World Population Day and our environment

N Munal Meitei *

July 11 is celebrated as the World Population Day and it is an international awareness campaign to call people on stage to know the reason of this exploding population as well as solve the big mistake of whole human fraternity. This great awareness event is to bring a population revolution globally as well as breaking sleep of all the deeply slept people to pay their full attention and help in combating the population issues and environmental problems.

While we talk about conserving the nature, the most important factor that comes to mind is the population explosion. The famous Heidelberg Declaration signed by 425 prominent scientists, including 52 Nobel Prize laureates at the end of the conference in Rio called overpopulation a 'plague' comparable to 'hunger and pandemics'.

At present, every second worldwide, five people are born and two people die, leaving three more humans to inhabit the earth. That's approximately 180 more people per minute and more than 237,000 more people hungry for dinner each night. FAO estimates that a man required about 1.57 kg. of food and three liters of water per day. Hence in order to feed these increased mouths, a huge tropical rainforest to the size of a football ground are cleared per minute totaling to the size of the Panama country per year.

The number of trees so felled is around 4 billion meanwhile the overall worldwide afforestation is less than 1%. How long can Mother Earth provide for this? World Population Day was started to mark the outgrowth of 5 billion peoples on the 11 July 1987. The theme of World Population Day 2016 is "Investing in Teenage girls."

The theme calls upon the importance of adolescent period for the girl child. How well a society treats its women is one of the strongest indicators of the success and failure of a society. By providing girls with an education, ensuring women to have a voice in family decisions, and providing women with opportunities for economic freedom, we will build stronger and healthy society.

It is estimated that 50 percent of the world's pregnancies are unintended and 25 percent are unwanted. Every day, approximately 800 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. This means that every two minutes, a family loses its lovely mother, and almost all of these maternal deaths occur in developing countries.

This year's theme also reminds us to protect the rights of the women to determine if and when they want to have children. We must work to make mothers and children healthier.

These forms of empowerment, enabling choice and expanding information, will change the dangerous trajectory of the world's population and improve the lives of people around the world.

World Population Day massages that to live together equitably on a healthy planet will depend on the choices and decisions we make now. This is an opportunity to celebrate our common humanity in diversity. It is also a reminder of our responsibility to care for each other and our planet.

Human and environmental health underpins in the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations which seek mainly to eradicate poverty and hunger and ensure environmental sustainability. The links between population growth and threats to the environment cannot be denied. Human beings living on the earth tend to overlook the obvious facts that an increasing population leads to a significant increase of consumption that causes in increase of waste in the environment.

We need a balance with increasing population to the conservation of the earth's natural resources. But to fulfill such important factors for 7.32 billion peoples by the mother earth will be next to impossible. The Global Footprint Network estimates that we are already overusing planetary resources and hence we will need two Earths by 2030 and three Earths by 2050 to sustain us.

Our current growth path is unsustainable. The warning signs are already around us, as rivers and lakes shrink, water tables fall, carbon emissions rise, ice glaciers melted, sea level rises, new diseases come out, deserts expand, forests shrink, scanty in rainfall, zoo plankton and coral reefs depleted and agriculture and fisheries collapse.

Current trends would suggest that we are on our way to becoming a "single-specie" planet. We are making a significant extinction in the earth's living species at the rate of one species per twenty minutes. We have already using about half of the world's land surface to grow our crops, raise livestock, construct our roads and build our towns and cities. While all economic sectors depend to some degree on ecosystem services, forestry and agriculture has the most intimate relationship with nature. Forestry and agriculture depends on healthy ecosystems for services such as pollination for nearly 75% of the world's crop species, freshwater, erosion control, and climate and water regulation.

It also employs 40% of global population and about 70% at the base of the pyramid. India, with 1,332,948,213 people as on July 2016 is the second most populous country in the world after China with 1.41 billion people. The figures shows that India represents almost 17.85% of the world's population and one out of six people on this planet live in India. India is all set to take the numerouno position by 2030 with more than 1.53 billion people.

Some of the reasons for India's rapidly growing population are poverty, illiteracy, and high fertility rate, rapid decline in death rates or mortality rates and immigration from Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar. India has missed almost all its targets to bring the population growth under control whereas China's 'One Child Policy' in 1978, has brought down about 450 million peoples since then.

In India for rural communities, people often depend on their local environment to provide them with their food, water, medicines and wood for fuel.

Livelihoods are often dependent on natural resources, forcing growing populations to use resources unsustainably from the nearby forests. Preservation of healthy ecosystems is essential from a conservation perspective, but also for the wellbeing of communities themselves.

In Manipur, the population impact to our environment is innumerous. Due to increase in population, the present pressure to our forests and protected area networks are many folds. To feed the increased population, many wetlands of state have now been turned into croplands and fish farmlands. But we know wetlands are cradle for biodiversity.

Hence, we should conserve our wetlands. While the populations of the state were spared, almost all the home steads had a pond and there were no water scarcity as of now. In the hill areas, weak economy and poor communication has made to increase the jhoom cultivation, the number one enemy for forests. To earn the livelihood, vast area of forest are sold and cut for firewood. The brick fields in the state are the main causes for deforestation and pollution.

Now for extraction of firewood, the Government needs to frame some guidelines. In the meantime, the Government also should take up schemes to increase the use of LPG from present data of 31.18% only in the state. Every year huge tones of charcoal are produced from the hills not only to cook and toast the winter cold but for some small scale industries. In our State, for making of charcoal, mostly the root stock of many coppicing trees are uprooted and burnt. This is the worst activity to our environment.

Charcoal should be made only from the branches, twigs or stump etc. but not from the roots stocks. Many reserved and protected forest areas are encroached upon for settlement and farmland. More and more narcotic plants are started to grow in the hills after cutting down the rich forests. Now to protect it, only Forest Department and lawcannot do it but we need our own understanding and consciousness. Numerous populations are using unwanted plastics without interference.

Nambul River which drained into Loktak Lake is over polluted in all forms. Everyday roads are blocked with huge traffics that will be getting more worsening day by day. Due to emission of greenhouse gases from the flooding vehicles, we have now faced the incident of cloudburst and heavy fogs. In the market area also, no vacant place is found as everywhere is occupied by the vehicles and local vendors.

Whatever the effort we made today to save our environment, if we do not control the population explosion, we will be reaching to a tipping point, the point from where there will be no return. Therefore, unless every one of us from all sections does not voluntarily accept and share our responsibility to save our planet, then we will be surely in an environmental dilemma in a very near future.