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Peer Reviewed
The Environmental Impacts of Overpopulation
This is a peer-reviewed entry published in Encyclopedia Journal, full entry can be found at 10.3390/encyclopedia5020045

Overpopulation’s central role in environmental degradation is intermittently challenged. This article assesses the impact of mounting demographic pressures on six critical global sustainability challenges: deforestation, climate change, biodiversity loss, fishery depletion, water scarcity, and soil degradation. By synthesizing findings from hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, the article offers a comprehensive review of the effects of expanding human populations on the most pressing current environmental problems. Although the rate of population growth worldwide is slowing, human numbers are expected to continue increasing on Earth until the end of the century. Current research confirms that overpopulation causes substantial and potentially irreversible environmental impacts that cannot be ignored if international sustainability policy is to be effective.

environment overpopulation biodiversity climate change soil depletion overfishing desertification water scarcity demography
Unlimited growth on a planet with finite resources is impossible [1]. During the 1960s and 1970s, overpopulation was a prominent concern among environmentalists, for many, a paramount priority. Rapidly expanding global population placed unsustainable pressure on natural resources, exacerbating environmental degradation, and increasing poverty [2]. Books like Paul Ehrlich’s best-seller The Population Bomb (1968) [3] and the Limits to Growth (1972) [4] emphasized the dire consequences of unchecked population increase, prompting widespread advocacy for population control measures. In a 1971 seminal article in Science, Ehrlich along with John Holdren posited the “Impact Law”, which identified population as one of the three essential contributors to environmental impacts, along with affluence and technology [5].
More than fifty years after ecologists first highlighted the dominant role of population growth in environmental degradation, many experts continue to see overpopulation as the single greatest driver of ecological damage on Earth [6][7][8]. For instance, in a 2017 “Warning to Humanity”—cosigned by more scientists than any journal article in history—15,364 researchers cautioned that rapid population growth was a “primary driver” behind many ecological and even societal threats. They cautioned, “By failing to adequately limit population growth… humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperiled biosphere” [9].
By the 1980s and 1990s, however, the focus of environmental organizations began to shift away from overpopulation as a central issue in the global sustainability agenda [10]. This change was driven by several factors, including criticisms that overpopulation rhetoric often targeted the Global South, unfairly blaming developing countries for global environmental harm [11]. The 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) marked a significant turning point in the global population discourse [12]. The conference decision prioritized women’s rights, reproductive health and development [13] over explicit efforts to reduce population growth [14]. After decades of opposition to international family planning initiatives [15], the Vatican played a crucial role in shaping the outcomes of the conference, strongly resisting any language that could be interpreted as endorsing contraception, abortion or coercive population control measures [16].
The Vatican’s influence was bolstered by alliances with conservative Muslim, Catholic-majority and developing countries, who shared concerns about the ethical implications of population control policies [17]. Feminist organizations also advocated for a shift in orientation, calling for a focus on women’s empowerment, reproductive rights, and access to education and healthcare, rather than on population reduction per se [18]. The resulting retreat among many environmentalists and green NGOs from meaningful engagement with scientific studies substantiating the causal relationship between human population pressure and environmental degradation [19] proved to be enduring.
In 2013, British political scientist Diane Coole identified five reasons for the historic decline in advocacy for sustainable population policies and why so many environmental activists came to “disavow the population question” [20]. Among these were fatalism regarding the inevitability of demographic growth; false optimism that high birth rates would eventually resolve themselves; and skepticism about whether population growth was even a problem at all. Chief among Coole’s explanations was “population shaming”, where supporters of sustainable population strategies were accused of racism or embracing eugenics [21].
Advocates for demographic stability and sustainable population policies were aggressively assailed as not really being interested in protecting the environment, but rather disingenuously seeking to constrain reproduction amongst peoples of color [22]. For instance, when the Sierra Club debated whether to take a stronger stance on U.S. immigration in the 1990s due to its environmental ramifications, critics reproached the NGO for veering into nativist or racist territory [23]. Such hostile claims continue to the present [24]. In the face of such malicious allegations, many environmentalists lacked the resolve to stand their ground [25]. Instead, environmental organizations found it politically expedient to pivot and concentrate on the role of consumption patterns, particularly in wealthy nations, as a central driver of environmental degradation, downplaying the role of population [26].
