The conclusion is clear: we live on credit. For several decades, humanity has largely exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity, this invisible limit beyond which nature can no longer regenerate what we consume. According to a team of researchers from Flinders University in Australia, the imbalance is so great that we would already have “crossed the wall” without even realizing it.
Yet, for centuries, the machine seemed to run smoothly. Until the 1950s, population growth went hand in hand with technological innovation. The more mouths there were to feed, the more human intelligence redoubled its efforts to produce more. But this engine stalled after the Second World War with the advent of the baby boom. From 1962, a shift took place, adding more individuals no longer boosted progress, but began to weigh on the system.
It was in the journal Environmental Research Letters that these conclusions were published, shedding light on an inconvenient truth. Corey Bradshaw, lead author of the study, explains to us that our current survival of 8.3 billion people is an artificial miracle based on the massive use of fossil fuels. “The true sustainable population level is much lower and closer to what the world supported in the mid-twentieth century“, he says. Basically, we have used oil and gas as a drug to ignore the natural limits of our environment.
The end of an illusion?
Today, this doping agent is starting to run out and its side effects (climate disruption) are staring us in the face, explains IFL Science. If we follow the experts’ calculations, a stable and thriving population would be around 2.5 billion people. We are far from it. The world population is also expected to continue to climb to a peak of 11.7 or 12.4 billion people around the 2060s, before experiencing a historic decline.
This is not a prediction of the end of the world, but a warning signal about our way of life that specialists are making. The study obviously does not recommend reducing the population by force, but pushes us to radically rethink our relationship with the Earth and our way of consuming its resources. It’s no longer just a matter of sorting waste, but of transforming the way we manage energy, water and our food to avoid a major collapse.
Corey Bradshaw warns: “Humanity’s current trajectory will push societies into deeper crises unless we make major changes“. The planet’s life support systems are already under pressure. If we do not change software quickly, billions of people will face increasing energy, food or climate instability.
But how can we keep a humanity record on a planet with finite resources? The answer undoubtedly lies in sobriety chosen rather than suffered. The challenge is immense, but it is also a unique opportunity to reinvent a world where comfort is no longer achieved at the expense of living things. The future of our grandchildren depends on the decisions we make today.
