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The Chinese government introduced the policy in 1978 to alleviate the social and environmental problems of China. [59] According to government officials, the policy has helped prevent 400 million births. The success of the policy has been questioned, and reduction in fertility has also been attributed to the modernization of China. [60]
In environmental science, a population "overshoots" its local carrying capacity — the capacity of the biome to feed and sustain that population — when that population has not only begun to outstrip its food supply in excess of regeneration, but actually shot past that point, setting up a potentially catastrophic crash of that feeder population once its food populations have been consumed ...
Human overpopulation (or human population overshoot) is the idea that human populations may become too large to be sustained by their environment or resources in the long term.
Thomas Robert Malthus, after whom Malthusianism is named. Malthusianism is a theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline.
Overpopulation or overabundance is a state in which the population of a species is larger than the carrying capacity of its environment.This may be caused by increased birth rates, lowered mortality rates, reduced predation or large scale migration, leading to an overabundant species and other animals in the ecosystem competing for food, space, and resources.
Ehrlich argued that the human population was too great, and that while the extent of disaster could be mitigated, humanity could not prevent severe famines, the spread of disease, social unrest, and other negative consequences of overpopulation. Ehrlich has proposed different solutions to the problem of overpopulation.
Behavioral sink" is a term invented by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe a collapse in behavior that can result from overpopulation. The term and concept derive from a series of over-population experiments Calhoun conducted on Norway rats between 1958 and 1962. [ 1 ]
Many studies have tried to estimate the world's sustainable population for humans, that is, the maximum population the world can host. [5] A 2004 meta-analysis of 69 such studies from 1694 until 2001 found the average predicted maximum number of people the Earth would ever have was 7.7 billion people, with lower and upper meta-bounds at 0.65 and 9.8 billion people, respectively.