Population Growth and Engineering Sustainability

This report provides information on population growth and its impact on engineering sustainability. It discusses the role of population in environmental sustainability and explains the greenhouse effect, global warming, and climate change. It also explores the concept of global warming potential and factors contributing to differences in values for different greenhouse gases.

Report

ABSTRACT
This report is providing brief information of population growth around world to maintain
sustainability in the engineering practices in order to manage the sustainability related to
environment, energy and resources. The impact of different green house Gases has been analysed
for condition of global warming and climate change.

Table of Contents
ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................................2
INTRODUCTION-100....................................................................................................................1
1. a) Role of Population in Environmental Sustainability...........................................................1
2 a) Explain greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change and their connection with
human activity..............................................................................................................................2
2. b)Explain global warming potential and factors that contribute to the differences in the
values for different greenhouse gases..........................................................................................2
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................4

INTRODUCTION-100
Engineering Sustainability is known as a process of planning and designing various
operating systems that are based energy and resource sustainability. It also can be considered as
process that does not compromises natural environment at any cost in process of future
generation to meet basic human needs (Simon, 2019). This report is analysing the population
growth to derive effective data that can help the engineers to maintain sustainability in the
engineering process. Various factors will be analysed in the study that can influence the
population growth. The population of India and China is used to calculate the population rate that
should be maintained to to get equals to population of India in year 2019. The effect of
greenhouse gases also will be evaluated for concept of global warming and other environmental
factors that are critical to consider. Various factors are considered in the report that contributes in
global warming.
1. a) Role of Population in Environmental Sustainability
The role of world population is most important for to maintain sustainability of
environment to prevent it from various factor like global warming and climate change.
There are different factors that can affect the population growth around world. Mainly
these factors are- Economic Development, Education, Quality of children, social factors, cultural
factor and death rate (Bacci, 2017). These are major factor that are need to be considered in order
to find its impact on the population growth rate.
Economic Development
The countries which in their developing stage and their economies are still under
development, have mostly concern about the impact of economic growth on population growth
rate (Bowen and Karl, 2017). In these countries children are considered as potential income
earners and it is considered that more the children parents have in family they will have more
potential members who can earn money.
Education
Education is a costly process for parents and expensive education system can encourage
the people to plan their family limited to stay economically stable (Abernethy and Hardin, 2018).
This is how population rate is affected by the education system.
Quality of Children
1

In the developing country people less focus on the quality of educational needs of
children so they do not care about family planning. If they start caring about educational needs of
their children they can show initiative for family planning.
Death rate
Death rate is inversely proportional to the population growth (Cassen, 2016). Higher
death rate will reduce the population growth rate and lower death rate shows that population is
growing much faster. The concept is related to factor that state that death rate can slow down
birth rate.
2 a) Explain greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change and their connection with
human activity
Human activities are one of the main reason because of which change in climate is
occurring frequently (Estrada, Botzen and Tol, 2017). One of the main reasons of this frequent
climatic change is greenhouse effect and its effect on global warming. Climate change can be
defined as issue in which there is a definite shift in whether pattern, rise in sea level etc. One of
the main reasons of climate change is greenhouse gases and global warming. Greenhouse effect
can be defined as a process in which radiation from earth’s atmosphere helps in maintaining
earth’s surface to a certain temperature. This is mainly due to increasing number of greenhouse
gases such as CO2. These increasing number of gases and their quantity is becoming one of the
most prominent reason of global warming. Global warming is a phenomenon in which there is
rise in earth’s temperature. All of these phenomena are directly linked to human activities. These
are mainly because of changing human activities such as natural resources such as oil, gases,
coal etc. are being increasingly used or burned by humans because of which emission of
greenhouses gases are increasing. As a result frequent changes in climate are occurring and
global warming is increasing continuously.
2. b)Explain global warming potential and factors that contribute to the differences in the values
for different greenhouse gases
Global warming potential (GWP) is a measure in which amount of greenhouse gases
trapped in earth’s atmosphere is measured up to a specific time horizon (King, Karoly and
Henley, 2017). There are various factors that contribute to difference in greenhouses gases
values such as: absorption of infrared radiation by a specific species, atmospheric lifetime of the
species and spectral location of its absorbing wavelength i.e. how much amount of gases are
2

trapped in atmosphere is calculated, then for how long these gases will be trapped in the
environment is calculated and lastly till what level these gases will impact the atmosphere is
calculated. These are the factors that contribute indifference in values of various kinds of
greenhouse gases. Gases with high GWP absorbed more energy whereas gases with lower GWP
increases earth temperature.
Explanation of why focus is always on CO2 even though it has a much lower global
warming potential compared to other greenhouse gases
CO2 is always paid more attention as compared to other greenhouse gases because other
gases have more potential of trapping heat molecules as compared to CO2 (Manzello, Eakin and
Glynn, 2017). Carbon dioxide plays a vital role in bringing changes within climate. There are
many resources because of which CO2 is emitted such as burning of fossil fuels, burn forest or
cutting down of forests. Other greenhouse gases have ability to trap heat but CO2 puts
environment at greater risk it has an irreversible effect on atmosphere because of which global
warming is increasing continuously, changes within climate are occurring frequently etc.
CONCLUSION
This report is concluding the important of population growth study to known the impact
of various factors on population growth all over the world. There are different factors has been
analysed in report that may have impact on population growth in the developing countries. The
impact of green house gases is analysed for climate change and global warming around the
world. The impact of Co2 is analysed for global warming compared to other green house gases.
3

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Abernethy, V. and Hardin, G., 2018. Population politics: The choices that shape our future.
Routledge.
Bacci, M.L., 2017. A concise history of world population. John Wiley & Sons.
Bowen, B.W. and Karl, S.A., 2017. Population genetics, phylogeography, and molecular
evolution. In The Biology of Sea Turtles, Volume I (pp. 39-50). CRC Press.
Cassen, R., 2016. India: population, economy, society. Springer.
Estrada, F., Botzen, W.W. and Tol, R.S., 2017. A global economic assessment of city policies to
reduce climate change impacts. Nature Climate Change. 7(6). p.403.
King, A.D., Karoly, D.J. and Henley, B.J., 2017. Australian climate extremes at 1.5 C and 2 C of
global warming. Nature Climate Change. 7(6). p.412.
Manzello, D.P., Eakin, C.M. and Glynn, P.W., 2017. Effects of global warming and ocean
acidification on carbonate budgets of Eastern Pacific coral reefs. In Coral reefs of the
eastern tropical Pacific (pp. 517-533). Springer, Dordrecht.
Simon, J.L., 2019. The economics of population growth (Vol. 5403). Princeton University Press.
4