GagaJo. David Attenborough describes the situation rather well. Population growth is a major concern but equally important is what the global population consumes and the challenge to developed nations to reduce their consumption.
Some extracts but the whole article is a worth reading:
www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/david-attenborough-warns-planet-cant-cope-with-overpopulation/
While it’s true that global fertility levels are in decline, leading to a slowing in overall population growth, fertility in the world’s 47 least developed countries is still relatively high - at 4.3 births per woman between 2010 and 2015 - meaning rapid growth of these countries at 2.4% per year.
One of the reasons population has increased as fast as it has, is that people like me are living longer than we did, so there are more and more people just because the expectancy of life has increased.”
… our consumption of resources varies massively across the globe.
“An average middle-class American consumes 3.3 times the subsistence level of food and almost 250 times the subsistence level of clean water,” according to Professors Stephen Dovers and Colin Butler in their paper, Population and Environment: A Global Challenge. So if everyone on Earth lived like a middle-class American, then the planet might have a carrying capacity of around 2 billion. However, if people only consumed what they actually needed, then the Earth could potentially support a much higher figure.”
As developing countries catch up with the rest of the world, you might think their carbon footprint grows at the same rate, but, according to research, between 1980 and 2005, many of the nations with the fastest population growth rates had the slowest increases in carbon emissions.
If we want to save Earth, we can no longer afford to keep eating meat: “We are omnivores, so biologically, if you could have a biological morality, you can say, yes we evolved to eat pretty well everything.