I have been a believer that there are too many people in the world for a long time. And that climate change with its rising temperatures, rising sea levels will reduce the amount of habitable land--too hot, coastal flooding, destruction of fresh water estuaries...
A recently released report in Nature found that rural areas around the world have been undercounted and the world population is probably much higher;
The significant underrepresentation of rural population we found in the gridded datasets raises the question whether such gaps in the census are more widespread than assumed to date, and how reliable current global population estimates really are. For example, is it possible that global population estimates from the United Nations36 (7.98 billion in 2022) or World Bank37 (7.95 billion in 2022), both relying heavily on national population censuses, miss a significant part of the world population?
Not only is the world more crowded the reduction in habitable land will lead to climate migration putting more pressure on the remaining land. Look at it this way, in 1980 had our focus been to keep population levels steady, we would have half the pressure on Mother Earth than we have today.
