Assignment 1: Social Impact of Population Growth The United Nations has hired you to be a consultant on global issues. One of the challenges is assessing the impact of population growth. There is no question that the world population will grow dramatically in the next decade throughout many countries of the world. The members of the UN are working to understand the impact that population growth has on society, specifically in developing countries. Your first project with the UN is to develop a whitepaper on three issues related to the population growth faced by one of these countries. Read the Case Study and provide an assessment based on the questions below. (For a brief list of resources for this assignment, please see the end of the course guide.) Overview Our obsession with continual economic growth deters us from studying the role that an expanding population plays in global warming.[1] About 3 billion years ago, the Earth suffered through a mass extinction caused by catastrophic volcanic activity in Siberia and wildfires that covered the entire planet. Since then, four more extinctions have eradicated up to 80% of all species each time. The world’s climatologists and scientists overwhelmingly agree that we are now on the verge of a sixth mass event that, over the next few tens of thousands of years, will wipe out nearly all living species on Earth — including humankind. This is not the stuff of science fiction or speculation, but rather the studied view of the people who are most qualified to make this kind of assessment. As anthropologist Richard Leaky, author of The Sixth Extinction,[2] wrote in 1995, “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.” This brings us to two issues worthy of reflection: Does the rate at which people are reproducing need to be controlled to save the environment? To what extent does human population growth impact global warming... and what can be done about it?[3] The answer to the first is quite simply “yes,” but the solution to the second is more problematic. The damage humans are doing to their climate is ruining the atmosphere surrounding their planet. At the rate this damage is increasing, at some point in the future there will be no atmosphere left to protect life on Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Compared to other planets in our solar system, Earth has mild temperatures, thanks largely to the protective gases of its atmosphere. However, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (around 1775), those gases have become stuck in the atmosphere, causing heat radiating from the sun to reflect back to Earth (rather than exiting to space). The result is that oceans have become warmer and glaciers are melting, including parts of Antarctica. If we think of that continent as the stopper in a bottle, its melting away will release all the water it is holding back. This will raise sea levels to uncontrollable.