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The term carrying capacity has been applied to a few different processes in the past before finally being applied to population limits in the 1950s. [1] The notion of carrying capacity for humans is covered by the notion of sustainable population.
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 ...
Attempts have been made to estimate the world's carrying capacity for humans; the maximum population the world can host. [131] 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 98 billion ...
These ecological resource accounts reveal that the global community has been exceeding the regenerative capacity of the Earth since 1970, which was the year when the consumption capacity of humanity first exceeded the biocapacity the Earth. Each year since 1970 humanity has witnessed global ecological overshoot.
Biocapacity is calculated from United Nations population and land use data, and may be reported at various regional levels, such as a city, a country, or the world as a whole. For example, there were roughly 12.2 billion hectares of biologically productive land and water areas on this planet in 2016.
The list consists of columns that can be sorted by clicking on the appropriate title: The names of the states, accompanied by their respective national flags.; The number of military personnel on active duty that are currently serving full-time in their military capacity.
According to the Global Footprint Network's calculations, currently people use Earth's resources at approximately 171% of capacity. [27] This implies that humanity is well over Earth's human carrying capacity at current levels of affluence. According to the GFN: In 2023, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 2nd. Earth Overshoot Day marks the date ...
A country that consumes more than 1.73 gha per person has a resource demand that is not sustainable world-wide if every country were to exceed that consumption level simultaneously. Countries with a footprint below 1.73 gha per person might not be sustainable: the quality of the footprint may still lead to net long-term ecological destruction.