Does the rate at which people are reproducing need to be controlled to save the environment?

There is no question that the world’s population will grow dramatically in the next decade. The members of the United Nations are working to understand the impact that population growth has in developing countries. For this assignment, imagine you have been hired by the UN to help assess the social impact of population growth. Your first project as a consultant with the UN is to develop a whitepaper on three issues related to the population growth faced by a developing country of your choosing. Read the overview below, then write a whitepaper addressing the questions below.

I.             Overview       

Our obsession with continual economic growth deters us from studying the role that an expanding population plays in global warming. (1)

About 3 billion years ago, the earth suffered a mass extinction caused by catastrophic volcanic activity in Siberia and wildfires that covered the entire planet. Since then, four more mass extinction events eradicated up to 80% of all species each time. The world’s community of climatologists and scientists overwhelmingly agree that we are now on the verge of a sixth mass event that, over the next few tens of thousands of years, will wipe out nearly all living species on Earth, including mankind. This is not the stuff of science fiction or speculation, but rather the studied view of the experts who are most qualified to make this kind of assessment. As anthropologist Richard Leaky, author of The Sixth Extinction, wrote in 1995, “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims” (2).

This leaves us with two issues worth reflecting on:

1.     Does the rate at which people are reproducing need to be controlled to save the environment?

2.     To what extent does human population growth impact global warming, and what can be done about it?