The world’s population will go through the seven billion barrier later this year having added an extra one billion people in just over a decade, according to to a projection by researchers working with data from the United Nations in an article published in the latest issue of Science.

The world's population is continuing its relentless growth Image by Arenamontanus, Flickr

In fact a specific prediction is made – though it must surely be taken with a pinch of salt. The planet’s 7-billionth person will be born on 31^st October 2011in India – that should add a bit of spice to this year’s Halloween.

This year in 2011 alone, approximately 135 million people will be born and 57 million will die – a net increase of 78 million people.

According to Professor David Bloom, of the department of economics and demographics at Harvard University who wrote the report, by 2050 the population will reach 9.3 billion. Most of this increase (97%) will be in the world’s less developed regions where life expectancy has been boosted by medical advances, more effective vaccines, antibiotics and general improvements in public-health conditions.

Nearly half of this increase will be in Africa.

The populations of developed western nations will, by contrast, remain largely flat but they will be more aged populations with fewer adults of working age supporting a much larger older and retired population.

Unprecedented global demographic upheaval

This enormous population rise will bring in its trail “unprecedented global economic demographic upheaval”. Food, water, housing and energy will be hard to come by in growing nations with limited resources, according to the report.

Whilst the rate of population growth has slowed since 1970 to 1 percent per year from a little over 2 percent, according to the U.N. data, the actual increase in population has continued on its inexorable climb. By 2050 India will have overtaken China as the world’s most populated nation, and the US will be the only developed nation among the ten most populated.

The world reached 1 billion people in 1800, then 2 billion in 1925 according to the report, and within the last half century alone the growth has been dramatic with the population booming from 3 billion to now 7 billion.

The projections are, of course, only projections and will be impacted by any changes in birth rates. Thus the 2050 the population estimate could be two billion lower than predicted, at eight billion, and the basic 2100 projection estimate of 10 billion could be either as low as 6.2 billion or as high as 15.8 billion.

“Although the issues immediately confronting developing countries are different from those facing the rich countries, in a globalized world demographic challenges anywhere are demographic challenges everywhere” says Professor Bloom.

“Population trends indicate a shift in the ‘demographic centre of gravity’ from more to less developed regions. Already strained, many developing countries will likely face tremendous difficulties in supplying food, water, housing, and energy to their growing populations, with repercussions for health, security, and economic growth” he added.

“The demographic picture is indeed complex, and poses some formidable challenges. Those challenges are not insurmountable, but we cannot deal with them by sticking our heads in the sand.

“We have to tackle some tough issues ranging from the unmet need for contraception among hundreds of millions of women and the huge knowledge-action gaps we see in the area of child survival, to the reform of retirement policy and the development of global immigration policy.

We cannot sit idly by

“It’s just plain irresponsible to sit by idly while humankind experiences full force the perils of demographic change” concluded the Harvard Professor.

Certainly the consequences are stark. Given our insatiable appetite to consume the world’s resources certain actions must be taken if we are to achieve any basic levels of environmental sustainability in order to alleviate what are likely to be the worst consequences of this population rise.

Obviously our economic model of continued growth, in conjunction with the massive global rise in population over the past 50 years has hugely contributed to the rise in greenhouse gases. We are all acutely aware of this now.

Water issues

But to take another subject that is less spoken about: water. Drinkable water is now spread so thinly across the globe that the United Nations Environment Program has projected that in just 14 years’ time, two thirds of the world’s population will be living in countries facing water scarcity (or “water stress”).

Half of the world’s original forests have already been destroyed for human land use, and the world’s marine life already faces the threat of catastrophe.

The world’s available agricultural areas may have expanded in the past 50 years, but not on a per capita basis  – and the available agricultural land per person must inevitably decline.

Closing the consumption gap will be monumentally difficult. You only have to look at the reactions of China and India when the West has tried to get them to cut their carbon output. They point to the arrogance of the West that has had decades of industrial growth, saying that they only aspire to living the kinds of lives that are taken for granted in the West.

There is obviously no magic pill but there are multiple fronts that need to be addressed at the same time. Water scarcity and protecting eco-systems are clearly essential, but perhaps most important of all is the challenge to ensure that women throughout the world are able to decide for themselves if they are to become pregnant.

environment, population growth, sustainability, United Nations, world population Ecology, News