Page 84 - IJPS-9-3

International Journal of

Population Studies

PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE
Human development, population, and

environmental burden: Historical perspective
and a peek into the future

Niels C. Lind*

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Abstract

The human species has continuously progressed in health, wealth, education,
and population worldwide since industrialization. A measure of this advance, the
Development Progress Index (DPI), is applied here to the world from 1770 to the
present and then projected to the year 2100 for three shared socioeconomic pathways.
Concurrently, our total environmental impact continues to grow with population
and consumption. However, progress has been uneven across regions. While China
is projected to outdistance the United States, India is projected to surpass both this
century. The population keeps growing, and the average individual DPI-value has
now grown enormously - by a factor of 17 since 1770. The environmental burden to
sustain the human lifestyle is reflected by the world’s gross domestic product that
has meanwhile grown by a factor of 155. If such human progress is to continue apace,
the gross world product will be more than 2000 times higher by 2100. Already now
a concern, the environmental impact is projected to grow five times larger by 2100.
*Corresponding author: Human environmental impact needs a measure and attention.
Niels C. Lind
(lindniels@gmail.com)
Keywords: Development Progress Index; Income; World population; Environment
Citation: Lind, N.C. (2023). Human
development, population, and
environmental burden: Historical
perspective and a peek into the
future. International Journal of 1. Introduction
Population Studies, 9(3): 78-83.
https://doi.org/10.36922/ijps.474 Human development is of fundamental interest historically and for strategic policy.
Received: March 1, 2023 To define and measure it is a priority. How much have we advanced, especially since
Accepted: September 14, 2023 industrialization? The environmental burden of this progress together with population
growth is a major concern, so we must also ask: What is the cost of this progress to our
Published Online: October 27, 2023
species? The aim here is to present the transparent Development Progress Index (DPI)
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s). (Lind, 2019) and apply it to the past and the future.
This is an Open-Access article
distributed under the terms of the The authors of the 1990 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1990) defined
Creative Commons Attribution
License, permitting distribution, the essentials: “Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices, the three
and reproduction in any medium, essentials are a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to resources.”
provided the original work is
properly cited. They assigned a proxy statistic to each essential: life expectancy at birth (L), years of
Publisher’s Note: AccScience education per person (E), and gross domestic product (GDP) per person (G). By the
Publishing remains neutral with equal marginal utility of increments to L, E, and G, DPI synthesizes the world essentials
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional of the past 250 years and is projected to the end of this century: a spectacular advance
affiliations. that is hard to fathom. The development is further detailed for five regions.

Volume 9 Issue 3 (2023) 78 https://doi.org/10.36922/ijps.474