Top Science Advisor to U.S. Govt.: Too Many People on the Planet

Nina Federoff said that human populations have already exceeded the limits of sustainability and that we are going to have to start becoming very creative in how we grow food and distribute water.

Worldwide human populations are already too big for the earth's natural resources to sustain. The bleak assessment was detailed in an interview with Nina Federoff on the BBC's One Planet program. Dr. Federoff currently serves as the science and technology advisor to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, having been in the advisory role to the secretary of state since 2007. Stressing that humans had already exceeded the limits of sustainability, she said that global population growth of more than 200,000 people per day needs to be managed and slowed. "We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people," Dr. Fedoroff told the BBC. The population question is mighty, transcending cultures and bringing together complex issues of water management and worldwide crop growth methodologies. "We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops," she said to the BBC. "We accept exactly the same technology (as GM food) in medicine, and yet in producing food we want to go back to the 19th Century." Estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau put the planet's human population at 9 billion by 2040. We are currently just under 7 billion people, and Dr. Federoff says that is already way too many. In a somewhat troubling sign that population growth worldwide is picking up speed, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the greatest composition of population (at 9.3%) is found in people aged 0-4 years-old. High concentrations at the earliest ages indicates accelerations in births and family expansions. These concentrations coupled with increases in life expectancy demonstrate the difficulty in bringing these numbers in line with sustainable levels.