CONTENTS

1. Inroduction...................................................................................................................................... 2
1.1 What is sustainable development? ......................................................................................... 2
1.2 World Population Growth ....................................................................................................... 2
2. Population growth and Sustainable Development ......................................................................... 3
2.1 Impacts to the Environment ................................................................................................... 3
2.2 Impacts on economic development ....................................................................................... 4
3. Population policy ............................................................................................................................ 6
4. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 8

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1. INRODUCTION

1.1What is sustainable development?

"Sustainable development" is the processes by which people satisfy their needs and improve their
quality of life in the present while safeguarding the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs. For most people, a better quality of life means a higher standard of living, usually measured
in terms of income level and uses of resources and technology. Inherent in the concept of
sustainable development is the principle of equity: in order to achieve economic and environmental
goals, social goals – such as universal access to education, health care and economic opportunity –
must also be achieved.

1.2 World Population Growth

More people have been added to the Earth's population in the 20th century than at any other time
in human history. In 1900, just 100 years ago, the world's human population numbered two billion
people. Today, the total human population has grown three times as large and is now over six billion
people.The rate of population growth has gone up rapidly in the past two centuries, from .0015%
before 1800 to 1.2% today. At this rate, the Earth adds one billion more people every 14 years. If this
continues, the world's population will double in the next century, nearing 12 billion in the year 2100.
Our planet truly is becoming a more crowded place to live.

What happened over the past 200 years to create such a rapid surge in the number of people living
in the world? There are a few simple ideas that lie behind these trends. Before 1900, many children
who were born did not reach adulthood so they never had their own children. In America and
Europe, young children died of many diseases that we now immunize against such as diphtheria,
tetanus, measles, pneumonia and whooping cough. In the 20th century, as these diseases became
less common, more children lived to adulthood. The result was that more children than ever before
were born and lived and had their own children, all of which increased the size of the world's
population. And thus one predator of humans began to recede.

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At the same time, people are also living longer. For example, in the U.S. the average life expectancy
in 1950 was 57 years. Now people, on average, can expect to live 77 years. People living longer
increase the population size, and this means that more people are living together on Earth at the
same time.

In the latter part of the 20th century, people in other parts of the world -- Africa, Asia, South
America and the Middle East -- who had traditionally lost many children to disease, began to catch
up with the developed world. People in these parts of the world began to adopt health practices
such as immunizing children that also allowed more children to live. As these children grew to
adulthood they too started their own families and this also has contributed to the world's current
population growth

Most European countries have low growth rates. In the United Kingdom, the rate is 0.2%, in
Germany it's 0.0%, and in France, 0.4%. Germany's zero rate of growth includes a natural increase of
-0.2%, without immigration, Germany would be shrinking, like the Czech Republic. The Czech
Republic and some other European countries' growth rate is actually negative (on average, women
in the Czech Republic give birth to 1.2 children, which is below the number to yield zero population
growth, approximately 2.1 children). The Czech Republic's natural growth rate of -0.1 cannot be used
to determine doubling time because the population is actually shrinking in size.

Many Asian and African countries have high growth rates. Afghanistan has a current growth rate of
4.8%, representing a doubling time of 14.5 years! If Afghanistan's growth rate remained the same
then the population of 30 million would become 60 million in 2020, 120 million in 2035, 280 million
in 2049, 560 million in 2064, and 1.12 billion in 2078.

Increased population growth generally represents problems for a country - it means increased need
for food, infrastructure, and services. These are expenses that most high-growth countries have little
ability to provide today, let alone if population rises dramatically.

2. POPULATION GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Population issues have no trouble seeing the connection between growth rates and sustainable
development. It seems obvious that sustainability cannot be achieved with a continuously growing
population. Despite wide variability in definitions of sustainability, the concept must include the
enduring capacity of a given ecosystem to support the demands that its human population imposes
on it--for example, in providing food, clean water, shelter, energy, and other essential services. Yet it
is remarkable that so many discussions of environmental and energy policy are devoid of any
mention of population issues

2.1 Impacts to the Environment

At any level of development, human impact on the environment is a function of population size, per
capita consumption and the environmental damage caused by the technology used to produce what
is consumed. People in developed countries have the greatest impact on the global environment.
The 20 per cent of the world’s people living in the highest income countries are responsible for 86
per cent of total private consumption compared with the poorest 20 per cent, who account for a
mere 1.3 per cent. The richest fifth account for 53 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions, the poorest
fifth, 3 per cent. A child born in the industrial world adds more to consumption and pollution levels
in one lifetime than do 30-50 children born in developing countries. As living standards rise in
developing countries, the environmental consequences of population growth will be amplified with

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ever-increasing numbers of people aspiring, justifiably, to "live better." Rather than assign blame in
the debate over environmental challenges, both current and new consumers need to realize and
address the consequences of their levels of consumption.

The difficulty in facing these questions is that the answers are neither simple nor complete. The
most obvious environmental impacts are usually local, such as the disappearance of forests and
associated watersheds, soil erosion or desertification or the brown haze hovering over cities. Less
obvious are phenomena such as the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the global decline
of fish catches or the pollution of land and water resources with industrial and hazardous wastes.
Further complicating the issue is the lack of data to help researchers determine trends and
accurately measure what is happening, a reflection of the relative youth of the environmental
sciences, disciplines that require expertise across research areas.

