Discussion on:

Explosive urban growth expected in coming decades

Why all efforts spent on stuff that does not drive food production/energy efficiency/renewable/nuclear should be spent on arresting population growth - as without this, global resource wars will be the order of the day in 50-100 years.

Urban dwellers means TV, Refrigeration, A/C, sewerage etc compounding world energy and resource issues. Not saying subsistence farming in India/Vietnam etc is equitable to westernised countries having ti now, but where we are heading for -...

I totally agree the focus should be on the population explosion. I drives me crazy that the religious right is trying to stop abortion. I feel that if we allow those women to have abortions that want them, then we are putting off the time when the population is so large that women are forced to have an abortion.

Most of the population growth is taking place in the poorest of countries that are not capable of feeding themselves. Stopping food exports would go a long way to reducing population.

Want to play some more?

Education, Contraception and Healthcare are the 3 biggest drivers getting women in the 3rd world out of the gutter of large families, poor health and near constant pregnancy. The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is a leading light in advocating this, but facing opposition from religious groups 'morally' opposed to contraception.

Considering that western nations that are having those kinds of discussions would be facing negative population growth if not for immigration from countries with exploding populations.

Population control is not a problem in the US beyond the fact we should stop sending food to Africa because all we are doing is feeding the unsustainable population growth.

I totally agree that North America would see a population decline if we stopped immigration. But unfortunately we need young tax payers to pay for US Social Security and the Canada Pension Plan.

If these things were run by qualified insurance companies, the money would be there from our past contributions. But our contributions have gone into the ether maybe to fight a war or develop the F-35 Fighter Jet. If this happened in a private insurance company, people would have gone to jail.

A modest reduction in the standard of living and stopping the constant expansion in aspirational accumulation of 'stuff 'is the answer to the global westernized problem with Pension Provisions. The issue with funding US healthcare is another drain on resources where a UK/Canadian style State provisioned healthcare system is more economical than an insurance provided profit driven scheme.

Getting immigrant labor in to grow your economy to pay for stuff now just kicks the can down the street, as many pesky immigrants actually stay to reap the rewards of their labor and the Pension's shortfall snowballs in the future in 2-3 decades time.

...that poorer people care far less about environmental and other external issues.

But you won't have to take it from me that this will be the case; As we continue to borrow 1/3rd of the dollars spent while also printing a half-trillion dollars a year, we'll find out soon enough if a lower standard of living is going to work out better for us.

I totally agree. If we don't start to voluntarily reduce or population, mother nature is going to do it for us. The crop failures in the mid-west are going to effect the food supply in India and Africa. And things are very likely to get worse.
We don't have the energy to power elevators in 60 floor buildings and we are running out of land.

Population expansion and the rapid growth of that population over the past 150 years has been dependent on one commodity - petroleum, and those commodities that are dependent on petroleum for their production. Few people realize that 95% of today's food production is dependent on petroleum - and not primarily for energy.

In the last decade Asia has begun converting from a manure based agriculture production system to a western model based on NPK fertilizers. NPK fertilizers are totally dependent on petroleum - directly or indirectly. NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium) largest constituent Nitrogen is produced from natural gas (currently very abundant in the US - but not world wide). NPK's phosphorus and potassium have to be mined using petroleum based fuels and petroleum dependent chemicals in their ore processing. While Potassium is the seventh most abundant element on earth, Phosphorus comes from increasingly scace phosphates which are now considered a peak commodity - like petroleum (get it - one peak commodity is dependent on another peak commodity).

A decade ago the US was the largest NPK exporter in the world. According the 2011 USDA Fertilizer Import Summary - the US imported over half of its fertilizer components in 2011 and has begun to import phosphates from Morocco (15% in 2011). Interesting to note that in 2002 China essentially stopped all export of phosphates from their country to assure their own supply. Another note - biofuel production usage of NPK could be four times our food production use.

So, don't worry about our unlimited population growth - it will be comparatively suddenly limited by the decrease in our food production ability as fertilizers become more and more expensive. Higher food costs will produce chaos (we've already seen some this in recent years) and the growing chaos will cause a drastic reduction in population through war and disease. Have a nice day.

