Shifting the Trajectory — 03: When Will the Human Overshoot Curve Peak?
Updated December 14, 2022
As I noted in Overshoot and Collapse Explained animal and plant species in healthy ecosystems rarely exceed the carrying capacity of their environment in a way that causes a collapse of the species’ population and reduction in the carrying capacity. Overshoot and collapse (O&C) in ecosystems is largely a human-created phenomenon. In this article I will be focusing on the human O&C curve, shown schematically below, and address the question: When will the upside of the curve peak and the downside phase begin?
The human species has been in overshoot since 1970 and the degree to which we are exceeding Earth’s carrying capacity would required 1.7 Earths to support our population of almost 8 billion on a sustainable basis:
Before I go any further, I have to say that when the title for this article came to me I did not anticipate how painful it was going to be to write. It brought into my awareness the cognitive dissonance created by the deep love I feel for both humanity and Mother Earth. Because I love humanity, I wish for everyone alive on the planet today to live peaceful, creative and fulfilling lives. Because I love Mother Earth I wish for all living beings to exist in harmony with humanity. Because I care about both, it hurts that future conditions for both people and Mother Earth are worsening. The primary reason conditions are worsening is that there are too many people and our population continues to grow.
My father, Kenneth Boulding (1910–1983), provided a framework for understanding our current situation more than 60 years ago:
Kenneth Boulding’s Dismal Theorems of Human Population Growth
The Image, University of Michigan Press, 1956, p. 117
— The dismal theorem (after Malthus): If misery is the limiting factor that reduces the rate of growth to zero then the population will grow until it is utterly miserable.
— The utterly dismal theorem: The better the technology and the bigger the niche, the more people can live in misery.
— The cheerful corollary to the dismal theorem: If the rate of growth can be reduced to zero by other means before the “misery niche” is reached, an equilibrium population that is not in misery is perfectly possible.
When my father wrote The Image there were 2.8 billion people on the planet and we were recovering from the ravages of the Second World War when an estimated 70 to 85 million people died. By next year (2023) our population will reach 8 billion people — the two population counters, Worldometer and The World Counts, differ by some 40 million on the current population but both are on track to reach 8 billion in late 2022 or early 2023 barring a dramatic increase in the number of deaths globally.
Today we are living with the consequences of the utterly dismal theorem: technology and a global economic system based on the principle of unbridled growth have increased human economic misery and is driving the sixth global species extinction event in earth history. Economists define human misery quite narrowly based on economic indicators such as inflation and unemployment. The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) takes a more holistic view of what is involved in human well being based on life expectancy, schooling and per capita income at the national level. Since 1990 the HDI for individual countries has fluctuated with an overall increasing trend, although increases have leveled off in recent years.
My sense is that what economists define as misery — unemployment and inflation — is experienced by most people as discomfort rather than misery. However, as we progress along the overshoot stage of the O&C curve, discomfort will become misery and utter misery for more and more people:
— As someone who suffered from depression when I was young, I can attest that being depressed is miserable. About 280 million people suffer from depression globally. When depression becomes utter misery people kill themselves to end it. Around 800,000 people commit suicide every year.
— According to the Global Report on Food Crises 2022 More than 190 million people were acutely food insecure in 2021 (IPC scale phases 3 to 5/acute to catastrophic), an increase of 40 million compared to the record high reached in 2020 (Update 9/22: World Food Programme estimated 345 milllion acutely food insecure in 2022). I have experienced voluntary hunger, having fasted for a week when I spent ten days in jail after being arrested during the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. I was told that you stop being hungry after three or four days without food, but I was hungry the whole time. My hunger was voluntary and I experienced no ill effects from the fast. It breaks my heart that in the near future hundreds of millions will be experiencing high to very high acute malnutrition leading to tens of millions dying of starvation or malnutrition-weakened immune systems. The Wiki article on starvation seems reluctant to give statistics on how many people are actually dying from it. The World Counts website estimates that 9 million people die each year from hunger and hunger-related diseases. As we continue of the overshoot phase of the O&C curve that number seems likely to steadily increase.
How Will the Overshoot Curve Peak?
The answer to this question is simple: when the number of births = the number of deaths. I have to admit that I cringed when I saw that the United Nations projects that the population will stabilize at around 11 billion people in the year 2100. I take small pleasure in how unrealistic the projections are. I have to confess that the hardest part of writing this article has been having to acknowledge to myself that I was engaging in wishful thinking when I created the graph that serves as the overarching framework for this article. I plotted 8 billion as the peak of the overshoot curve:
What I didn’t consider was the present gap between births and deaths, with the most painful realization being how rapidly deaths will have to increase in the next twenty-some years for the human population to reach its peak.
When Will the Overshoot Curve Peak?
I’m going to make two predictions. I predict 1) that the curve will peak in 2050 and 2) that it will peak at a population of 9 billion people. As data become available, I will be updating this article.
I have plotted these predictions on the world model standard run presented in The Limits to Growth, published fifty years ago, and to my mind their forecast of population peaking in 2050 was remarkably prescient:
The chart below shows that global deaths per year will have to increase an additional 60 million per year in order to equal 140 million births, given that the annual number of births seems unlikely to change much in the next twenty years. When the chart was made in 2019 such an increase seemed unthinkable, but the estimated 18 million excess deaths in the last two years since the covid pandemic began have jump-started the process. Droughts, floods, heat, famines and health care systems stretched to the breaking point are likely to contribute further to the grim arithmetic of the peaking overshoot curve.
A Somewhat Cheerful Corollary to Boulding’s Dismal Theorem
When my father stated the cheerful corollary our population had not exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. Most of us alive today do not live in misery, but we humans at this point do not seem to have collectively reached a level of consciousness that makes it possible to “reach an equilibrium population that is not in misery.” In overshoot, stabilizing the population isn’t enough. It also has to decline until it reaches a level that allows humans to live in balance and harmony with each other and all other life on the planet. This can be accomplished by flattening the overshoot curve as an alternative to catastrophic collapse.
I would like to close by offering a somewhat cheerful corollary to my father’s dismal theorem:
We humans have the intelligence, creativity, ingenuity and resilience to flatten the overshoot curve in ways that significantly reduce human misery and eventually live in balance and harmony with each other and all life on Mother Earth.
I characterize the corollary as “somewhat cheerful” because it will not easily come to fruition, and along the way there will be inevitable pain and suffering for many. I have started another Medium publication titled Spiritual Practices for a World Falling Apart for sharing ways at the personal level for acknowledging and coming to terms with the inevitable pain and suffering.
I will be be exploring many facets of this corollary in coming articless. You can find a complete list of articles in this series with links at the end of StT — 01: Introduction.
Updates: I anticipate updating this article as new data become available.
September, 2022: The number of people experiencing acute food insecurity increased from 190million in 2021 to 340 million in 2022. Updated graph of global births and deaths shows the gap between is decreasing in a way that is consistent with the original modifications to the graph:
December, 2022: When the United Nations made a forecast that global population would reach 8 billion on November 15, I did a screen capture of the World Counts at 8:42:22 pm EST when the counter turned to 8 billion:
