Professor Sir Robert May:

"Overwhelmingly the biodiversity crisis is driven by the fact that there are too many people . But it is differentially amplified by the patterns of resource consumption so that one individual in North America or parts of Europe consumes as much, and has as much impact on the environment as 30 to 40 people in a typical third world country. So it is both a question of halting and in the very longer term, I would say reducing human numbers, while at the same time acknowledging that the great mass of humanity aspires legitimately to enjoy the same standards of living or something close to it that we do."