Carrying Capacity
Carrying capacity refers to the maximum population size that an environment can sustainably support without degrading the environment. It is influenced by factors such as food availability, water supply, and space. Understanding carrying capacity is crucial for managing resources and planning sustainable development in geographical areas.
6 Key excerpts on "Carrying Capacity"
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Population Geographies
Lives Across Space
- Holly R. Barcus, Keith Halfacree(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These are expressed within arguments about the extent to which the Earth has the overall ability to support or sustain its human population. Can Earth’s Carrying Capacity —the idea that the planet can only sustain a limited number of people (e.g. Ehrlich 1968)—cope with 7 billion, let alone the 9 billion some predict for 2045 (Kunzig 2011) or possible 10 billion by 2100 (Dorling 2013)? This is not just an issue of food supply, or even provision of other basic needs (water, shelter, space), but must take into consideration issues such as pollution produced (and its link to phenomena from ill health to global warming), the extent to which humanity relies on largely non-renewable resources to underpin lifestyles, and how humanity’s expansion has often been at the expense of the Earth’s other living species. The Carrying Capacity issue (11.3.1) is also, fundamentally and unavoidably, a question of politics and of global and local power relations. Any discussion must also consider the distribution of food and other aspects of basic needs within a society. The Earth that may be seen to have a Carrying Capacity is an economic, social, cultural and political Earth as well as a physical entity. As eminent Geographer David Harvey (1996: 147) forcefully put it, “scarcity is socially produced” at least as much as it somehow resides in the laws of the natural world. Population matters, then, are never solely matters of nature, making them still more important and interesting to study. By now, it should be clear to the reader that consideration of global numbers of people alone suggests immediately why the human population merits specific and detailed attention by students, researchers and policymakers. There is a clear prima facie case for the discipline of Demography : “the scientific study of the size, composition, and distribution of human populations and their changes resulting from fertility, mortality, and migration” (Poston and Bouvier 2010: 3)...
- Jean-Frederic Morin, Amandine Orsini, Jean-Frederic Morin, Amandine Orsini(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Carrying capacities paradigm Nathan F. Sayre University of California at Berkeley, United States Adam Romero University of Washington Bothell, United States Carrying Capacity can be defined as the quantity of some X that can or should be supported or conveyed by some Y ; in most of its many applications, exceeding a Carrying Capacity is considered damaging to X, Y, or both. Scholars in many fields have discarded the concept of Carrying Capacity, but it persists and has in recent decades proliferated in debates about human populations and the environmental conditions on which they depend at the scale of Earth or significant subunits thereof. Although the term itself is not always used, Carrying Capacity is thus a pivotal idea for the Anthropocene, population sustainability, and sustainable development. The carrying capacities paradigm can be defined as the suite of methods, concepts, and assumptions that inform and support the view that human–environment interactions can and should be understood in terms of the X : Y ratios that carrying capacities describe or prescribe. Developing and improving methods to measure and communicate such ratios is central to debates about the limits to growth, ecosystem services, planetary boundaries, and natural capital. But the origins and implications of the paradigm’s supporting concepts and assumptions frequently pass unexamined. At its origins in the mid-twentieth century, the paradigm married the concerns of neo-Malthusians regarding world population with the methods of systems analysis and scenarios. The most influential example is The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), the landmark report of the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind...
eBook - ePubParks and Carrying Capacity
Commons Without Tragedy
- Robert E. Manning(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Island Press(Publisher)
...2004). In this sense, Carrying Capacity can be most appropriately interpreted as a normative or value-laden concept. For example, to consider the human Carrying Capacity of an area, one would have to answer questions such as the following: What level of material well-being should be maintained? How should this material well-being be distributed among the population? What level of technology should be applied? What level of environmental protection should be achieved? What social and political institutions should be applied? What time period should be considered? (Cohen 1995; Cohen 1997). Human Carrying Capacity is not devoid of natural constraints, but these constraints must be considered in the context of human values and related choices. Thus, Carrying Capacity as applied to humans is less rigid, positivist, mechanistic, and deterministic than traditional models such as the logistic growth equation might suggest. Recent treatments of human Carrying Capacity have begun to address this issue by suggesting that it is the impacts of human population and economic growth that need to be emphasized instead of the traditional focus on population numbers per se (Daily and Ehrilch 1992; Seidl and Tisdell 1999). That is, human population and related economic growth has impacts (I) on the environment, and these impacts are what may ultimately dictate maximum (or acceptable) population and economic growth. Moreover, the maximum acceptable levels of such impacts are largely a function of human values as manifested in these types of issues and questions. In this way, Carrying Capacity analysis and management is evolving from its traditional emphasis on defining maximum population size (K) to defining the conditions under which this population chooses to live (I) (I suggesting the ecological and social impacts of human population growth and related economic development)...
