Human Population Grows Up
- As we swell toward nine billion in the next half a century, humanity will undergo historic changes in the balance between young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural
- The year 2005 is the midpoint of a decade that spans three unique, important transitions in the history of humankind
- From 2000 forward, old people will outnumber young people
- From approximately 2007 forward, urban people will outnumber rural people
- From 2003 on, the median woman worldwide had, and will continue to have, too few or just enough children during her lifetime to replace herself and the father in the following generation
- The century with 2000 as its midpoint marks three additional unique, important transitions in human history
- First, no person who died before 1930 had lived through a doubling of the human population
- Second, the dramatic fall since 1970 of the global population growth rate to 1.1 or 1.2 percent a year today resulted primarily from choices by billions of couples around the world to limit the number of children born
- Finally, the last half a century saw, and the next half a century will see, an enormous shift in the demographic balance between the more developed regions of the world and the
less developed ones - The population will be bigger, slower-growing, more urban, and older than in the 20th century
- Rapid population growth will boost human numbers by nearly 50 percent, from 6.5 billion now to 9.1 billion in 2050
- Falling fertility and increasing longevity worldwide will expand the proportion of potentially dependent elderly people
- Increase access to reproductive health care and contraception to voluntarily slow population growth
- Although the rate of population growth has fallen since the 1970s, the logic of compounding means that current levels of global population growth are still greater than any
experienced prior to World War II - One billion people will be added to today’s population in only 13 to 14 years
- By 2050 the world’s population is projected to reach 9.1 billion, plus or minus two billion people, depending on future birth and death rates
- Human numbers currently increase by 74 million to 76 million people annually, the equivalent of adding another U.S. to the world every four years
- Virtually all population growth in the next 45 years is expected to happen in today’s economically less developed regions
- Despite higher death rates at every age, poor countries’ populations grow faster than rich countries’ populations because birth rates in poor countries are much higher
- Half the global increase will be accounted for by just nine nations. Listed in order of their anticipated contribution, they are India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Con-
go, Bangladesh, Uganda, the U.S., Ethiopia and China - 51 countries or areas, most of them economically more developed, will lose population between now and 2050
- This crossover in the proportions of young and old reflects both improved survival and reduced fertility
- The average life span grew from perhaps 30 years at the beginning of the 20th century to more than 65 years at the beginning of the 21st century
- If recent trends continue as projected to 2050, virtually all of the world’s population growth will be in urban areas
- In effect, the poor countries will have to build the equivalent of a city of more than one million people each week for the next 45 years
- Projections of billions more people in developing countries and more elderly people everywhere, coupled with hopes of economic growth especially for the world’s poor, raise concerns in some quarters about the sustainability of present and future populations
- In the short term, our planet can provide room and food, at least at a subsistence level, for 50 percent more people than are alive now
- Kingsley Davis observed in 1991, “There is no country in the world in which people are satisfied with having barely enough to eat.”
- Early efforts to calculate Earth’s human carrying capacity assumed that a necessary condition for a sustainable human society could be measured in units of land
- Other one-dimensional quantities that have been proposed as ceilings on human carrying capacity include water, energy, food and various chemical elements required for food production
- Attempts to quantify Earth’s human carrying capacity or a sustainable human population size face the challenge of understanding the constraints imposed by nature, the choices faced by people and the interactions between them
- Many major cities were established in regions of exceptional agricultural productivity, typically the floodplains of rivers, or in coastal zones and islands with favorable access to
marine food resources and maritime commerce - If the world’s urban population roughly doubles in the next half a century, from three billion to six billion, while the world’s rural population remains roughly constant at three billion, and if many cities expand in area rather than increasing in density, fertile agricultural lands around those cities could be removed from production, and the waters around coastal or island cities could face a growing challenge from urban waste
- Unless urban food gardening surges, on average each rural person will have to shift from feeding herself (most of the world’s agricultural workers are women) and one city dweller today to feeding herself and two urbanites in less than half a century
- The rise in food production could put huge strains on the environment
- Urbanization will interact with the transformation of human societies by aging
- Cities raise the economic premium paid to younger, better-educated workers whereas the mobility they promote often weakens traditional kin networks that provide familial support to elderly people
- The sustainability of the elderly population depends in complex ways not only on age, gender and marital status but also on the availability of supportive offspring and on socioeconomic status
- Better education in youth is associated with better health in old age
The human population on Earth has changed dramatically as rates of growth have been increasing over time. Most of this occurrence is linked to less-developed countries where it has problems dealing with poverty and high birth rates. If this remains constant towards 2050 of the human population, it is predicted that there will be 9.1 billion people on the planet. Taking this into consideration, the carrying capacity for the Earth to hold that much people is becoming closer and closer. The cause for this is because of the demand for more resources to the growing population and accounting for billions of people such as having to build more structures, using up more water, and the consumption of food that comes from food production which requires other various elements needed to be able to produce all that food. All of these factors can be easily seen in the degradation of the environment and the waste that is polluting our waters which adds more hardships to sustain both our planet and the survival of the human race. Also, there is issues with the balance between the young and elderly. If there are many older people and less younger ones, the life of the elderly can be quite devastating as they have most of their reliance on the youth for support and going through on a daily basis is tough and vice versa. By fixing the population now, the world can be in a better shape.
It's certainly sad to see how stressful for us and our world that has to go through because of this rapid increase of the growing human population that is putting a dent on the Earth. It's important to understand how this issue can relate to the idea that "nothing is unlimited and that everything has its limits" of how we overuse our resources that are becoming harder to obtain. By having more even population of the old and the young in some places such as Africa and Japan, the ability for the population to handle themselves is more easier. In addition, I believe that education is also another method that can bring awareness to the public about the costs of overpopulation and especially to the women out there of how having smaller families can change their lifestyle in a whole new way and the end to the cycle of poverty. I can agree that having a child is absolutely expensive and seeing that when we have less of them can alleviate the burden of having to take care of them. Hopefully, these actions can help to make the human population at a steady rate and protecting the environment of many other living species that provide us essential benefits.