Why 80% of New Zealand is Empty

This is New Zealand and this is where people actually live in New Zealand, as you can see almost 80 percent of the country's land area is completely uninhabited by humans, which is a little strange if you think about it at first because New Zealand Zeeland is probably both larger. than you think and has a very good climate for people to live in the South Island and the North Island, they are respectively the 12th and 14th largest islands in the world and have been placed over the United States and would extend along the east coast from Florida. Running across Pennsylvania together, New Zealand's two main islands are even larger than the United Kingdom and, like the United Kingdom, share an almost identical climate with similar year-round temperatures and similar levels of rainfall.

The type of climate designated by Copen for the United Kingdom. Ireland and the vast majority of New Zealand is oceanic and temperate, generally having no dry season, warm summers and mild winters. If you look at a world map of where you can find this type of climate and similar climates, it includes several of the most densely populated places in the world, such as most of Western Europe, Vancouver, Mexico City, Lima and Cusco, Johannesburg and the really populated parts of south east Australia, one of the biggest outliers here is of course New Zealand, which despite having an overall climate that is almost identical to the UK and even larger in size, is also much less populated: the United Kingdom today has a population approaching 69 million people, while New Zealand barely has more than 5 million or almost 14 times fewer people;

In fact, New Zealand's combined landmass has a population less than a ton of other smaller islands around the world, all despite its larger size and more ideal climate, the biggest evidence of all being smaller islands like Java, Honshu and Britain, all of which are smaller than New Zealand and yet have orders of magnitude more people living in them. To cut to the chase, population density in the UK is on average 281 people per square kilometer, while in New Zealand it is only 18 people per square kilometer; So the UK is 15 times more densely populated than New Zealand, so why is it New Zealand? much more comparatively

empty

despite similar size and similar climate the answers are complex and fascinating but the thing about New Zealand's population pattern is that it seems to get even stranger the more you look at it remember that something like the 80 percent of the country is totally uninhabited, but consider the difference in that amount of uninhabited land between the two main islands, the vast majority of New Zealand's population, more than three quarters of them live more clustered in the North Island, while less than a quarter Many of them live much more dispersed in the geographically larger South Island, so the smaller North Island has many more people than the South Island, but still, almost Half of all North Islanders simply live around New Zealand's main city, Auckland.

By far the largest city New Zealand has, strategically located on the isthmus with good natural harbors to the north and south and situated on a dormant volcanic field with fairly fertile soils, the Auckland region alone is home to around 37 per percent of all new modern cities. New Zealanders and is rapidly approaching a population of two million people. This high concentration of people around a single city makes New Zealand one of the most centralized countries in the developed world. For comparison, these are the population percentages of some other countries. and its largest cities around the world, so including Auckland, the North Island is home to four out of five of New Zealand's largest cities, with the largest on the South Island being Christchurch, located on the Canterbury Plains, but if the urban area is excluded.

Around Christchurch, the population density in the rest of the South Island, an island that is about the same size as the Netherlands plus another half of Belgium, is basically almost barren, with only about 5.4 people per square kilometer in average, almost as

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as the states of North and South Dakota in the United States and this is really strange today because historically back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was actually the South Island that had the most people than the North Island, now, of course, the biggest and most obvious factor explaining the new Zealand's relative emptiness is simply its absolute isolation from the rest of the world.

There are some cartographers who prefer to divide the planet into two separate halves: the land hemisphere and the water hemisphere, and within the water hemisphere, New Zealand sits almost directly in the center. The closest other major landmass to them is, of course, Australia, but they are separated by almost 2,000 kilometers across the open ocean of the Tasman Sea and, apart from that, are just scattered Antarctic islands or open, empty oceans. thousands of kilometers away in each of them. The direction, even today, because they are such a small note here, air and sea traffic around the South Pacific is the emptiest place in the world, it still takes almost four hours of flight to jump between Auckland and Sydney, which is roughly comparable to a flight between London and Athens across all of Europe Europe and that's just New Zealand's nearest neighbor for most of Europe New Zealand is literally the furthest place you can get to without leave the planet itself in a space because New Zealand exists precisely on the opposite side of the world from much of today's Spain and Portugal, it simply takes time for people to arrive or leave New Zealand, even in the 21st century, and it is because of this extreme isolation from the rest of the world that New Zealand was Always destined to be calm, the last large habitable landmass on the Earth's surface discovered by humans, remained an isolated ecosystem, perfectly untouched by humans throughout all of history and civilization, until a group of Polynesian explorers probably stumbled upon it through simple chanting.

