Today the population of the planet reached 6.5 billion. That is 5 billion more people that there were 100 years ago.

What does this have to do with business? Everything. It raises immediate questions about resourses — specifically economic & environmental sustainability.
Mary Kent and Carl Haub, co-authors of a Population Reference Bureau report issued last month titled “Global Demographic Divide” claim that, “Populations are growing most rapidly where such growth can be afforded the least.”

In 2004, The World Watch Institute had a thought provoking special issue of their magazine focused on population issues which offers additional insight on the issues our planet is facing with each new baby born. In it they have a nice assembly of articles addressing the question: What are the impacts of the population trends on economic, social, health, and environmental issues?

The question in my mind is: What is our planet’s carrying capacity? This question is particularly timely not only as we mark the historic population level today, but also as we here at Case await to hear from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, who is coming March 1 to campus to talk about his book: Collapse:How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

How can we prevent collapse? And what is business’ role in that prevention?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Business-in-Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.