The world’s population has recently topped the seven billion mark and it is certainly a reflection of the progress that has been made in medical care, food security and advances in science and technology. However, it also poses several challenges and among the major ones are environmental sustainability and global food security.
According to experts with the Worldwatch Institute, addressing the challenges associated with a still growing world population will require a two-pronged response. The combined measures of empowering women to make their own decisions about childbearing and significantly reducing global consumption of energy and natural resources would move humanity toward rather than further away from environmentally sustainable societies that meet human needs.
Roughly 4.5 billion people have been added to the world’s population in just the last 60 years, according to United Nations estimates, putting increased strain on the world’s ecosystems and resources. Because humans interact with their surroundings far more intensely than any other species and use vast amounts of carbon, nitrogen, water, and other resources, we are on track not only to change the global climate and deplete essential energy and other natural resources, but to wipe out thousands of plant and animal species in the coming decades. To some extent, these outcomes are now unavoidable; we’ll have to adapt to them. But in order to improve the likelihood they will not be catastrophic, we need to simultaneously work to influence the future path of population and to address the environmental and social impacts that continued population growth will have.
The issue of childbearing is a very touchy and delicate one as historical and cultural attitudes and traditions have to be taken into serious consideration. In this regard the experience of India, the second most populous country, in curbing its population growth under the Prime Ministership of Mrs. Indira Gandhi is a typical example of the cultural peculiarities impacting on population control policies.
China, which has the largest population, on the other hand, has rigidly implemented its one-child policy and it seems that it has never really encountered serious opposition. Perhaps there was no other alternative in China because it had an extremely high birth rate.
While the approach towards dealing with an increasing global population may be debatable, putting policies and measures in place to deal with a growing global population is certainly not debatable, and as such every country has a role in responding to the challenges.
In this regard, Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh at the UNFPA ceremony to  observe the occasion of the world’s population topping the seven billion figure, made some interesting and pertinent comments about how Guyana could contribute towards a sustainable environment and global food security.
He noted that despite Guyana’s relative smallness in terms of population, the country can position itself to make a contribution to the global response to the challenges of a growing population, which hit the seven billion mark yesterday, more than doubling what it was in 1959.
To this end, the minister spoke of what Guyana has been doing in terms of the Low Carbon Development Strategy that can be directly related to the challenges that a seven billion population places on the environment.
“The world has finally woken up to the fact that we are on a path that is unsustainable on the environmental front. This is one area where I believe Guyana has a significant role to play and has situated itself with respect to playing that role,” he said.
The minister said Guyana’s policy position on the role of standing forests in the fight against climate change stands out, “and we must spare no effort to continue to articulate that role, in the context of the need for the global community to find a solution to the global environmental challenges that is truly lasting.”
But he said the fact that there have been foregone economic opportunities and that the forests provide the global environmental services that they do, Guyana should be remunerated for those services. “It is a position on which we will continue to seek the support of our friends in the international community, and in particular, the UN agencies,” he said.