Small Household Sizes Seen as Threat to Planet

The rise of singletons, divorcees and young people setting up home on their own may be a significant threat to the world's environment and wildlife, a new study suggests. The fragmentation and atomization of families thought of as a purely social phenomenon, in fact drives ecological destruction, it says.

Population growth means natural resources are being gobbled up at an increasingly faster rate, but the break-up of extended families and the boom in the formation of new, small households of one or two people is making the problem far worse, according to the study published in Nature.

Small households waste resources and contribute to urban sprawl, it says, claiming that the use of wood for fuel, the absorption of greenfield land and forests by housebuilding, and the emission of greenhouse gases are all increasing in per capita terms because of the growth in the number of households.

An abundance of homes with just one, two or three occupants can cause a sharp rise in the use of resources. For example, both two-person and six-person households typically have one refrigerator.

Scientists looked at more than 140 countries, more than half of which contained "biodiversity hotspots" - areas rich in endemic species of animals and plants (those peculiar to one locality) that are threatened by human activities.

For each one they counted population growth, number of households and average household size. In the countries with hotspots, they found there had been a dramatic drop in household size, which led to 155 million extra homes between 1985 and 2000, over and above those to be expected merely from population increase. Annual population growth in the regions ranged from 0.5 percent to 7 percent, whereas the growth in the number of households reached between 1.7 per cent and 10 percent.

Even in areas where population was declining, such as Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain, the scientists found that the number of households was soaring. Italy, for example, between 1951 and 1991 gained almost six million new households as a result of reduced average household size alone, which shrank in that period from 4.02 persons to 2.83.

The scientists, led by Jianguo Liu at Michigan State University, say in their paper: "Rapid increase in household numbers, often manifested as urban sprawl, and resultant per capita resource consumption in smaller households, pose serious challenges to biodiversity conservation."

Source: www.Independent.co.uk