The World's Growing Population Poses a Malthusian Dilemma

MALTHUSIAN DILEMMA: How to feed a human population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050 while also grappling with poverty as well as climate change, dead zones, biodiversity loss and other environmental ills? © iStockphoto.com / Tobias Helbig

From Scientific American:

Solving climate change, the Sixth Extinction and population growth... at the same time.

By 2050, the world will host nine billion people—and that's if population growth slows in much of the developing world. Today, at least one billion people are chronically malnourished or starving. Simply to maintain that sad state of affairs would require the clearing (read: deforestation) of 900 million additional hectares of land, according to Pedro Sanchez, director of the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program at The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

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