eBook - ePubA Planet of 3 Billion
Mapping Humanity's Long History of Ecological Destruction and Finding Our Way to a Resilient Future | A Global Citizen's Guide to Saving the Planet
- Christopher Kevin Tucker(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Atlas Observatory Press(Publisher)
...Without understanding these phenomena in terms of the specific biogeographical dynamics at play, as they evolve over time, so-called “planetary boundaries” scientists do these important issues a disservice. In the end, while drawing attention to the limited biocapacity of our planet and the pressures humans put on it, the Planetary Boundaries community dodges the hard questions about population, as though technological innovation will allow a population with unfettered growth to live within the boundaries identified. The Ecological Footprint Thesis Another way of calculating the Carrying Capacity of our planet is decidedly more geographic in its approach, yielding a more tractable and meaningful framework for understanding how humanity has taxed our planet. This is the “Ecological Footprint” effort of Mathis Wackernagel and the Global Footprint Network, which derives each country’s ecological footprint from the biologically productive area that it takes to absorb a population’s carbon dioxide emissions and to generate all the resources that it consumes. 65 Although this framework is geographic only insofar as it is tied to the concrete geographies of the world’s nations, it is a good start. After all, nation states are the sovereign entities that may have some hope of taking action to curb humanity’s ecological footprint, one nation at a time. In this model, a country’s consumption is calculated by adding imports to and subtracting exports from its gross domestic production. It is assumed that all traded commodities carry with them an embedded amount of bioproductive land and sea area necessary to produce them and sequester the associated waste...
eBook - ePub- Oswald J. Schmitz(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Island Press(Publisher)
...Per individual mortality rates will rise with increasing population size, again due to declining abundance of resources that would normally be allocated to survival. (See figure 4.2a.) Whenever birth or mortality rates change with or depend on population size within a location, we say that the population is undergoing density-dependent growth. (Population size within a geographic location is called population density.) By contrast, fitness of individuals in populations undergoing the unbounded exponential growth described above is not influenced by population density. Such populations are said to undergo density-independent growth. Ecological Balance and Carrying Capacity In the face of intensifying competition with rising population size, per individual net fitness eventually will be reduced to the point where the per individual birthrate is exactly offset by per individual death rate (figure 4.2a). At this point, individuals are merely replacing themselves over their lifetime and the population will neither grow nor shrink in size. Instead it will remain at a steady state. This steady state is called equilibrium.The reader may be more acquainted with the vernacular term for equilibrium, “balance of nature.”The problem with the term balance of nature, however, is that it gives the impression that there is a single natural balance.Yet, several different populations could exist at their own unique balance in different geographic locations. Hence, the idea that life on earth is in a single balance of nature is a popular but unfortunate misconception. We have now explained how environments limit species populations.The equilibrium population size is effectively the fixed maximum population size that can be sustained or “carried” by the limiting supplies of resources or space in a geographic location. In ecology, this is formally known as Carrying Capacity, usually labeled K. In figure 4.1b, K for the Tasmanian population of sheep is on the order of 1,670,000 individuals...
- Linda L. Lowry(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Carrying Capacity: Environmental Carrying Capacity: Environmental Mary Snow Mary Snow Snow, Mary Rich Snow Rich Snow Snow, Rich 236 238 Carrying Capacity: Environmental Mary Snow Rich Snow Tourism is a combination of complex economic and social systems and is determined by both the standard of living and the freedom of travel within a nation. A great deal of tourism is considered “nature tourism” and is inextricably linked to the health and sustainability of the natural world. For example, in the United States, the entire national park and national forest systems receive numerous visitors each year. The challenge for these areas is that the pressures and impacts from visitation will result, in many cases, in the areas being “loved to death.” There are numerous negative effects that can accompany tourism if the natural area is not properly managed and protected. Some would argue that the increase in visitors to these pristine sites could eventually destroy the fragile ecosystems that make a place unique. Overcrowding can produce environmental stress and changes in animal behavior. Excessive noise disturbs natural sounds and can cause wildlife agitation, which can result in vulnerability during nesting season. The careless use of fire and firewood collection can lead to forest fires and habitat loss. And simply feeding wildlife can initiate behavioral changes and dependence on humans. The following examples highlight the repercussions of exceeding the environmental Carrying Capacity during travel and tourism. Biodiversity The earth is rich in biological diversity. Although nearly a million plant and animal species have been identified and documented in the taxonomic records, scientists suspect that this is only about 15% of the worldwide total number of species. However, we may never have a chance to discover and identify the remaining 85%. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 100,000 species are lost annually...
