Heads count

The growth in the human population poses a wide range of serious threats to the planet. Many have been highlighted but the political and social response has been ineffective in many countries. A special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published online, provides us “with an intellectual feast”, even though the papers “will leave a bitter taste in the mouth afterwards”, writes Roger Short at the University of Melbourne, the issue editor along with Malcolm Potts at the Bixby Center at the University of California, Berkeley. A series of papers from a range of specialists explores the ways in which the inexorable increase in human numbers is exhausting conventional energy supplies, accelerating environmental pollution and global warming, and providing an increasing number of ‘failed states’ where civil unrest prevails. “Few can be left in any doubt that calling a halt to future population growth in both developed and developing countries is the greatest challenge now facing our world,” writes Short. “It is surprising that when the UN announced its eight millennium development goals in 2000, halting population growth was not one of them, it has since been added as an afterthought. International organisations, governments, and religious leaders will be the last to appreciate the gravity of the situation, and the last to implement effective measures to halt further population growth,” he writes. As global warming increasingly makes the headlines ahead of the major meeting in Copenhagen in December to create a new treaty on greenhouse gas emissions, more and more people are beginning to accept it as a reality. But there remains a major credibility gap; people have yet to draw the obvious conclusion that, since global warming is the result of human activities, too many people will only exacerbate the problem, Short says. The split between the developed world, with high energy usage but low population growth, and