What is the best way to tackle world overpopulation?

Question: What is the best way to tackle world overpopulation?
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Asked by SriLankanAntMan to John, Laura, Luke, Rob, Ruth on 15 Jun 2016.
- John Fossey answered on 15 Jun 2016:
  
  Your presumption is there is a population problem. I prefer to think of a resource and supply problem. Science is constantly engaged in tackle resource and supply problems.
- Ruth Patchett answered on 15 Jun 2016:
  
  Well I suppose if we go through the options they are;
  1) Reducing the current population-don’t really fancy that :/
  2) Encouraging people to have less children in future generations through access to contraceptives-possibly however I also think it’s important for people to make their own choices a massive drop in children could also result in an aging population (we could end up with a lot of old people with not enough young people to look after them)
  3) Trying to get the population to consume less-if people don’t need as much land/energy to live then presumably we can fit more people on the planet
  4) Find another planet to populate-as long as we found enough people who were happy to go! This could take a while though.
  
  Generally it is agreed that the population level will drop off eventually but scientists cannot quite agree on when and at what population. There is an article about in it “Science magazine” here if you are interested http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/experts-be-damned-world-population-will-continue-rise
  
  So i guess I’fd try for a mixture of options
  
  Generally I think the number of people on the planet is expected to level off 2 and 3 for now. And hopefully keep 4 for emergancy backup!
- Laura Finney answered on 15 Jun 2016:
  
  There is a theory that to tackle overpopulation we need to stop so many children dying in places like Africa. This sounds odd as you expect more dying to be better for population but there is a good argument for this theory. Basically, families in places like Africa have lots of children as the chances of survival are smaller than ours, so this means that they may have 2/3 per family that survive.
  However, if you were to reduce the death rate of children, families would have less children as they wouldn’t have the risk of them dying, so more families would stick to having only one child. They then predict that this would make the population start to level out instead of just increasing all the time.
  
  It’s a very interesting way to look at it rather than just stopping people having families.
- Luke Williams answered on 16 Jun 2016:
  
  I rather suspect that the world has exceeded its carrying capacity of humans as things stand and unless we do something to reduce our impact upon the planet, it will reduce the number of humans for us.
  
  Current issues that stand out are:
  
  1) Antibiotic resistance – should resistant bacteria become more widespread, and there is evidence that they are, then we could see millions dying every year of relatively minor complaints simply because there is no cure that is effective.
  
  2) Climate Change – will require substantial changes to society and living standards to accommodate major changes.
  
  I think in order to improve the situation we as a society need to be proactive about reducing our impact. This will mean improving agriculture to improve food production, reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
  
  Ultimately the biggest factor is education. There is a very high correlation with rising education levels and reduction in the number of children people have. Thus if we improve education globally, which is a good thing anyhow, I think that will reduce the population. Now, whether having an aging population is going to have longer term effects, I don’t know. But we could rely more heavily on automation to cope with such things.

Question: What is the best way to tackle world overpopulation?

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