Sometime in the 13th century, around the same time that Genghis Khan and the Mongols devastated Eurasia, from there, over the centuries, the first Polynesian settlers developed their own unique culture, the Maori, and remained on the islands without be bothered by anyone else. humans from the outside world until the mid-17th century, when a Dutch sailor was the first non-Polynesian to discover and visit them, but sustained and lasting European contact with the islands did not really begin later until 1769, when the British sailor Captain Cook visited the island almost five centuries after it was first discovered and settled by the Maori, although, in short, other islands around the world such as Great Britain, Java Honshu and many others have simply had much more time to develop and expand their populations that New Zealand has many of these islands.

They have been colonized by humans for tens of thousands of years simply because they exist closer to the edges of major continental landmasses and were therefore discovered by people Millennia before New Zealand existed, as recently as the 13th century. , New Zealand's human population was literally zero, while other medieval islands like Japan and Britain already numbered in the millions; roughly where New Zealand is today in the 21st century, having more people to start with simply means having more people later, as more people become available to breed and New Zealand Maori. Zeeland started completely from scratch just 800 years ago, which is actually not that long ago, historically based on several assumptions and not based on anything but guesses.

Modern demographers generally estimate that the Māori population in New Zealand probably numbered around 200,000 people. After five centuries of living there when the British arrived and subsequently its population began to plummet significantly, in 1840 the British Empire formally incorporated New Zealand as a colonial possession and began a flood of immigrants to the islands from Great Britain and Ireland through of a The combination of several factors, such as diseases introduced by Europeans, to which the Maori lacked immunity. War and violence between the colonizers and the indigenous Maori and the forced introduction of a new legal and justice system that was unfamiliar to them, New Zealand's Maori population plummeted from around 200,000 at the time of contact in 1769, there were only about 40,000 more than a century later in 1890, but by that time around 500,000 white European settlers, mostly from Britain and Ireland, had arrived on the islands and had now mostly replaced them.

Initially, during the colonization process, most of the new European settlers who arrived decided to settle in the South Island because the North Island was much more inhabited by indigenous Māori and therefore more colonial wars and violence were occurring there. . and also because gold was discovered in the south island, it wouldn't be until the 20th century that the North Island would regain its larger proportion of population, but basically it was always destined to happen and get to the point where we are today. More than three-quarters of the population lives on the North Island because it turns out that it is quite difficult to build a civilization on the South Island.

For starters, the South Island is significantly more mountainous than the North Island. This is because beneath the surface of New Zealand exists precisely along the intersection of the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates, but beneath the South Island, the westward-moving Pacific plate is colliding and subducting beneath the northwest-moving Australian plate for the past 45 million years, the collision of these two plates here has lifted up 20 kilometers of rock to form the Southern Alps, which stretch for almost the entire South Island and its name is appropriate because this mountain range is actually approximately On par with the scale of the original Alps, in Europe there were 18 peaks in this mountain range exceeding 3 000 meters in height, while the highest of They measure over 3,700 meters and are almost as tall as the iconic Mount Fuji in Japan, for comparison, these mountains tower over anything found in Australia.

The highest mountain Australia has to offer is Mount Kosciusko and it is approximately 1500 meters lower than this highest mountain on the South Island of New Zealand. Economically developing gigantic mountains is a challenging task because building anything around or through them is simply more expensive and labor-intensive than on flatter, more ideal lands, but takes up a lot of space that would otherwise be available in the South Island is not the only problem for development that the mountains here pose, they extend for around 500 kilometers across the entire island and only form a narrow strip of land to the west that is actually exposed to the prevailing westerly winds. blowing across the Tasman Sea, so as a result, moist air blowing with the prevailing winds will almost immediately reach the Southern Alps, forming clouds that will dump torrential amounts of rain. along the narrow western coastal strip, but as the winds travel further over the mountains, they lose moisture and become warmer as they cross and then descend towards the eastern side of the mountain, where they then become winds warm and dry winds blowing through the east of the island.

