Overpopulation is commonly associated with global ecological overshoot, but it can occur at any level from the local to the global. Ecological overshoot in industrialised countries is complicated by labour migration, especially in urban areas. Population pressure on top of ecological overshoot should force these countries to reconsider overly permissive immigration policies.
by Jan van Weeren
It is a straightforward definition: if a country or region cannot sustainably support its inhabitants, it is overpopulated. It applies to rabbits, deer and human beings. It holds for the Earth and its inhabitants. The renewable resources of our planet are not sufficient to cater to present day human consumption. However, the conclusion that humanity would require 1.75 Earths to sustainably support the world population does not imply that the inhabitants of all countries on Earth are in overshoot.
If we take the ecological footprint as a useful indicator of human carrying capacity of nations, then it turns out that some countries have an ecological deficit whereas others have an ecological reserve. According to this logic, the average inhabitant of the latter countries has a smaller footprint than he or she is entitled to have according to the available biocapacity. Unfortunately, in many cases this ecological reserve is not a surplus one can freely use without negative consequences. If countries such as French Guiana, Suriname, Congo and the Central African Republic would start logging on a large scale, sell the timber and turn the forest into cropland, then the world’s capacity to sequester CO2 would diminish and our total carbon footprint would increase. The privilege of sharing one’s country with globally important wilderness areas does not confer either the feasibility or the right to transform them for human use. In most cases, these areas are ill-equipped to provide for humans, which is why they have escaped transformation to date.
But the ecological footprint does not tell the whole story about overpopulation. It is based on the regenerative capacity of nature; non-renewable resources such as (finite) fossil fuels and minerals are disregarded. Secondly, the scope of the measurement unit is generally too broad to take into account specific details.
For example, the biocapacity of Sudan is in balance with its ecological footprint. Nevertheless, the country cannot sustainably support its population without food aid from the UN’s World Food Programme. This year, the situation has become worse due to an armed conflict between two warlords.
Additionally, we will have to accept the fact that many countries would not be able to sustainably support their inhabitants, even if they reduced their ecological footprint to 2.14 global hectares per person, estimated as the minimum associated with acceptable standards of welfare. This can be seen on this map from a recent study of sustainable national ecofootprints:
We are inclined to see overpopulation as a non-local problem: “there are too many of us”, or alternatively: “there are too many consumers on Earth”. However, overpopulation is essentially a local problem. I mentioned the harsh situation in Sudan, and going forward there will be more examples of such places where the carrying capacity of the region is insufficient given projected population growth.
But local overpopulation is also a huge problem in high income countries. Their current ecological overshoot is aggravated by a continuous influx of more people, especially in Europe and the US. About 3.6% of the world population are migrants and 0.3% are refugees. The number of international refugees increased to 26.7 million last year; this amounts to a percentage of the world population of 0.33%, which was more or less the same in the nineties. In 2020 there were worldwide 281 million international migrants, both legally and illegally. Increasingly, these flows are driven by poor circumstances in the sending country rather than genuine labour demand in the receiving country. According to the African Youth Survey 2022 almost half of 18- to 24-year-olds in 15 African countries said they were thinking of emigrating.
Migrant workers do not distribute equally over the surface of host countries. As with gravity in space, there are spots in that surface with much more attraction than others. That is where the problems arise and overpopulation becomes a serious local issue. This holds even for countries which are not overpopulated according to the definition given at the beginning because of their biocapacity surplus.
For example, Canada is experiencing a population boom with 437,000 immigrants last year and 1.45 million more in the preceding three years. There is a housing crisis, especially in Canada’s major cities. These immigrants do not spread over the land, but concentrate there. The already overburdened health care system will become more and more overstressed. Australia with its ecological reserve faces similar problems. A population growth of 496,800 last year exacerbates the housing shortages and infrastructural insufficiencies. See here and here.
Things get worse in countries with a huge ecological deficit. Switzerland and The Netherlands are unable to redress their overshoot, even if they would adopt much lower per capita consumption as can be seen in figure 1. In the last two decennia, the Swiss population has grown by 21%. Last year 145,985 persons were added, bringing the total number to 8.89 million. In the same year the Dutch population increased by 227,000 individuals, bringing the total population to 17.8 million people. Both countries face a housing crisis and heavy strains on public services such as health care, education, transport, electricity and water supply.
Like mass in space, industrial activity is unevenly distributed over the Earth’s surface, and centres of industrial activity will attract migrant workers in the same way as mass causes gravity in space. On the following map you can identify countries where migrants are expected to continue contributing to population growth, although many of these countries are already in an ecological overshoot, which cannot possibly be countered by sobering down to a much lower level of consumption.
Another indicator of dense human activity is the emission of nitrogen dioxide (from industry, intensive cattle farming, and traffic). This registration made by the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite shows hot spots in and around major cities. Large hot spots are found in The Netherlands and Belgium, the Ruhr in Germany and in Northern Italy. In mountain regions NO2-concentrations are remarkably low.
Some countries in the world are in ecological overshoot, some are not. Countries in especially high overshoot attract people from abroad who will immigrate both legally and illegally, tempted by employment and the level of welfare these countries have to offer. These immigrants add many new feet to the national footprint, often in situations where strong population decrease is the only possibility left to restore eco-balance (see Figure 1). This forces these countries to reconsider the necessity and desirability of immigration.
Do we want to have societies in which food production, parcel delivery, cleaning, elderly care and childcare is done by an underclass of servants? Do we want distribution centres, slaughterhouses and horticultural companies which can only survive by exploiting foreign workers? Should higher education not be restricted to inhabitants of the country that pays for it and prepares its students for the national labour market? Should companies not employ them instead of hiring people from abroad?
Additional questions come to mind. Do we want a society in which a minority of well-to-do people enjoy the profits of heavy immigration, whereas blue collar workers in depressed districts have to compete with newcomers for jobs and housing in a living environment where their mother tongue is hardly spoken anymore?
In situations of severe overpopulation, we must rethink mass migration.
Jan van Weeren is secretary of the Dutch Foundation Against Overpopulation www.overbevolking.nl
“genuine labour demand” – I don’t believe that such a thing exists. You should only have the economy size that your population requires, not more just for the sake of the economy. This means that you can theoretically distribute any task that really needs to be done among the existing population; if no one wants to do certain jobs, you pay people more, improve the working conditions, or go without those jobs getting done if they really are that undesirable (but people will do anything for the right price, for better or for worse).
Humans can be trained for any job; it’s absurd that in countries where – due to long periods of education, early retirement, inherited wealth and long lifespans – less than half the population works, you should still import workers.
The left used to know that immigration creates downward pressures on wages and labour rights – but they’d rather fight to get people in, then fight to get better conditions for workers, than prevent the inevitable exploitation from existing in the first place.
I agree with Gaia on this; that sentence jumped out at me, too, as the only dubious assertion in an otherwise convincing essay.
There will always be a “genuine labor demand” by capitalists to drive down wages and keep workers cowed and under their thumb. No matter how low wages go, capitalists always want to drive them lower and keep higher profits for themselves.
We cannot respond to population growth globally, only locally. We must limit population in keeping with local bioregional, geophysical and cultural restrictions, and therefore our population limitation efforts must be focused in our own bioregions.
If we can’t control population growth in our own bioregions, we cannot control it elsewhere.
I think there’s also a connection between local and global population growth. A incentive to population growth in poor areas is that some people will migrate and send money back (I’ve heard this explicitly stated by some parents). If that isn’t allowed to happen, children become more of a burden than an investment.
What not allowing that to happen looks like, however, is a troubling thought, as I’ve said many times here.