• Question: How do we solve the population problem?

    Asked by Coco to Neil, Martin, Lauren, Ciorsdaidh, Alan on 5 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Alan McCue

      Alan McCue answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      wooh this is a good question and one which is difficult to answer. I suppose the question is do we have a population problem or is the problem how we live out lives? Well, it would have to be a little of both. Controlling population size is difficult as you are effectively limiting human rights and a lot of people won’t like that. I think as a chemist we should look at this from the other angle. So that means making sure we live our lives in a sustainable manner. Lets start using renewable resources to make chemicals. Lets try and produce and emit less carbon dioxide. Lets try and produce less waste. That way we lessen the impact humans have on the planet. That would be where I would start.

    • Photo: Neil Keddie

      Neil Keddie answered on 13 Mar 2018:

      I’ve been leaving this to think about, as it’s quite a hard question that has some moral issues about it! As we become a more ageing population (through living longer due to better medicines and healthcare and by doing less dangerous jobs) we are going to end up with more people to feed and more medicines needed to manage conditions related to older age. These are big challenges for the western world, and certainly ones that scientists can help solve.

      I don’t think it is morally correct to start suggesting that you control the population size by limiting human rights – that is quite a dangerous path to go down. China have had the one-child-per-family policy for many years (recently relaxed for some families) as a way of controlling population, but it brought many problems with it. Yes, we need to be sensible as a planet and try and live within our means as a world population, but I think this comes down to a better way of surviving – more sustainable energy and food production too, which in turn will lower the amount of greenhouse gas emitted, ensuring that our planet doesn’t warm further and make large areas of the world inhospitable.

    • Photo: Lauren Webster

      Lauren Webster answered on 15 Mar 2018:

      I agree with Alan. It is such a difficult area to “control” and there are a lot of ethics involved. And again agree with using renewable sources. As a country we are definitely trying, as one entity (the world)…well that is a different matter

    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 16 Mar 2018:

      This is an very difficult question to answer because we have to identify the problem first. Perhaps the question you are asking is how do we feed our growing population. Since the majority of the population eat grains rather than the high animal protein based diet of Europe and North America, we need to make sure we can grow enough. Issues of water availability clearly result in famine in Africa and other places. This problem could be solved by desalination – removing salt from sea water – and people are looking into this. But we still need to give the plants fertilisers to help them grown. Simple nitrogen-based fertilisers have probably been the most important contribution made by chemistry in the last 100 years. They have allowed us to address the issue of feeding our population. People like Alan working on catalysis are trying to make this process (the Haber-Bosch and Ostwald processes combined) more efficient to ensure we can continue to do so.

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