Environmental Impacts You bring up some very good points there, but I think another issue is that even our current population it is not sustainable. So rather asking “what is a sustainable population” we must first analysed our unsustainable lifestyle and acknowledge how Australia plays a part in the unsustainable lifestyle humans live. A way to look at it would be looking at our “ecological footprint”, this is the amount of land and water area we use to produce the renewable natural resources such as crops, timber, plant fibre, livestock, fish etc that we consume. With currently 7 billion humans inhabiting the planet, we need 2.7 hectares of land and water area to produce what we consume per person. But if we take into account the needs …show more content…
On average, Australians use 7 hectares of land and water area to maintain our consumptive lifestyle. If the world lived how the average Australian lived than we would need seven planets to sustain the population without impoverishing future generations and causing huge species extinctions. So continuing on what was said earlier before asking the question “what is a sustainable population” we should first consider “what is a sustainable lifestyle”. Australia needs to reduce its “ecological footprint” to within and less than 1 hectare per person. Only 23 nations out of 153 listed on the Footprint Network use 1 hectare or less per person, and these 23 countries are categorized in the “least developed”. To hit more to home we can look at South Australia, South Australia currently has a population of 1.6m and aims to increase this to 2 million by 2050. Quite a realistic goal, if anything not ambitious enough but the South Australian government also at this time aims to reduce the aggregate SA ecological footprint by 30% by 2050. This will mean reducing the footprint to 3.7 hectares per person, but whilst increasing the population seems...counter-productive? Although, this reduction is not nearly enough, with less than 1 hectare available to “live sustainably” globally it will not halt or stop this spiralling path