Question 1: Explain the relationship among the world’s population growth, human use of
resources, and global environmental crisis.
I. Introduction
According to United Nations, the world’s population is close to 7 billion in 2011. It will
reach to 9.3 billion by 2050 and double to 15.8 billion in 2100 by projection, with most of
the increase taking place in some developing countries such as Africa (United Nations
2011). The population explosion is caused by the improved medical and health facilities
which help people to grow well so that the death rate is reduced. It is also due to a lack of
birth control in the low-income groups which makes the high birth rate (Shamsi 2009). The
changes in human population will highly affect the human use of resources, such as water,
food, land and other forms of energy like electricity. When the population increases, the
demand for different resources increases as well. This helps to meet the basic needs of the
people so as to maintain their lives and for the development of the area. However, if the
resources are misused or overused, global environmental crisis will be resulted such as
water crisis, desertification, and different kinds of pollution as well as global warming.
Therefore, it is important to know that the increasing population and human activities play
an important role in affecting the global resources distribution as well as the environmental
crisis.
II. The relationship among the world’s population growth, human use of resources
In the following section, the relationship between the world’s population and the use of
several resources will be discussed.
a) An increase in the demand for water
Water is the basic component of lives. It has a great variety of uses. For example,
individuals use water for drinking, cooking and bathing while the manufacturing sector
uses water to make products. Agricultural sector uses water to grow food and energy
industry uses water to provide electricity and heat. In general, with a larger size of
population, the global demand and consumption of the Earth’s fresh water resources rises
(Cunningham et al. 1999). Since the Earth has only a limited supply of fresh water, which
is stored in aquifers, surface of the lake and atmosphere, the supply of fresh water will
impose a serious problem in many developing countries or places without an immediate
access to fresh water such as China and African countries (Stancheva 2003). The worse
thing is that water produced from mining and factories cannot be reused since the used
