‘Sustainability’ the only answer to over-population

A planet-wide conflict that claimed as many lives as the first two world wars combined would hardly make any difference to the world’s exploding population, according to a study.

Population growth is so out of control that even stringent restrictions on childbirth, disastrous pandemics or a third world war would not make it manageable by the turn of the next century, the researchers claim.

Rather than reducing the number of people on the planet, cutting the consumption of natural resources and enhanced recycling would have a better chance of achieving effective sustainability gains in the next 85 years, they said. Prof Barry Brook, who co-led the study at the University of Adelaide, Australia, said: “We were surprised that a five-year WW3 scenario, mimicking the same proportion of people killed in the first and second world wars combined, barely registered a blip on the human population trajectory this century.”