Ecological Footprint and Sustainable Population
By Denis Garnier, president of Démographie Responsable, Nov 21, 2023
With humanity currently in overshoot, societal changes must be enacted to return to sustainable levels. While either a country’s ecological footprint or population size could be altered to achieve the necessary level, combined efforts on both fronts would be most effective.

A sustainable population corresponds to the total human population that the planet can support without diminishing the health of the biosphere and its ability to support humans, in the same numbers and at the same standard of living, into the future.
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CONCLUSION
We have estimated a ‘sustainable’ world population to lie between 4.9 and 3.1 billion,
depending on the strategy used. Based on this, we can estimate that Earth’s carrying
capacity for humans lies between 3 and 5 billion. Many scenarios can therefore be modelled
based on the GFN database. The idea here is simply to show examples of calculations.
It would be in every country’s interest and in line with international distributive
justice to bring itself into line with its biocapacity by reducing its average individual
footprint and/or its population.

If a sustainable population were recommended by the international community at a
UN conference, with implementation freely consented to by each state, it would take
a relatively long time to achieve. People almost everywhere (including in low-fertility
but overpopulated countries) would need to be persuaded that smaller families maximise
the future prospects for themselves and their children. Country leaders would need to be
convinced that population decline has more advantages than disadvantages: that it is worth
paying a little more of national revenue to pensions and elderly care, to avoid resource
scarcity, extreme weather events caused by climate change, and the political instability
and warfare that extremes of deprivation tend to trigger. We might assume that restoring
global population to a sustainable level will take a couple of centuries. In the meantime,
not only must the rich world begin to wind back its high per capita consumption, we need
to do everything in our power to protect those productive ecosystems that remain, and use
both renewable and non-renewable resources more wisely. In addition, the restoration of
natural habitats and species population needs either more resources, or even fewer people
than was calculated above, as the ecological footprint does not specifically take
biodiversity into account.

https://overpopulation-project.com/ecological-footprint-and-sustainable-population/

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