As a result, the mountains of the South Island not only take up much of the available space away from development, but also cast a deep rain shadow over the flat plains of the eastern half of the island, turning them into generally arid plains that sometimes often subjugate. to drought-like conditions, so essentially the land on the east side of the island is generally flatter and easier to develop, but also receives very little rainfall to make farming a sustainable enterprise, while The western side of the island is extremely hilly with much less flat space available and probably too much rain conversely, although still quite mountainous in its own right, the North Island is much less mountainous than the South Island.

There is more flat land available there, so it is easier to develop rainfall across the entire North Island, it is more evenly distributed. and predictable than the South Island, since there are not as many large mountains to alter weather patterns and since New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere and the North Island is further north, closer to the equator, especially extending towards the isthmus, where Auckland is located, temperatures are The North Island is on average warmer than further down in the South, closer to the pole, and while there aremany volcanoes on both islands, all the volcanoes on the South Island are currently dormant and none of them have erupted in centuries, on the contrary, the volcanoes on the island.

The North Island is still active and there have been some small eruptions from time to time over the last few decades which have produced a limited amount of fertile volcanic soils on the island that are completely absent on the flatter South Island. lands more reliable and evenly distributed rainfall warmer temperatures and marginally better soils mean a better ability to carry out agriculture and a better ability to simply support more people on the North Island and so on after the gold on the island ran out South and the violence in the North Island ended, it was only a matter of time before the North Island ended up with more than three-quarters of the total population, but even then it is not that the North Island has much capacity to house To many people while active volcanism introduces some quantities of minerals to the soils of the North Island, these eruptions really do not occur that frequently and are generally quite minor events;

There have only been a total of 13 major volcanic eruptions in all of New Zealand over the entire last 1800 years. In history, the North Island itself has only seen four very minor eruptions over the last century, while the South Island, of course, He hasn't seen exactly any. By contrast, Japan experiences an average of 15 volcanic events each year, while only one volcano among dozens of active volcanoes on the Indonesian island of Java has erupted six times since 2018 alone. As a result, the soils of several Indonesian islands and Japanese more frequently receive deposits of minerals from all the ash that falls from volcanoes, so they are more fertile and easier. to farm than in New Zealand where volcanism is more dormant and rarely occurs and therefore soils are naturally fertilized much less frequently, so ultimately due to all the mountains, volcanoes Dormant, arid hills and plains taking up most of the space accompanied by strange rainfall patterns and lack of very good soils, the vast majority of New Zealand is simply not very good for cash crops;

Less than two percent of the country's total land mass is actually considered arable and suitable for crops, a percentage that is actually comparable to countries like Jordan and Somalia, each of which largely exists in a desert environment. Much more hostile, but unlike desert countries, while New Zealand's land is mostly not very suitable for farming, its temperate climate has water readily available in some places and abundant pastures largely make up for it. perfect for grazing and ranching, so instead of farming, New Zealand simply brought in a ton of cows and sheep and built their entire agricultural industry around animals.

Instead, the meme that there are more sheep in New Zealand than humans is very true because of this factor. Today there are almost 27 million sheep on the islands compared to only 5.1 million humans and with sheep New Zealand found its perfect niche in the world market because they are now the largest exporter of sheep products such as wool and lamb in the world, but that is not even its largest export product. New Zealand also has more than twice as many cows on their islands as they have people, so it is actually dairy product that they produce from all of these cows and then that makes up their single largest export product, so despite only two percent of its land that is considered arable 55 of New Zealand's land is still used for agriculture anyway, virtually all of it is used to raise animals rather than growing crops, in a way that New Zealand's geography forced it to become basically an offshore European ranch after the Gold War.

It was depleted at the end of the 19th century, there were really no other lucrative minerals to extract nor oil and gas to extract and sell to world markets, its very limited capacity to cultivate and its remoteness from the rest of the world is centrally assured. that despite their large geographical size the islands would always have a fairly small population and a small population plus the very remote distance from the three main global consumer markets in Europe, East Asia and North America meant that New Zealand could never develop a sector competitive manufacturing as occurred in other island states such as Japan and the United Kingdom, which can grow much more food to support more people or be closer to major consumer markets to export their finished products, thus being New Zealand's only ability to generate capital.

