Global population and public health

Abstract

Although it took all of human history up until the 1800s for the global population to reach one billion, the most recent billion was added in a mere 12 years. This unprecedented growth in the global population has contributed to many serious moral problems, but arguably the most dire of these is climate change. The Earth’s atmosphere can only absorb so much greenhouse gas before it violently disrupts the climate, and the number of people on the planet make staying below that limit very difficult. In this chapter, I will argue that the relationship between the world’s population and the threat of catastrophic climate change entails that we have a global population crisis, and that the fact of this crisis constitutes a public health emergency.