footprint accounting measures the demands people make on nature and compares them to available supplies for both individual countries and the world as a whole 67 developed originally by mathis wackernagel and william rees it has been refined and applied in a variety of contexts over the years by global footprint network gfn on the demand side the ecological footprint measures how fast a population uses resources and generates wastes with a focus on five main areas carbon emissions or carbon footprint land devoted to direct settlement timber and paper use food and fiber use and seafood consumption 68 it converts these into per capita or total hectares used on the supply side national or global biocapacity represents the productivity of ecological assets in a particular nation or the world as a whole this includes cropland grazing land forest land fishing grounds and built up land 68 again the various metrics to capture biocapacity are translated into the single term of hectares of available land as global footprint network gfn states each city state or nation s ecological footprint can be compared to its biocapacity or that of the world if a population s ecological footprint exceeds the region s biocapacity that region runs a biocapacity deficit its demand for the goods and services that its land and seas can provide fruits and vegetables meat fish wood cotton for clothing and carbon dioxide absorption exceeds what the region s ecosystems can regenerate in more popular communications this is called an ecological deficit a region in ecological deficit meets demand by importing liquidating its own ecological assets such as overfishing and or emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere if a region s biocapacity exceeds its ecological footprint it has a biocapacity reserve 68 according to the gfn s calculations humanity has been using resources and generating wastes in excess of sustainability since approximately 1970 currently humanity use earth s resources at approximately 170 of capacity 69 70 this implies that humanity is well over earth s human carrying capacity for our current levels of affluence and technology use according to global footprint network in 2024 earth overshoot day fell on august 1 earth overshoot day marks the date when humanity has exhausted nature s budget for the year for the rest of the year we are maintaining our ecological deficit by drawing down local resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we are operating in overshoot 71 the concept of ecological overshoot can be seen as equivalent to exceeding human carrying capacity 72 67 according to the most recent calculations from global footprint network most of the world s residents live in countries in ecological overshoot see the map on the right nations living within their ecological means shaded green or in ecological overshoot shaded red in 2022 this includes countries with dense populations such as china india and the philippines countries with high per capita consumption and resource use france germany and saudi arabia and countries with both high per capita consumption and large numbers of people japan the united kingdom and the united states 68 planetary boundaries framework edit according to its developers the planetary boundaries framework defines a safe operating space for humanity based on the intrinsic biophysical processes that regulate the stability of the earth system 52 human civilization has evolved in the relative stability of the holocene epoch thus crossing planetary boundaries for safe levels of atmospheric carbon ocean acidity or one of the other stated boundaries could send the global ecosystem spiraling into novel conditions that are less hospitable to life possibly reducing global human carrying capacity this framework developed in an article published in 2009 in nature 73 and then updated in two articles published in 2015 in science 52 and in 2018 in pnas 74 identifies nine stressors of planetary support systems that need to stay within critical limits to preserve stable and safe biospheric conditions see figure below climate change and biodiversity loss are seen as especially crucial since on their own they could push the earth system out of the holocene state transitions between time periods in earth history have often been delineated by substantial shifts in climate the biosphere or both 52 estimates of how the different control variables for seven of nine planetary boundaries have changed from 1950 to present the green shaded polygon represents the safe operating space the scientific consensus is that humanity has exceeded three to five of the nine planetary boundaries for safe use of the biosphere and is pressing hard on several more 74 by itself crossing one of the planetary boundaries does not prove humanity has exceeded earth s human carrying capacity perhaps technological improvements or clever management might reduce this stressor and bring us back within the biosphere s safe operating space but when several boundaries are crossed it becomes harder to argue that carrying capacity has not been breached 75 because fewer people helps reduce all nine planetary stressors the more boundaries are crossed the clearer it appears that reducing human numbers is part of what is needed to get back within a safe operating space 76 77 population growth regularly tops the list of causes of humanity s increasing impact on the natural environment in earth system science literature 78 recently planetary boundaries developer will steffen and co authors ranked global population change as the leading indicator of the influence of socio economic trends on the functioning of the earth system in the modern era post 1750 79 see also edit biocapacity estimate of an ecosystem s production of certain biological materials ecological footprint individual s or a group s human demand on nature ecological overshoot demands on ecosystem exceeding regeneration earth overshoot day calculated calendar date when humanity s yearly consumption exceeds earth s replenishment overpopulation when a population of a species exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment overshoot population phenomenon in which populations temporarily exceed carrying capacity of environment planetary boundaries limits to safe impact on the earth ecology population bottleneck sharp reduction in the size of a population population ecology field of ecology population growth increase in the number of individuals in a population r k selection theory ecological theory concerning the selection of life history traits further reading edit kin cheng sok et al predicting earth s carrying capacity of human population as the predator and the natural resources as the prey in the modified lotka volterra equations with time dependent parameters arxiv preprint arxiv 1904 05002 2019 references edit 1 2 chapman eric j byron carrie j january 2018 the flexible application of carrying capacity in ecology ...