Overpopulation

 THE EFFECT OF OVERPOPULATION

Human population can be defines as the number of people living in a particular area in this whole world. The world population grows because births rate significantly outpace the death rate on average. Human overpopulation issue is a serious issue, silently causing global warming, environmental pollution, habitat loss and other issues. According Baus (2017), human overpopulation issue does not arisen over the last few decades, but since prehistoric time until now.  Today, there are currently more than 7.7 billion people live in this world. As the clock ticking, people increase but the earth's resources are finite. Thus this affects many people especially people in poor country as they lack of education. Education plays a very important role in educating the parents to have some sort of degree tend to have fewer children, whereas uneducated families tend to be larger. Overpopulation has a lot of negative consequences that impact all people around the globe. Population is growing rapidly, far outpacing the ability of our planet to support it thus overpopulation can has a number of effects such as lack of space,  increase the transmission of diseases, and triggers conflicts and wars.

The first effects of overpopulation are that they can cause lack of space. Humans will run out of actual space to live as overpopulation occurs. According to a BBC article written by Nuwer (2015), about 3% of Earth’s total land supports more than half of humanity. The author also mentioned that with 83 million more people on the planet every year, increased populations will increase pressure on the land. Each person needs a place to live, to work, and grow lands to provide food. Overpopulation depends on the ratio of population to available sustainable resources, not on the size or density of population. It also depends on how resources are managed and distributed throughout the population. According to Garg (2017), it is estimated that growth in human population affects the global land use pattern available for agriculture, forest land cover and nearby areas of different types of water bodies. This rapid increase in human population is putting pressure on natural resources available like land, water and ecosystem services. Since the population is growing a lot, people need space to live. According to Weebly (n.d), one of the ways people get the space is by ravaging the environment. People will destroy the forests, animal habitats and other land to build home and infrastructure development. This activity can be known as deforestation. Deforestation is bad because it affects the biodiversity of flora and fauna species as we take their “home” to get more resources.

Besides, overcrowded countries can lead to the spread of disease. According to World Health Organization (WHO) countries like China, India and Bangladesh have a higher possibility to have diseases that can be transmitted to their citizens as they have a higher population than other countries. Studies have shown that countries with higher populations can be the major factor for diseases such as respiratory disease, cholera and HIV. A country like China which has the highest population number in the world can easily transmit disease especially respiratory disease like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and recently Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19). This is because the transmission of disease is easier in this country due to an overcrowded population (Lippi & Henry, 2020). These pathogens can infect humans in public areas like the subway, shopping mall and others when the victims are coughing and sneezing. In India, sexual transmitted disease which is HIV has dangerous statistics as this country also has a higher population. This number 2 ranked country that has high populations can easily transmit the disease by 3 types of transmissions which are by sexual contact, exposure to infected blood and vertical transmission from mother to child (Sinha, 2017). Not only that, Bangladesh which is a poor country with a high population can have higher chances of getting cholera, a gastrointestinal disease caused by Vibrio cholerae. The symptoms of this disease are diarrhoea, abdominal cramp, vomiting and even worse, death.  This disease commonly infected people after drinking contaminated water and has low sanitation (Bharati, 2011). Besides, lack of education of the citizens also can be one of the reasons for this life threatening disease. So, countries with overcrowded citizens have higher possibility to spread the diseases like respiratory disease, cholera and HIV no matter their status, poor or stable country.

Next, overpopulation can trigger conflicts and war. As human population increase, resources and basic necessities such as food, water, land, employment and other basic necessities are more limited which increases the competitiveness and demand for these resources. According to Swomley (1998), there were 148 totals of wars happen since World War II which most of them were population wars especially in Sudan, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Ethiopia. People may be fighting each other for basic needs to defend their necessities thus trigger conflicts and violence. Growing populations will stress the labor force which increases the rate of unemployment and weak the economies. This unemployment in turn could provoke rising crime and social revolt in a country. Moreover, overpopulation wars also related to high poverty and high fertility rates in the country. There are also some emigrants from overpopulated country to the less populated neighbouring states which may be an unwelcome and destabilizing consequence for the host country. Thus this condition leads to quarrels and disagreement between the countries as both countries fight for their own rights. According to World Health Organization (WHO), (n.d) states that it is crucial to have family planning to slow down the population growth as rapid population give negative impacts on economy, environment, national and regional development efforts.

In conclusion, since people are unaware about the overpopulation has a lot of negative consequences that impact all people around the globe , they are going to end up living in circumstances that lacking in term of spacing, increasing the number of diseases and factors that triggering the conflicts and wars. Awareness is the factor that plays the foremost dominant role today that might decide the longer term of the upcoming generations and therefore the way forward for the present people on earth. When people are aware, they are more careful and take smarter decisions. If awareness spreads, and if people become conscious of the results and therefore the causes of overpopulation, they might then unite so as to vary the factors that have caused overpopulation within the past into becoming beneficial and not harmful for his or her societies and cultures, thus obtaining a far better standard of living and a better organized and advanced life. As seen earlier, the consequences of overpopulation will have a drastic effect on people’s lives (Wheeler, No year). To avoid such problems, “countries and individuals must work together to realize zero population growth” (Busam, 1995).