Hi. It’s Mr. Andersen and this is environmental science video 15. It is on human population
impacts. A model we have used so far this year is this idea that the earth supports
society which is driven by economy. But do all the countries on our planet impact the
environment in the same way? So this map right now, if we impose it on a NASA simulation,
so this is going to be the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced, you will see that
we are producing way more carbon dioxide in red in the northern hemisphere. In North America
and Western Europe and Southeast Asia, we have higher amounts of carbon dioxide. We
are burning more of those fossil fuels. Not so much in the southern hemisphere. You can
see the wind is moving it around. But watch what happens as we move into June. And then
as we move into July. The carbon dioxide levels are dropping off. Now we still have industry,
it is just that it is summer. The leaves come out. They do photosynthesis and they take
in that carbon dioxide. Watch what happens now as we move into October and the leaves
start to fall. That carbon dioxide comes back again. And so it is not equal impact to the
environment. And so we have learned so far that with industrialization you see exponential
growth in a population. And so the population increases in that is impacting the environment.
But it is not only the number of people, it is the affluence of those people. It is how
much they are consuming and it is also their technology. Now some technology can actually
help the environment. And so I am talking about destructive technology. It is impacting
the environment. One way to measure that is using the IPAT equation. You do not actually
have to calculate it, but it is combining these three things. The population, the affluence
and the destructive technology. And an analogist’s model is the ecological footprint. It measures
how much of the earth do we need to support that industry. Now these are feedback loops,
and so all of these are going to put impacts on the population itself. Another big one,
aside from population is the economy. If the economy grows too much that is going to consume
resources and destroy habitat. But if the economy is not big enough in certain countries
it can lead to disease and hunger. And so the IPAT equation looks like this. It is pretty
easy. On the left side we have the impact. We then have the population. So in other words
the bigger the population is, the larger the impact. If we are looking at affluence that
is going to be consumption per person. So if you have a house and several tvs and many
cars, you are probably going to have more affluence than somebody who lives in a village
in Africa. And then is that consumption actually harming the environment or impacting it? Well
it depends on what technology that is. And so let’s give you an example. So let’s
look at a country, so this is Burundi. It is in the Rift Valley of Africa. And so if
we look at their population there are about 9 million people that live there. So there
is going to be a certain impact. If we look at how much money they make, the average person
makes 910 dollars per year. What does that mean? They do not get much money so there
cannot be much consumption. If we were to look at the major industry it is going to
be agriculture, meat is rare because it is going to be highly expensive. If we look at
transportation, bicycles are really common. And so is there a huge impact in Burundi?
On the environment, no. It is going to be relatively low. But if we look at another
county, so this is the UAE or the United Arab Emirates. Their population is 9 million as
well. If we start to look at their consumption however, the average person there make 50
times what somebody in Burundi makes. What does that mean? There is a lot more consumption
per person. If we look at their technology, this is Dubai, you can see there is way more
technology. Way more burning of fossil fuels. There is going to be a greater impact on the
environment. If we look at Burundi, this is the capitol of Burundi, you can see there
is not a lot of industry and so that means it is going to have a really small footprint.
It does not consume much of the earth’s area. If we look at something like UAE there
is way more industry. And so if we were to put values to this, the ecological footprint
of Burundi is going to be less than 1 global hectare per person. It is going to be relatively
small. If we look at what it is in the UAE it is going to be about 12 times that. That
means it is going to have a larger ecological footprint. It is going to consume more of
the earth’s resources. So this graph is kind of interesting. On the bottom we have
the ecological footprint. And on the right side we have a development index. And so these
are going to be the developing countries and these are going to be the developed countries.
So the US is going to have high development index. It is highly developed and it is also
going to have a very large ecological footprint. And so where do you think the UAE is going
to be? It is going to be way out here. So it is going to have a high footprint and it
is going to be highly developed. It has more impact on our planet. It has a larger economy.
If we were to say where is Burundi going to be? It is going to be way down here. It is
a developing nation. And so you can see the general trend is as countries develop they
will move up and then they will move across. And that means they are going to start to
have more of an impact on the planet. Now this line is interesting. This line right
here are 2.1 global hectares per person is the bio capacity. It is what our earth can
support. And so you can see that a lot of countries are actually exceeding that. And
so going back to our model again, it is the society and the economy. And so as the population
gets larger we are going to have population effects on the environment. But the economy
can effect it as well. If the economy is too large then we have too much of an impact.
But if it is too small that can impact the society itself. To illustrate how the population
and the economy can impact the environment and therefore the population, we are going
to use worldmapper.org. It is a great website. And so let me show you what you can do. So
this is a map of the world with all of the countries. What you can do is you can change
the size to represent another characteristic. So this is what the earth would look like
if the countries represented the actually population. So you can see that some place
like Canada shrinks. But China and India and Pakistan are going to get much larger. And
that is because they have a really high population. If we were to look at poverty watch what happens.
Well America shrinks to almost nothing. Same with Western Europe. But we can see high poverty
in India. Some poverty in China. And we have high poverty in Africa. And so this is going
to impact the people. And so if we look at hunger for example, we are going to have high
undernourishment in Africa. And we are going to have high undernourishment in India. It
has that double hit of a high population and high poverty. We could also look at health.
And so this is health public spending. And you can see it is going to be much greater
in America and in Japan and in Western Europe. Well, how does that impact disease for example?
This is going to be the HIV prevalence. You can see it is going to be low in areas like
Japan. But incredibly high where we are not spending much money on public health. So incredibly
high in certain areas of Africa. It is 2 and sometimes 3 out of 10 adults are going to
have HIV. If we look at income we see that inverse relationship where we are going to
see the developed nations having a higher income. Especially like Western Europe and
the United States. How does that impact ecological footprint? It is going to be almost a direct
relationship there. The greater the economy is, it is putting more impacts on the earth.
We could look at resource use. This is going to be greenhouse gases. It is going to follow
that economy as well. We could also look at things like habitat destruction. The whole
world in connected so changes like increases in greenhouse gases can cause high extinction
rates. And those are going to be in areas where we have a lot of species. So this is
Ecuador right here in South America. And so we have some many species at risk because
there are lots of species there. And so did you learn the following? How the population
and affluence and destructive technology can affect the environment? These impacts could
be measured though the IPAT equation or the ecological footprint. Remember if the economy
is too big we can have resource use and habitat destruction. But if the economy is too small
you get disease, hunger and I hope that was helpful.