There are plenty of other sources for phosphorous. The most obvious one is our waste. After all, the phosphorous that plants use just gets recycled into the ground or goes into our diet. Almost all of it that we eat comes out in our urine and fecal matter. So much of it can be recycled. We just don't do it today because phosphorous is still a lot cheaper from other sources.

Natural gas is very abundant outside of the US. It's believed China's supply of natural gas is greater than the US's. Britain has a natural gas field in its northeast that's as big as the Marcellus shale field in the US. It's thought that Siberia has huge reserves of natural gas. And so on.

Don't worry about biofuel using more NPK. It's just not efficient to make and use for plenty of other reasons.

We recycle EVERYTHING. It's part and parcel of PERMACULURE. But let me tell you, it will take some change in mindset from the authorities to allow this to happen, because when I insisted we put a source separating composting toilet in our semi rural house, the authorities went apoplectic! It took them nearly six months to approve it.....! http://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/composting-the-permaculture-way/

The other thing is that modifying/replacing the current infrastructure to recycle P is no easy task, and whether the money to ever do it will even exist as the monetary system collapses reamains to be seen....

After 40 years of intensive research there are no economically feasible replacements for phosphates (not from noddles in the ocean or land deposits, not from seawater) and any other source will drastically impact food prices.

The megacity/suburb sprawl as a way of populating the world is a 20th century idea that no longer applies in the 21st century. Small town living has it over urban living in every aspect you might consider.

Our town (pop. ~ 3600) is economically viable, unlike all the big cities and suburban areas, which are mostly bankrupt. There's much less crime because everyone knows everyone else's business. It's a cleaner environment with better schools and friendlier people. A small town has all the benefits of urban/suburban living without any of the detriments.

I think that all the factors that originally led to big urban environments developing have been mitigated by modern technology. The mega city has seen its day.

Now, if we could only get a handle on our population growth, we could set about to make the planet a much better place.

Couldn't agree more. All these "re-urbinazation" tales never came to fruition. While some cities had some increases, if you look historically, they often still have not reached their 20th century peaks. Manhattan at the beginning of the 20th had 3 million people, then it declined to 1.5 million by 1970. It's still "come back" to only 1.8 million and then stagnated.

More people want controllable political environments, shorter commutes, less crime and an escape from overbearing and corrupt machines politics of the obsolete cities that a town ( 50,000 to 100,000 ) can offer.

How far have we actually gotten? Are we really better and happier as urban dwellers vs a sustainable agricultural economy? How many people can the earth support wthout self destructing? Only time will tell.

I don't know if you ever actually worked on a farm for any length of time, but it's hardly a romantic, blissful time. It's a lot of hard, back-breaking work from sunup to sundown. When you get done for the day, you don't have the time or energy to surf the internet, read a book, watch a movie, or visit with friends.

"Sustainable" agriculture means subsistence agriculture, where each family barely produces enough for its needs. Even modern organic farms use a lot of mechanization to plow and till the fields, harvest, and so on. That still means a *lot* of petroleum -- nobody knows how to do it with windmills and batteries.

Sustainable agriculture means PERMACULTURE. I've been practicing it for years, and I have loads of time to "surf the internet, read a book, watch a movie, or visit with friends"...... in fact I have way more time than when I WORKED!

Sustainable agriculture means working smarter WITH nature rather than against it. Whenever I see images of those poor buggers in Africa toiling totally depleted soil with no water, I feel grief..... the third world's best aid would be teaching them PERMACULTURE. There is no other future. Just google the term "greening the desert"

Reclaim forest area for the wild animals, Citypeople have less demands than farmers, reshaping the cities including small farming to healy places takes years. Years that most people burned away in their cars and big industries.... Succes Kids...

The image depicted in the article - of dozens and dozens of high-rises, is typical of the mindset of the totalitarian, ecoterrorist, central-planner elites. How naive can you get?