While consistently acknowledging the important role of consumption in environmental degradation, sustainable population advocates continue to advance evidence-based arguments that most environmental problems are ultimately driven by population increase [27]. Using a metaphor popularized by Stanford ecology professor Paul Ehrlich, they perceive population and consumption as two sides of a rectangle: regardless of which side is longer, the total area—representing aggregate environmental damage—remains unaffected [28].
While Western environmentalism may have lowered the profile of overpopulation in the sustainability discourse, the ecological implications of demographic growth have not changed. The rate of population increase has slowed since its peak in the 1960s, but the absolute number of people on the planet continues to rise [29]. Between 2011 and 2023, human population grew by one billion in just twelve years, compared to the fifteen years it took to increase from 3 to 4 billion between 1960 and 1975 [30]. The United Nations projects that the world’s population will continue to incrementally increase, from 8.2 billion in 2024 to 10.2 billion by the mid-2080s, stabilizing around the end of the 21st century [31]. Environmental damage functions, however, are increasingly recognized as non-linear [32][33]. It is not surprising, therefore, that the magnitude of the associated adverse environmental impacts is also expected to intensify [34][35].
UN estimates, like other projections envisaging an imminent end to global population growth [36], involve many optimistic assumptions about future fertility declines in the Global South, assumptions that are challenged as excessively sanguine by many demographers [37]. Demographic models predicting stability consistently ignore waning support for family planning that threatens global fertility declines [38]. In challenging UN demographic methodology, critics chide the historic timidity of the United Nations in confronting controversial demographic issues. For instance, the UN Sustainable Development Goals do not even mention population stabilization as an explicit objective, focusing instead on other causes of environmental degradation [39].
For many countries, the local consequences of overpopulation remain too acute to ignore. With varying degrees of success, nations have implemented effective policies designed to stabilize their populations. For example, voluntary population policies in Asian countries like Singapore [40], Thailand [41], Iran [42] and Bangladesh [43] have reduced fertility levels to replacement levels or below [44]. Cognizant of past famines and concerned about the consequences of rapid population growth on societal wellbeing, from 1980 to 2016 China implemented a draconian “one-child policy” that faced widespread international condemnation for human rights violations [45]. In Sub-Saharan Africa, several countries, such as Botswana [46], Rwanda [47] and Kenya [48], have seen meaningful drops in population growth rates by improving access to contraception and encouraging smaller families [49]. Education, particularly for girls and women, is also highly correlated with lower fertility rates [50]. Greater demographic stability makes sustainability challenges more tractable.
These examples demonstrate that with sufficient political will and carefully designed interventions, rapid population growth and its environmental consequences can be mitigated. But these policy trends are hardly universal. In the absence of a global sustainable population consensus, during recent decades demographic pressures have continued to undermine environmental progress. This suggests that international initiatives must once again prioritize population stabilization to address the root causes of ecological degradation.
The present review of research published in recent years highlights the severe environmental impacts of population pressures on a broad range of media. These include six of the world’s most pressing ecological challenges: deforestation, climate change, biodiversity loss, fishery depletion, water scarcity, and soil degradation. The implication is unequivocal: meaningful ecological progress cannot be achieved without prioritizing population stability as a cornerstone of international and domestic policy.
It is duly noted that population pressures play an important role in many other local ecological challenges as well: air pollution [51][52][53], solid waste [54][55][56], noise pollution [57][58][59], inland water availability [60][61][62], water contamination [63][64][65], natural resource shortages [66][67][68], ocean acidification [69][70][71], transport of exotic animals through increased global trade [72][73][74], eutrophication [75][76] and many other environmental insults are driven by the demands of expanding human populations. Moreover, demographic pressures are directly associated with a host of other social maladies, from psychological stress [77][78][79], depression [80][81] and violence [82][83][84][85][86] to traffic congestion [87][88][89] and disease [90][91][92][93][94]. Rapid population pressures contribute to massive food insecurity [95][96], with one in eleven people globally and one in five in Africa still facing hunger [97] or routinely suffering from insufficient calories [98][99]. In most future scenarios that include population growth, food shortages are expected to remain a global scourge through 2050 [100].
Nonetheless, the six aforementioned global environmental problems on which this article focuses are unique because their association with population increase is so significant. Moreover, frequently, the damage incurred is irreversible or unlikely to be ameliorated, as long as rapid demographic growth continues. The clear consensus emerging from current research confirms the severe environmental consequences caused by overpopulation.

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