Some trends are already obvious, however, particularly with regard to the three "renewable"
resources on which human life depends: land, water and air. Each year, an estimated 5 to 7 million
hectares of agricultural lands are lost to accelerating land degradation and rapid urbanization. A
sixth of the world’s land area -- nearly 2 billion hectares -- is now degraded as a result of overgrazing
and poor farming practices. Another 16 to 20 million hectares of tropical forests and woodlands are
lost each year.

Water is a finite resource. There is no more water on earth now than there was 2,000 years ago
when the population was less than 3 per cent of its current size. During this century, while world
population has tripled, water withdrawals have increased by over six times. Today, with water
scarcity defined as less than 1,000 cubic metres per person per year, 458 million people in 31
countries face water shortages. By 2025, close to 3 billion people in 48 countries will be affected by
critical water shortages for all or part of the year.

The pollution and increasing scarcity of renewable fresh water supplies also threaten human health
and welfare. An estimated 1.1 billion people were without access to clean drinking water in 1994;
2.8 billion people lacked access to sanitation services. Waterborne diseases infect some 250 million
people each year, about 10 million of whom die. The poor are most exposed to fumes and polluted
rivers and least able to protect themselves. Of the estimated 2.7 million deaths each year from air
pollution, 2.2 million are from indoor pollution and 80 per cent of the victims are rural poor in
developing countries.

Today, climate experts worry that continued increases in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 –
already 28 per cent higher than pre-industrial levels – could result in sufficient temperature
increases to raise sea levels around the world and seriously disrupt agricultural production. The
impact of population growth in rural areas can push communities into unsustainable practices, such
as the burning and razing of tropical forests in order to plant crops, over-cropping – and subsequent
depletion – of fragile arable land and over-pumping of groundwater.

So, the growing population can results many harmful effects to the environment and overutilization
of environmental resources. This can lead to become our planet as a not suitable place to live for the
future generation.

2.2 Impacts on economic development

Any population growth rate of 0.5% or more is impoverishing. Population growth increases demand,
however, it also floods the workforce with excess workers thereby depressing wages and increasing
poverty. We cannot correlate the effect of birth rates/population growth rates with the economic

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growth for the year of the births. We have to time-lag the correlation about 20 years to look at the
impact of all those births entering the workforce. We saw this very clearly as Baby Boomers flooded
into the work force in the 1970's & 80's, whereas the low birth rates of the Depression and great loss
of life in World War 2 created low workforce growth rates in the 1950's, when incomes were
relatively high compared to cost of living, and one income could readily support a family.

Between 4+ million births per year since the early 1980's plus very high immigration levels, we have
a terrible glut of workforce entrants and excess labor which depresses earnings and keeps demand --
therefore costs -- very high. Therefore poverty is increasing dramatically, and we have far more
people trying to live off credit. The credit bubble has burst, but we have not reduced birth rates or
decreased immigration. Economic development is maximized when there is a relative shortage of
labor. It generates high levels of invention, labor-saving devices, and therefore massive increases in
productivity, etc. E.g. switch from elevator operators to self-service elevators in the 1950's; use of
the computer (invented in the 1930's) took off in the 1950's. Increasing productivity keeps prices
low, wages high and expands prosperity more widely through the population.

For the past 50 years, food production has kept ahead of rising demand. Today, in a world where
two-thirds of the people depend on rice, wheat and/or maize as their staple food, 80 countries
cannot produce enough food to feed their own populations from existing land and water resources.
According to FAO (Food & Agriculture Organization), world food production will have to double in
order to provide food security for 7.8 billion people expected by 2025.

Compounding the environmental challenges facing us all are the needs of more than roughly 1.3
billion people living in absolute poverty. Without higher standards of living, one-fifth of the world’s
people – and their children – will continue to suffer malnutrition, disease and illiteracy.

A favourable international economic climate, featuring improved and reliable access to developed
country markets, debt reduction and an increased flow of financial resources from North to South,
by way of both foreign direct investment and aid for development, is vital to the success of efforts to
alleviate poverty.

Education, basic health care – including family planning and reproductive health care -- and access to
land, credit and employment are all important to poverty alleviation and, therefore, crucial to long-
term economic and environmental sustainability. Above all, however, ensuring sustainability will
require people to make changes, in both the way they think about their environment and how they
live in it. In particular, the high consumption, high-waste lifestyle of the top-earning fifth of the
world’s population, most of whom live in the North, cannot continue without imperiling the right of
the lowest- earning fifth of the world’s population to satisfy their basic needs.

However we can identify that GDP per capita has exponentially increased over last 50 years,
although population has continuously increased. This is due to acceleration of productivity as a
result of technological developments. This GDP acceleration has not evenly distributed all over the
world, technically and economical advanced countries have highest GDP growth rates but
developing countries which have less technological developments do not get the advantage of this
accelerating economic development. Following graph shows the relationship between population
growth and GDP growth.