Through exports, it was raising biological animal resources such as sheep and cows, which are very good at producing and marketing in exchange for things in manufactured products and oil and gas. In fact, New Zealand now produces so much food through this process that they produce enough to feed around 40 million people a year or around eight times their own population, obviously they don't really need that much food, so the 95 percent is exported to more than a hundred different countries around the world, which in 2019 generated more than 46 billion New Zealand. dollars in income Livestock is the main pillar of New Zealand's exports, it has been that way for almost 200 years and will probably continue to be that way in the future because it is really the only competitive export that geography really gives New Zealand, but because that is the case.

Animal agriculture occupies more than half of the total available land in New Zealand and therefore further limits the ability of people to spread and settle on the islands and then, as in the rest of the developed world, New Zealand's birth rates have also fallen below the natural level. replacement level, but they have not been there for as long as in other countries - as recently as 2010, the birth rate in New Zealand was still 2.1 children per woman on average, precisely at the level required to keep stable to the population from 2022. Rates have fallen slightly below replacement level to 1.8 children per woman, but are still higher than in many other developed countries such as Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea and, Unlike Japan and South Korea, New Zealand has and continues to have a very long history of Immigration to the islands from abroad New Zealand is a settler society where no human being today has direct ancestry from the islands they It dates back more than 800 years and when almost the entire population of European descent does not even have ancestry there that goes back 200 years. years throughout its history since 1840 when the British began the period of mass immigration, most of New Zealand's population growth has always come from immigrants, but the pace of immigration has recently begun to grow even faster fast for about a century after the British began mass migration to New Zealand.

Racist policies were implemented that deliberately restricted the number of non-white immigrants allowed to come to the islands, keeping the number of arriving immigrants artificially limited at limited growth and density; After all, there were actually only a limited number of white Europeans who wanted to uproot their lives and travel to the opposite end of the world for a new life in New Zealand, therefore it took centuries after its initial discovery by the Maori for New Zealand reached even a million people around 1911. Racist policies restricting the number of non-whites arriving only relaxed after World War II, so it took another 45 years from 1 million people to reach 2 million, then another 20 years until it reaches 3 million and then another 30 years until it reaches 4 million, but after 4 million people. were reached in 2006, it only took just 14 more years to add another million people and reach 5 million by 2020, and the vast majority of all that recent growth came from immigration from new places.

Starting in 2008, the New Zealand government set a target of 45,000 new immigrants to the country annually plus an additional allowance of up to five thousand more between 2013 and 2018 alone. 270,000 new immigrants arrived in New Zealand from overseas. The United Kingdom continues to represent the largest country from which immigrants arrive in New Zealand. As former residents of the United Kingdom still represent approximately 1 in 20 people in the country, but the majority of immigrants today no longer come from Europe as a whole, but from Asia and mainly from China, India and the Philippines, today There are more than 27 of the total.

New Zealand's population was born somewhere else outside the country, a rate that is among the highest seen anywhere in the world and a rate that will likely continue to rise even further in the future, but new immigrants arriving in the country they don't do it. they settle everywhere at the same time, for the most part they basically settle in the biggest city with the best flight connections to the outside world, where they originally came from Auckland in their 20s, between 1996 and 2016, more half of New Zealand's total. The population growth occurred exclusively in the Auckland region, a growth rate that many in the city worry is not very sustainable.

By 2022, the median house price in Auckland had risen to more than US$1.1 million, all in a city where the median annual salary remains fair. US$44,000, that's a ratio where the average house price in the city costs 25 years of the average salary, making Auckland one of the least affordable cities in the world to own a home, so While it's true that most of New Zealand is still pretty empty, most of it is simply not habitable for all the reasons explained in this video and the small parts of the country that are actually inhabited are already struggling to provide enough housing to the people who will already be there in the future.

You know how much more populated these fascinating, isolated islands will become, but New Zealand's quotas on the number of people they allow entry each year are rooted in logical and scientific thinking; Today they understand better than anyone the natural limitations their islands offer and the realities they actually have to work with, and if you're like me, then you're probably just as curious about why our planet actually works the way it does. It does, but the world is complicated and sometimes difficult to understand. Science and mathematics serve us. as the main tools to help us understand this complicated reality, but for me and perhaps for you too, science and mathematics are subjects that have never been easy and can even seem impossible to understand at times without a personal teacher to explain the things and going over problems almost everything that was more complicated than just basic math crossed my mind.

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