High-rise construction requires immense amount of materials and energy to build and operate.
High-density living necessitates massive off-site agriculture and power generation.

High-rise units cost a fortune, and tomorrow's jobs will be fewer and pay less.

There is no need to concentrate people into megacities.

Once the overdue pandemic(s) take off, especially as antibiotic resistance grows faster than already rapid and super dangerous Climate Change that will release unimaginable amounts of methane into the atmosphere, cities will become pandemic breeding pens.
That will turn cities, towns and villages into decaying ghost towns and rural regions into battle fields where the by then savage remnants of humanity slaughter each other for whatever edible plants are still reasonably safe to eat, since agriculture has also set itself up for mutating pandemics specific to vegetation.
Like the business cycle, life too has a cycle, and we are on the verge of the big, very, very big crash.
The upside is that after a cyclic crash, there is always a rebirth of sorts. Unfortunately, like mammals replacing dinosaurs, the rebirth is unlikely to include us -- at least not at the top of the, ummm, food chain.

Have you ever tried to climb up the stairs to the 60th floor in a building where there is not enough energy to run the elevator? Then when you get there you find there is no air conditioning because there is not enough electricity.
Large urban centres are going to collapse once the reality of energy shortages kick in. But architects have no understanding of this. They get paid to produce drawings and if the building becomes unusable 10 years later, that's someone else's problem.

In 1970, the Club of Rome ran nine (I think) different computer models of what might occur if growth was not checked. ALL the models came up with the same conclusion: within 100 years (of 1970), world population would collapse. Here we are, 40% of the way through this century, and we are bang on target for a collapse beginning 2025~2030.

Peak Oil, Peak Water, Peak Phosphorus, Peak Debt and Climate Change are all marching on their way to making it all come true. http://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/so-much-for-debunking-the-club-of-rome/

The largest risk is the swallowing up of arable land. cannibalism.
Arable land is limited and, apart from the oceans, it is the only source of food production. Of this planets 148 million square kilometres of land, approximately 31 million are arable; however, arable land is being lost at the rate of over 100,000 km per year as a result of urban sprawl and drought. If this is seen against a growing population, it becomes clear that arable land per head of the worlds population is reducing at an alarming rate. While it was a mere 0.51 ha per person in the year 2000, it will become about 0.34 ha per caput in 2050, a reduction of 33 per cent or one third. If scientific predictions of rising oceanic water levels resulting from the melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice eventuate, then available arable land will shrink even more as a result of flooded deltas and low-lying islands being submerged.

Only if everyone tries to live like Americans, specifically Americans in the Sun Belt where exurban dwellers have the largest carbon and eco-footprint in the world--probably twenty times the footprint of your average Hong Konger (city in the picture). Transferring rural dwellers into dense cities reduces their eco- and energy-footprint, all other things being equal. Of course concomitant with most people in China/Asia etc becoming urbanites is an increase in living conditions which means consumerism, but that is another issue--do some of the posters here propose only they get to benefit from modernity?

Picture editors naturally love Hong Kong. Me too. But for a journal that calls itself Smart and presumably likes to stay at the cusp, it is distinctly out of date. On the West Kowloon Reclamation (top left, opposite side of the harbor) there is no sign of the Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong. It opened in February this year and so has obviously been under construction for years which makes this pic many years out of date. This building is the tallest in HK and has the highest bookable hotel room in the world on floor 117.

Congrats to all the participants to this discussion. One of the best threads I have read on SmartPlanet since its start. Civil and with a great deal of thought regarding the impact of a multitude of factors affecting "growth."

Years ago I was fascinated by Hammurabi, the classic game of strategy and resource allocation. It has a simplistic view of how resources and population are intertwined and the challenges that lead to a sustainable balance. Playing the game made me appreciate the difficulty of taking an uncontrollable world population and fitting it into a world with finite resources. What sets us apart as humans from the rest of the animals on the planet is our determination to populate ourselves out of existence. Lacking the natural balancing of predator-prey in the human species, nature itself will probably be the deciding factor that determines our ultimate fate.