TY - JOUR A1 - Kaack, Lynn A1 - Katul, Gabriel T1 - Fifty years to prove Malthus right JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences N2 - A major question confronting sustainability research today is to what extent our planet, with a finite environmental resource base, can accommodate the faster than exponentially growing human population. Although these concerns are generally attributed to Malthus (1766–1834), early attempts to estimate the maximum sustainable population (ergo, the carrying capacity K) were reported by van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) to be at 13 billion people (1). Since then, the concept of carrying capacity has evolved to accommodate many resource limitations originating from available water, energy, and other ecosystem goods and services (1, 2). In PNAS, Suweis et al.(3) apply the concept of carrying capacity using fresh water availability on a national scale as the limiting resource to infer the global K. They estimate a decline in global human population by the middle of this century. We ask to what extent models that are … Y1 - 2013 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hsog/frontdoor/index/index/docId/4119 UR - https://www.pnas.org/content/110/11/4161 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1301246110 ER -