In our research we invested in some reasons that have cause overpopulation.
- One reason is the medical advancements that have been made in the past century, though this is certainly a positive thing, longer average age per person and treatment of infertility do contribute to the issue of overpopulation.
- Another reason that has been seen is due to poverty, in many countries the government will give financial support to each child of the family when the family is considered as low income, therefore encouraging those in poverty to raise more children. Along with the reason of poverty, is the poor planned parenthood and less to no prevention of child birth, also adding on to the overpopulation issue.
- A third reason is the immigration of people as countries are split into developing and developed. Many people tend to immigrate to developed countries such as the US and England, therefore the population of the world is unevenly distributed, leading to uneven distribution of resources. While some places are plenty of natural resources, others are scarce of resources due to population.
Based on these observations, we came up with the following possible solutions to the issue.
- Education. One solution to world population would be increasing the focus on sex education for younger groups. Safe sex would therefore ensure a lower rate of issues such as teen pregnancy and accidental pregnancy, that are some major contributors to the increase in world population. Also not just students should be educated, teachers and parents should also be promoted to feel comfortable teaching the subject, allowing it to be seen as a mandatory branch of education.
- Abolish policies encouraging more children per a family. In countries that have decreasing population such as Romania and Germany, the government has forms of encouragement that reward citizens when they have more children. Though this might not be fair to countries who have a depopulation issue, it is not necessary to have rewarding attitudes towards having too many children because this could problematic in the long run. By abolishing these policies, the population will not increased as having them, therefore reducing overall population growth.
- Even population distribution between rural and urban areas. Though this is not a solution that can directly decrease the population growth of the world, it is a solution to the negative effects of overpopulation. A major problem in the world right now, is the uneven distribution of the entire population, there is a much more significant number of people living in urban areas comparing to rural areas. Therefore the resources that are being shared on average are very different, while some places are crowded of people and have scarce resource of food, other places are depopulated and in poverty. If the population was at a more even distribution throughout the world, resources would also be evenly distributed, which is one of the problems with overpopulation. And although this solution might not be feasible, it is definitely an effective solution to overpopulation.