Disagreement over “civilizational collapse”: – Researchers fear collapse

Just over 200 years ago, in 1800, there were approximately one billion people on the planet. Just one century later, the population had increased by another 600 million people.

Today, about 8 billion people live on Earth, and according to the United Nations, this number has reached its peak In 2086 with 10.4 billion people.

According to one New study This growth is unsustainable for our environment, and there is a risk of a “population correction” before the end of the century.

Canadian researcher and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Canada, William Rees, is the one who prepared the study. It is published in the magazine world.

He argues that we are using the Earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate, and that our natural tendencies as humans make it difficult for us to correct this.

In the study, Rees wrote:

“Homo sapiens evolved to reproduce massively, expand geographically and consume all available resources.”

The researcher says, according to the report, that the result may be a kind of civilizational collapse that “corrects” the world’s population Science Alert.

It is believed that this may happen in a worst-case scenario before the end of the century.

– Disagree

Biologist and professor Dag O. Hessen is aware of Reiss’s article, but doesn’t entirely agree with it.

The possibility of the collapse of civilization exists locally and regionally in the sense of the collapse of infrastructure and production systems, but I find it difficult to imagine this happening on a global level, Hessen tells Dagbladet.

A population collapse is thought to be much less likely.

-I do not believe in mass death. “We are a strong species,” he says.

However, he believes that parts of the planet may become uninhabitable, and we may see mass migrations and difficult times.

Population growth could be slowing faster than we thought, says Heesen, who previously discussed the topic in an article in… Forskning.no.

-Moves backwards

If you take the term “collapse” literally, you have to go back to the Stone Age, anyway, to pre-industrial times, points out Hessen, who doesn’t think that will happen in the next 80 years.

Collapse is a violent word that means returning to the beginning. However, I think we should expect big changes, and there is no doubt that there are difficult times ahead, says Hessen.

– As a result of extreme weather, I think we will have more regional and local collapses, and a decline in goods and services. He says: I believe that the whole world will face great trials, and there will be a global decline in living standards.

He also believes that there are many reasons to abandon the idea of ​​further consumer growth and purchasing power.

“You can see that floods, fires, heat and extreme weather are taking lives and overrunning production equipment, and this will get exponentially worse,” says Hessen.

– Express an opinion

It is worth noting that World magazine, in which Rees published his predictions, is owned by the publisher MDPI, he wrote Forskning.no.

They are a commercial publisher that charges a fee to publish. The publisher publishes a large number of articles and has been criticized for the fact that peer review is not always accurate.

Hessen told Dagbladet that this in itself is not a reason to delete the article.

– It’s become very popular with these push magazines. But that’s Rees’s view, and he explains the available data. “It’s the same thing I’m doing here, but I came to a slightly different conclusion,” Heesen says.