By XANTHA LEATHAM,
UK Daily Mail Excerpt:
Earth’s population currently sits at 8.3 billion people – but it could crash within the next 40 years, experts have warned.
Scientists say that, in a worst–case scenario, humanity could potentially be halved by the year 2064.
This could be the result of climate collapse, a pandemic, global conflict or resource shortages, they warned.
‘The most provocative part of our paper explores hypothetical future scenarios,’ the researchers, from the University of Milan, said.
‘We modelled what could happen if major environmental crises abruptly imposed severe carrying–capacity limits on Earth.
‘Under a deliberately conservative worst–case assumption that Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity suddenly dropped to around two billion people, our model predicts a rapid global population decline, with humanity potentially halving by around the year 2064.’
The researchers maintain that this is not a forecast, but an ‘illustrative mathematical scenario’ which shows how sensitive population dynamics may be to abrupt changes.
But with researchers sounding alarm bells about global warming, recent pandemics such as Covid and falling birth rates, the scenario is not completely unrealistic.
For the study, published in the journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, the researchers analysed 12,000 years of human population growth.
From this, they were able to devise a mathematical equation that accurately reproduced the major population growth patterns from the Neolithic era to the modern age.
The model takes into account that in some periods, human population expanded slowly and steadily while in others, growth accelerated explosively.
Overall, they found the current trajectory remains relatively stable and does not imply imminent collapse.
But in a ‘worst–case illustration’ Earth’s carrying capacity could plummet to just two billion, they warned.
This would mean that the maximum number of people our planet could sustain indefinitely would be around a quarter of its current population.
And, in turn, it would trigger a crash which could see the number of people on Earth halved.
‘In a scenario where carrying–capacity constraints suddenly become abruptly active, (our equation) predicts a rapid population decline,’ they wrote.