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 3. POPULATION POLICY
An effective population policy along with an achievable implementation programme is a vital
instrument for the development of many nations. In a modern view demographic variables infuse all
aspects of economic and social life. That makes it essential as population policy is managed by all the
relevant sectors of the economy and society which are equitably served by it.

To most citizens and policymakers, population is a non-issue. It has been for most of the past three
decades as citizens and policymakers alike paid little attention to growth in the human population. It
is also clear that the low salience of population issues, in combination with a disturbing lack of public
knowledge of basic demographic realities, will greatly constrain development of population policies
that are essential to realize the goal of sustainability. The conclusion for environmentalists and other
citizens concerned about establishing a sustainable future should be clear. They need to raise the
visibility of population issues, educate the public and policymakers on the facts, and help to design
and promote public policies that can slow and eventually halt population growth around the world.

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Population policies can help both rich and poor nations attain a better future than these
demographic projections suggest is otherwise likely. They can do so through providing the means for
women to avoid unwanted pregnancies--for example, by establishing and funding voluntary family
planning programs to provide information and contraceptive services that can help individuals
achieve desired family size. Meeting those needs alone could sharply reduce the birth rate in nations
where access to such programs falls below current demand. Such programs can also appreciably
reduce the number of abortions performed annually.

Aside from direct assistance through family planning programs, other policy initiatives have proven
to be effective. They were strongly endorsed at the 1994 United Nations International Conference
on Population and Development held in Cairo, Egypt. These include population education,
improvement in infant, child, and maternal health care; basic education, especially for young girls;
promotion of gender equity; and improvement in the status of women--in part to empower them to
make decisions related to reproductive choice.

National and global population policies, whether family planning or other measures, depend on
having a well-informed and active electorate that can bring much needed political pressure to bear
on public officials who otherwise tend to ignore these issues. For many people, the easiest way to
understand the implications of a growing national and world population is to focus on their local
communities and sustainability issues. At the local level, where concern about urban sprawl has
grown sharply, there should be plenty of opportunities for the kind of public involvement and
interaction that can help to reconcile conflicting positions and forge a community consensus on a
desirable future.

The governments of most Asian countries have used incentives or disincentives as a population
policy strategy. In the 1960s the Indian government offered money or gifts to acceptors at mass
sterilization campaigns. In the late 1960s through the 1970s Singapore enacted legislation penalizing
large families, including delivery fees for the third and subsequent children, denying them
government housing and a choice of schools. There were also rewards to small families. During the
late 1970s China started its own 1-child policy with the objective of limiting the population to 1.2
billion by the year 2000. Incentives included monthly welfare or nutritional allowances; priorities in
housing, education, and medical care; and expanded maternity benefits. Disincentives included
fines, deductions from salaries, withdrawal of maternity leave, health coverage, and allowances.
There have also been charges of forced sterilization and abortion, which led to the US termination of
funding to UNFPA (United Nations population Fund) because of its support of China's program.
Incentives and disincentives raise the ethical issue of how to balance governmental actions
attempting to control population growth against individual reproductive rights. In practice abuse has
been rampant; therefore voluntary choice in childbearing should not be infringed upon no matter
how strong the government interest is. To this effect some standards are proposed:

1) Governments restricting reproductive choice have the burden of demonstrating that continued
population growth threatens the survival of society.

2) The people who are subject to the policy must agree that it is valid.

3) Measures that are less restrictive of voluntary reproductive choice should be tried and proved
ineffective before more restrictive measures are employed.

4) The burdens of restrictive measures should be distributed equitably.

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5) Penalties that directly punish children for being a high order child should not be used at all.

Whether global, national, or local, however, only a knowledgeable and active citizenry can help to
maintain the population policies that we now have, design and adopt new policies as needed, and
ensure that the funds necessary to implement them are provided. The solutions cannot come from
national governments alone, nor are they likely to given existing disagreements. But a community-
based movement has enormous potential to move population issues to a more visible position on
the policy agenda across the country and to help bring about essential national and international
actions as well

4. CONCLUSION
If every country made a commitment to population stabilization and resource conservation, the
world would be better able to meet the challenges of sustainable development. Practicing
sustainable development requires a combination of wise public investment, effective natural
resource management, cleaner agricultural and industrial technologies, less pollution, and slower
population growth. A sustainable development approach to population issues focuses on the long
term. A sustainable development approach reflects good policy development, which involves
identifying the problem, assessing options for addressing the problem, considering interconnected
issues, and taking account of long-term pros and cons.

A sustainable development approach also enables different perspectives to be drawn out from
situations that may at first appear problematic. For example, slow growth in population size could be
regarded as an opportunity to use resources that would otherwise be diverted to developing new
suburbs or addressing associated social problems, and using them to improve education and training
services, address environmental concerns and raise the general quality of life.

Worries about a “population bomb” may have lessened as fertility rates have fallen, but the world’s
population is projected to continue expanding until the middle of the century. Just when it stabilizes
and thus the level at which it stabilizes will have a powerful effect on living standards and the global
environment. As population size continues to reach levels never before experienced, and per capita
consumption rises, the environment hangs in the balance

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