Environmental Science: Human population – Flashcards

The Industrial Revolution

High life expectancy and low infant mortality

Average number of children a female has during her life.

Age structure describes the relative number of people. Demographic transition explains a population's change from high birth and death rates to low.

Highest: US, Canada, Israel, France Lowest: India, Pakistan

86%

1800

Life Expectancy

Carrying capacity

Lowest: tundra and desert Highest: NYC a seacoast in Europe

size

Sex ratio

US, Australia & Canada are considered developed and nations in Africa, Russia, Eastern Europe, South America are developing

Decreased

High

1700

Developing nations

a huge

Big

Growth rate

replacement

Developed

Wealth gap

Emerging

Infant mortality

Domography

Fertility rate

developing

Quantity of life

People use mass transit in cities (less pollution in the air) and have access to more jobs, A negative impact of a lot of people in cities is that it could cause pollution "hot spots"

A woman's education followed closely by her economic status, access to birth control, poverty, and supplying enough food, water, jobs and resources to provide for all the people

It caused ever-increasing resource consumption and pollution

Population size, population density and population distribution

The Industrial Revolution has had the largest impact on the size of the human population. The Industrial Revolution led to improvements in sanitation, medical technology, synthetic chemicals, and even agriculture. These changes helped limit the spread and effects of disease and allowed people to grow more food. The result was a rapid increase in world population growth. (Although the human population is still increasing, the rate of growth now is actually decreasing.)

In ecological terms, the human population distribution is clumped, rather than random or uniform. This uneven distribution means that some areas bear more of an environmental impact than others. For example, many people are clustered along rivers, and some rivers, such as the Yellow River in China, have been negatively affected by clustered human populations and their pollution. Sometimes, people try to live in areas that really cannot support them. In parts of the Middle East, some grasslands have been so overfarmed that they have become deserts.

Fertility rates have started to drop in many countries, because more women are having fewer children. This change is due to a few reasons. In the past, people had many children to ensure that at least some would survive childhood. Today almost all children survive childhood, so people feel it is not necessary to have so many children. Another reason people historically had many children was to have extra help with farm work and in caring for the parents as they got older. However, today, modern machinery has made farm work more efficient, and government programs help support older adults, which is another factor influencing people to have fewer children. Additionally, in some nations, such as China, there are policies that limit the number of children a family may have.

When a population has a high proportion of older people, it benefits because older people can serve as productive volunteers in the community and care for younger children. Free child care enables more women of reproductive age to work outside the home and make money, which is good for the whole economy. The drawback of having a higher proportion of older people is that there can be a drain on a society's financial resources if too many of those older people require care. This puts pressure on working-age people to support both the very young and the very old.