World Population Day 2015 and our environment

N Munal Meitei *

World Population Fortnight Observation at Chandel on July 11 2015 :: Pix - Hueiyen Lanpao

Today [July 11] , we are celebrating the World Population Day and is an international awareness campaign all over the world to call people on stage to know the reason of this exploding population year by year as well as solve the big mistake of whole human fraternity. This great awareness event is to bring a population revolution globally as well as breaking sleep of all the deeply slept people to pay their full attention and help in combating the population issues and environmental problems.

The theme of World Population Day 2015 is "Vulnerable Populations in Emergencies." This theme calls for action and an opportunity to engage with people about what it means to live in a world of 7 billion and what they can do to ensure that everyone achieves their present and future potentials. It also massages that to live together equitably on a healthy planet will depend on the choices and decisions we make now. This is an opportunity to celebrate our common humanity in diversity. It is also a reminder of our responsibility to care for each other and our planet.

Human and environmental health underpins in the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations which seek mainly to eradicate poverty and hunger and ensure environmental sustainability. But to fulfill such important factors for 7.2 billion peoples by the mother earth will be next to impossible. Here we may remember the significance of the theme for World Environment Day 2015, 'Seven Billion Dreams; One Planet; Consume with Care.'

World Population Day was started to mark the outgrowth of 5 billion peoples on the 11 July 1987. According to the United Nations, the world's population is most likely to reach 100 billion by 2083 that will really be a population bomb. The links between population growth and threats to the environment cannot be denied. Human beings living on the earth tend to overlook the obvious facts that an increasing population leads to a significant increase of consumption that causes in increase of waste in the environment.

We need a balance with increasing population to the conservation of the earth's natural resources. People live their daily lives not concerning themselves with the strains that they place on their environment. Humans are destroying the earth and countless are not aware of it. We are making a significant decline in the earth's living species and land area. It's going to come down to one day with our tremendous population increase and continuous depletion of land that the world is going to have a major problem and for that we need to solve this now.

One of the reasons for the rapid population growth is technological development. If you look into charts that show how world population changes throughout time, you will clearly discover a rapid growth after every significant event in development, such as the Industrial Revolution. Every time we make another major improvement in technology, we push environmental capacity to another limit. We mined, farmed, built power plants and so on to make the earth more suitable for us to inhabit, which in turn leads to population growth. Another reason for population growth lays in improvement in health care.

People live longer and longer these days. Back in 20th century, the world's average life expectancy was about 30 years and now is 68 years, and in some countries, like Japan, it is over 80. With improvement in medicine and health care, we reduced the death rate dramatically, which ultimately contributed to population growth. More than 220 million women in developing countries, who don't want to get pregnant, lack access to voluntary family planning services.

While all economic sectors depend to some degree on ecosystem services, forestry and agriculture has the most intimate relationship with nature. Forestry and agriculture depends on healthy ecosystems for services such as pollination for nearly 75% of the world's crop species, freshwater, erosion control, and climate and water regulation. It also employs 40% of global population and about 70% at the base of the pyramid.

Innovative products and technologies are needed to maintain ecosystem services. Seeds are being developed, for example, that are drought tolerant and nitrogen efficient, and efforts are intensifying to keep crops pest and disease free. If farmers, scientists, agricultural companies and policymakers can work together to make this agenda happen at scale, we can preserve the ecosystem services that underpin global eco-system, agriculture and human wellbeing intake, while feeding 7.2 billion people.

In India for rural communities, people often depend on their local environment to provide them with their food, water, medicines and wood for fuel. Livelihoods are often dependant on natural resources, forcing growing populations to use resources unsustainably. Preservation of healthy ecosystems is essential from a conservation perspective, but also for the wellbeing of communities themselves.

In Manipur, the population impact to our environment is innumerous. Due to increase in population, the present pressure to our forests is many folds. Our Keibul Lamjao National Park is pressurized in any forms.

To feed the increased population, many wetlands of state have now turned into croplands and fish farmlands. But we know, wetlands are cradle for biodiversity. Hence, we should conserve our wetlands. Weak economy and poor communication has also made to increase our environmental problems. Every year huge tones of charcoal are produced from the hilly regions not only to cook and toast the winter cold but for some small scale industries like Blacksmith, Goldsmith and Dhobi etc.

In our State, for making of charcoal, the root stock of many coppicing trees are uprooted and burnt. This is the worst of the worst to our environment, leading to soil erosion and many more ecological imbalances. Charcoal should be made only from the branches, twigs or stump etc. but not from the roots stocks. In the meantime, the Government also should take up schemes to increase the use of LPG for each of the families. As of now most of the brick fields in the state are using Fire-wood in their kiln which has caused the prime role in deforestation. In this regard, the Government needs to frame some guidelines.

Why to World Population Day and Environment?

At present, globally it is estimated that 5 persons are born and about 2 persons are died every second resulting an increase of approximately 3 persons per second. This increase is about 9.46 crores peoples per year. FAO estimates that a man required about 1.57 kg. of food per day. Hence in order to feed these increased mouths, a huge tropical rainforest are cleared amazingly to the size of a football ground per minute totaling to the size of the Panama country per year.

The number of trees so felled is around 4 billion meanwhile the overall afforestation is less than 1%. Think may be made; a tree can sink about one ton of CO2 in its life time and can also produce the oxygen requirement for 8-10 persons annually. Forests are the most bio-diverse ecosystems in the world. They hold thousands of undiscovered species, potential medicines and indigenous peoples.

Forests also provide us with clean air and are an indispensable carbon sink, but they are often undervalued, exploited, misunderstood and deforested. Help protect the forest through innovative teaching methods, planting trees, or providing sustainable livelihoods through social enterprise. Until and unless we control the population explosion, we would not be able to save our environment.

Whatever the effort we made today to save our environment, if we do not control the population explosion, we will be reaching to a tipping point from where there will be no return. Therefore, unless every one of us from all sections does not voluntarily accept and share our responsibility to save our planet, then we will be surely in an Environmental dilemma in a very near future.