The count may be symbolic in that it may have come to pass a few weeks or even a year or two ago, but the announcement by the United Nations that the world’s population has this week crossed eight billion is a moment for reflection.

While it took just eleven years for it to go up by a billion, it may take another 15 before it reaches 9 billion, indicative of the fact that the rate of population growth is slowing down, having dropped to less than one per cent per year.

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India added 180 million in the past decade and is set to overtake China next year as the world’s most populous nation. Most of the added numbers ~ about 700 million of them ~ came from Asia.

But while Asia is expected to get its population growth under some check, in the decades to come it is Africa that will see the highest increases, with Lagos projected to be the world’s most populous city by the end of the century. And that is the region where the world can expect to face the greatest challenges.

According to one projection, sub-Saharan Africa, which hosts an estimated 738 million without adequate access to food is expected to see that number double by the middle of the century. This essentially means that there will be fewer resources to cater to the food and water needs of the world’s people. Add to this, the strains likely to be placed on natural resources by climate change, and the picture looks grim.

But more than the question of whether there are too many people on earth, the one that must be addressed urgently pertains to the overconsumption of resources by its wealthiest members.

A researcher at the Wilson Centre, Dr. Jennifer Scuibba, answers this question best when she says: “Our impact on the planet is driven far more by our behaviour than by our numbers. It is lazy and damaging to keep going back to overpopulation. Really, it is us. It is me and you, the air-conditioning I enjoy, the pool I have outside, and the meat I eat at night that causes so much more damage.”

She argues that if everyone in the world lives as people in India do, we would need only the capacity of 0.8 of an earth annually; if everyone lived like people in the United States of America do, five earths a year would barely suffice.

Many experts have described as elitist ~ and unfair targeting of the Global South ~ the notion that every additional person on earth adds to the stress on the planet. The larger question ~ one that those who possess too much refuse to consider ~ is of equity and proper distribution. Such thinking was seen when it came to vaccine distribution during the Covid pandemic and will surface with greater intensity as resources fail to keep pace with demands