Atlas Overview

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Science tells us how natural forces of enormous power have shaped and reshaped Earth’s surface, atmosphere, climate, and biota again and again since the planet’s beginnings about 4.5 billion years ago. For most of the planet’s history those environmental changes were the result of the interaction of natural processes such as geology and climate and were described on the geological time scale in epochs spanning millions of years. When humankind appeared on Earth around 200,000 years ago the influence of human activity on the environment must have been small and localized. The influence of scattered small groups of people on the global ecosystem would have been overwhelmed by the forces of natural systems (Steffen and others, 2007). Human population would not grow to 50 million (about 0.7 percent of the Earth’s current population) for another 197,000 years.

Population growth accelerated over the centuries that followed until the planet was adding more than that 50 million people every year. Our planet is now home to roughly 7.3 billion people and we are adding 1 million more people roughly every 4.8 days (US Census Bureau, 2011). Before 1950, no one on Earth had lived through a doubling of the human population but now some people have experienced a tripling in their lifetime (Cohen, 2003).

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With hunting and the use of fire, later agriculture and urbanization, and eventually the industrial revolution and modern technology, the ability of humans to shape their environment also grew exponentially. Earth scientists use the geologic time scale to describe time periods where different processes and forces shaped events in the Earth’s history, such as ice ages and mass extinction events. They use periods of time they call epochs, which range from 11,700 years (the Holocene) to millions of years (the Pleistocene and Neogene). In about 2000, Earth scientists coined a new word — Anthropocene — to describe a new epoch where “the human imprint on the global environment has become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system” (Steffen and others, 2011). Many in the Earth sciences believe that epoch has begun and that humankind with its vast numbers and its power to change the face of the Earth is at risk of putting the Earth system out of balance and causing the collapse of natural systems that are essential for humans to thrive, perhaps even threatening the future of all humankind.

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In 2015, the 17 countries included in this atlas are estimated to have a total population of over 369 million, representing a nearly 5-fold increase since 1950 — outstripping global population growth which grew by 2.9 fold during the same time (UN, 2015). The young age structure of the West African population assures continued rapid population growth until 2050 and beyond. If United Nations estimates are correct the 17 countries in this atlas will grow to 835 million people by 2050; 11.1 times as many people as lived on the same land in 1950 (UN 2015)! Parallel trends can be seen in the land cover changes of West Africa. With so many new families to feed, West Africa doubled the area covered by farms between 1975 and 2013. Vast areas of savanna, woodland, and forest landscape have been replaced or fragmented by cropland. At the same time villages, towns, and cities have grown in area — taking up 140 percent as much land as they had in 1975. In part to make way for those farms and settlements more than a third of the dense forest cover present in 1975 has been lost. In savanna and steppe landscapes of West Africa, drought, in some cases made worse by unsustainable land use practices, has degraded the vegetation cover contributing to a 47 percent increase in sandy areas. The future is unpredictable, but the trends of the past four decades projected into the future would be unsustainable.