Carrying Capacity of the Environment

Abstract

Catton defines carrying capacity as the maximum persistently supportable load of a focal population in a bounded environment. Here, definitions of carrying capacity for natural populations, ecosystems and humans, as well as biocapacity, are presented, with issues fully discussed pertaining to their proper interpretation, models and estimation, debate and derived paradoxes. With the explosion of the human population, the threat of overstepping the earth's carrying capacity has become a sword of Damocles, hanging over humanity and urging it to choose a sustainable path of development. Carrying capacity has become arguably the most important concept in the era of Anthropocene.

Value Chain-Induced Constraints Limiting Scale of Conservation Agriculture in South Africa

“…Biodiversity is the planet's greatest asset [1]. Anthropocene-induced species loss is estimated at up to 10,000 times the rate of natural extinction, in which Hui et al [1] argue agriculture, next to overfishing, industrialisation and urbanisation, plays a considerable role.…”

“…Anthropocene-induced species loss is estimated at up to 10,000 times the rate of natural extinction, in which Hui et al [1] argue agriculture, next to overfishing, industrialisation and urbanisation, plays a considerable role. Humans rely heavily on ecosystem services, which include cleaning air and water, stabilising weather, maintaining soil fertility, dissipating waste, controlling pests, pollinating crops, generating power and discovering new antibodies, and providing food, timber, cloth, medicine, minerals and industrial materials such as coal, oil, gas, rubber, plastics, and chemicals [1]. Humans have never contributed to such flows, but have always made use of them, today at a rate, where such ecosystem services are less likely to be available indefinitely.…”

“…Planetary boundaries, a concept developed by Rockström et al [2], which identifies safe operating spaces within earth systems, such as climate stability, fresh water, land system change, ocean acidification, phosphate and nitrogen biochemical flows and biosphere integrity, are integral parts of the ecosystem services and represent our planet's limits in supplying such services within the principles of our planet's carrying capacity. To sustain humanity, we need to manage its biosphere within that carrying capacity, to maintain such services, and avoid regime shifts, mass extinction or repeating boom-bust patterns of earlier civilisations which were unable to manage their natural resources and regional carrying capacities [1].…”

Biocapacity optimization in regional planning

“…Within the framework of sustainable development, biocapacity (BC) serves as the base for social, economic and human wellbeing234, which further determines the limit of human activities5, making the estimation of carrying capacity essential to regional planning. Many quantitative methods have been proposed for estimating biocapacity (for instance, NPP6, ecological footprint (EF)7, emergy8), in which the methodology of ecological footprint is of particular interest and translates the regional human demands for natural resources into the total area of different biological productive land necessary for material flow, with ecological footprint considered the demand on ecological capacity.…”

Environmental Carrying Capacity Based on Land Balance for Evaluation Planning of Spatial and Regional in Solok Regency, West Sumatra

“…These have an impact on consumption of natural resources and environmental quality owned (George and Kini, 2016;Hui, 2015). To overcome these problems, an assessment of the environmental carrying capacity in utilization of land is required (Abdelrahman et al, 2016).…”