Effects of humanity on our planet addressed by former chief scientific adviser - <em>News</em>
Wednesday 17 October 2007
By Naomi Weston
In the last 150 years the global population has increased five times and in the last 70 years it has increased three times. But what impact is this having on our planet?
Professor Lord Robert May discussed the effect of humanity on our physical environment in a Centenary Prestigious lecture, chaired by the Rector, Sir Richard Sykes, last week.
Looking at the issues of climate change, food and water and our effect on other species, Lord May documented the present scale of human impact and examined the actions we should be taking.
"Population growth since we invented agriculture has been remarkable," said Lord May, "but nothing like what we have seen in the last 150 years."
"The increasing use of energy and the problem of climate change is also a huge issue," added Lord May. "As the G8 countries are asked to reduce their global greenhouse gas emissions, the global population is set to increase by half again by 2050 which is another worry."
With an increasing demand for food and water there will be further problems with water supplies and agriculture demands, he said.
Lord May also highlighted the speeding up of extinction rates over the last century and the work Imperial College is doing to combat this. The Centre for Population Biology at the Silwood Park campus headed by Professor Georgina Mace, for example, is conducting research on ecological processes and the human impact on ecosystems.
How can we measure our affects on the planet, asked Lord May. The first attempt to make a quantitative measure of our impact was 20 years ago by researchers at Stanford University. They estimated that between a quarter and a half of all green plant material that grows each year is used for our purposes directly or indirectly.
But what can we do to address these issues? "We need to adapt to change," Lord May emphasised. "We need to reduce our demand for energy and use more renewable sources."
"It is important however, to remember that atoms of CO2 we put into the atmosphere will stay there for 100 years or more and it will take longer to assess their effects," he added.
Concluding the lecture, Lord May stated: "Tomorrow’s struggles among nations will be in a resource limited world. We need global co-operation to address these environmental changes."
He added: "We live in difficult and dangerous times. We are confronting problems that are real and serious but not insuperable. To solve them we need the fact based empiricism of the Enlightenment and also people and institutions showing high levels of co-operation."
Lord May of Oxford, is former President of the Royal Society (2000-2005), and holds a Professorship jointly in the Department of Zoology, Oxford University, and at Imperial College London. For the five-year period ending in September 2000, he was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, and Head of its Office of Science and Technology.
Lord May studied theoretical physics, but for the last 25 years he has applied mathematics to the study of the way population structure affects ecology, especially in the context of infectious diseases. His research interests centre on the causes, consequences, and magnitude of biological diversity; mathematical models of the population dynamics of the immune system; transmission of, and defences against, viral infections and other disturbances in complex networks, including ecological food webs, infectious diseases, and IT systems.
Watch the lecture at: Lord May lecture
Article text (excluding photos or graphics) available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.
Photos and graphics subject to third party copyright used with permission or © Imperial College London.
