The global human population switched from depensation to compensation in the 1950s
Prof Corey J. A. Bradshaw
Global Ecology | Partuyarta Ngadluku Wardli Kuu, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia
February 2024
Accompanies preprint:
Bradshaw, CJA, MA Judge, DT Blumstein, PR Ehrlich, ANZ Dasgupta, M Wackernagel, LJZ Weeda, PN Le Souëf. Global human population ended self-facilitation in the 1950s. SSRN doi:10.2139/ssrn.4788003
and paper in review:
Bradshaw, CJA, MA Judge, DT Blumstein, PR Ehrlich, ANZ Dasgupta, M Wackernagel, LJZ Weeda, PN Le Souëf. Earth has surpassed its sustainable human carrying capacity. Environmental Research Letters In review
The ecological concept of human carrying capacity is necessarily complicated because human beings are the “ultimate ecosystem engineers” who moderate the environment for their benefit. For at least the last few hundred years, human ingenuity, access to massive stocks of fossil fuels, and technological development have driven facilitation whereby increasing human abundance has promoted higher population growth rates. However, this positive relationship broke down during the 1950s, and by 1962, the global human population entered a phase where the growth rate consistently declined as population increased. The onset of this negative phase occurred 8 years before a global biocapacity deficit began in 1970. The onset of the negative phase also varies regionally, with the lowest-income and highest fertility regions entering this phase later than higher-income regions. A Ricker logistic model fitted to the negative phase predicts that the global population could reach 11.7 to 12.4 billion people between 2067 and 2076. The same model fitted to the facilitation phase predicts a maximum population of 2.5 billion people that Earth might be able to maintain. The negative phase also correlates strongly with the trend in global temperature anomaly, ecological footprint, and total emissions, with more of its variation explained by increasing population size rather than increasing per-capita consumption. The Earth cannot sustain the future human population, or even today’s, without a major overhaul of socio-cultural practices for using land, water, energy, biodiversity, and other resources.
humanpoptransitionR1.R(main code)new_lmer_AIC_tables3.R(source functions)r.squared.R(source functions)
- agestructure1950_2021.csv: United Nations Population Division age structure data from 1950-2021
- AGO.csv: United Nations Population Division data for Angola
- BDI.csv: United Nations Population Division data for Burundi
- BFA.csv: United Nations Population Division data for Burkina Faso
- china1950-2023.csv: United Nations Population Division data for China
- COD.csv: United Nations Population Division data for Republic of Congo
- consump.csv: global consumption data, global emissions data, and global ecological footprint data
- continent.country2.csv: country-region categories
- demog.csv: regional demographic time series (United Nations Population Division data)
- gdppcPPP.csv: purchasing power parity-corrected gross domestic product per country time series (World Bank data)
- GMB.csv: United Nations Population Division data for Gambia
- MLI.csv: United Nations Population Division data for Mali
- Nchild-01.csv: number of children aged 0-1 years from 1950-2021 (United Nations Population Division)
- NER.csv: United Nations Population Division data for Niger
- NGA.csv: United Nations Population Division data for Nigeria
- Npre1950.csv: historical estimates of global population size
- popregions.csv: population data by major global region (United Nations Population Division)
- popXtempanom.csv: world population size relative to global temperature anomaly (HadCRUT.05.0.3.0)
- TCD.csv: United Nations Population Division data for Chad
- UGA.csv: United Nations Population Division data for Uganda
- UNpop.csv: United Nations Population Division data
- worldpophist.csv: historical United Nations Population Division data
boot, dismo, gbm, ggplot2, gridExtra, lmtest,performance, plotrix, sjPlot, tmvnsim,truncnorm, wCorr
