Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Population growth and environmental problems
Many developing countries struggling to maintain living standards in the face of
growing poverty have little to spend on countering environmental problems. The
growing populations of developing countries presently consume far less per capita
of the world’s resources and cause less pollution than do the populations of rich
nations. Nevertheless, demographic increase puts some regions under stress.
Population growth does not automatically mean environmental degradation: it
can stimulate agricultural production and improvement of technology (e.g.
population growth in Europe probably drove farmers to farm fertile but difficult
clay-lands and shift from long fallow to annual cropping). It is simplistic
Malthusian or neo-Malthusian determinism to say that population growth
inevitably leads to problems; environmental impact is a function of population
and standard of living, the technology practised and attitudes. Devastation can
occur at low population levels and it is probably fair to say that, up to a point,
population increase becomes a socioeconomic problem only if food production
technology fails to keep up.
Caution is necessary when examining population—environment relationships—
for example, there has been little study to check a common assumption that the
presence of poor people correlates with environmental degradation (Kates and
Haarmann, 1992) (for an introduction to Malthusian and Boserüpian views see
Harrison, 1992:11–19).
Urbanization
Cities have grown rapidly in the last half-century, and relatively recently humankind
has become more than 50 per cent urbanized. Rapid growth has led to environmental
problems: pollution of air and water, refuse disposal, demand for fuelwood, and
large poverty-stricken slums (mainly in developing countries) (Barrett, 1994). In the
twenty-first century urban environmental management is going to become much
more important as those problems develop.