Population Control

Then you have the poorest countries on the planet continuing to have children in the hopes their family lines will somehow survive, due to poverty, disease, etc.

The funny part is, the speed at which we brought the 3rd world closer to 1st world medical technology and sanitation minimums is kind of dicking us over (vaccination programs, clean water initiatives, etc). Those countries still have the birth rates of a dark ages population. They're trying to have as many kids as possible because so many used to die, and while way too many of those kids still die, it isn't as much as it once was. It took most of the current first world a century or two or three to bring our birth to death ratio down and we brought the 3rd world nearly up to speed in a few decades. Our obsession with personal-professional life helps too, but I always get a kick out of the fact that good medicine is biting us in the ass.

Didn't we just have a thread where some guy was getting upset about a condom and birth control initiative somewhere since the earth could easily support 10 billion+ people? I didn't chime in there but our population vs. resource issue is one of demographics and not numbers. Too many people in the wrong places with too few resources. And resources don't give a pomegranate about geo-political lines. Condoms are a much cheaper solution than fair global redistribution of essentials to life across political and socioeconomic lines. It's not a complete solution, but it works to slow the tide. Even if the birth rate magically matched the death rate per capita tomorrow, we'd still encounter the same resource distribution problems because populations are constantly concentrating toward urban areas and the global standard of living is constantly improving.

It's probably the most all-encompassing challenge of our time, and I think the best method is to take it in little bites. Huge issues arise over things in the political sphere like welfare, jobs (and the issues of how we currently educate people) but I think there's much to be done in other areas that are hard to argue against.

Working to make water desalination as cheap as possible would be huge. There's a lot of ocean out there and we'd use so little of it we'd barely even need to worry about the salt left in the ocean compared to the water taken out. Alternative energy and smarter energy.

I don't know about New Zealand, but the US electrical infrastructure is ancient, creaking and insufficient. The upgrades necessary aren't overwhelmingly divisive but a https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Smart_grid#Deployments_and_deployment_attempts being implemented and proven on a national scale somewhere would be a good step forward. Stuff like the massive east coast blackout a few years back are shameful marks on the state of our infrastructure and would be easily avoided with the benefits of a smart grid. At the very least, we need improved transmission capacity. Regrettably, smart grids are incredibly specific and would be open to obnoxious corporate bullshit (see the deployment section of that wiki page). This specificity is part of what makes the idea so powerful as an energy saving tool.

We need to be a bit kinder in general to the environment. Global warming is a huge related issue, but littler things like the rate at at which we expend underground aquifers across the globe, logging rates, how much salt we're getting into our planting soil and fresh water supplies, and utterly ridiculous disasters like the BP spill are all controllable and/or avoidable.

We need to keep engineering better crops across the world. More drought resistant, more temperature resistant, better nutrition, faster growth times, need less water to grow- you name it, we can probably bio-engineer it.

We have to rethink how we build and expand cities. Suburban sprawl is tremendously wasteful but at the same time increasing the density of our urban centers and keeping them properly supplied is an equally challenging nightmare. I honestly don't know what to consider in this department, but little things like urban farming on abandoned lots in Detroit always catch my attention.

We do need to get off oil at some point. Dramatically reduce our usage of it at least. Or from the other foot, we need to dramatically improve our technology for finding new oil wells and get to them as cheaply as possible. Alternative energy never hurts.

All these little problems contributing to the challenge of "how do we support a global and growing population" have solutions or at least means of relieving the symptoms. The easy ones just need a brief moment of political attention and some money - in many cases a not-so-horrendous sum assuming we stopped doing silly pomegranate like start wars. The harder ones are generally more directly intertwined with people and politics and may never be dealt with without political or personal sacrifice. Sadly, we've slid into this world of the "news cycle" when this is a generational problem that will need to be chipped away at for years and decades and it's hard enough to get the world to act together as a planetary collection of humans short of a Haiti earthquake or a tsunami, let alone try to keep a minimum of attention and resources directed to keeping humanity kicking for centuries to come without erupting into a World War III blood bath over resources. (On a dark note, WWIII is one "solution" to having too many people on the planet)