When I was born in 1953, the approximate world population was 2.681 billion. Now we’ve gone past 6.9 billion people according to the United Nations Population Reference Bureau, and some time next year it will be 7 billion. Overpopulation is still one of the biggest planetary problems, though it’s not talked about that much because it is a slow-motion catastrophe like global warming.
- Nearly all of the world’s population growth (80 million people a year) comes from developing countries, exacerbating poverty and threatening the environment.
- The world’s developed countries (totaling 1.2 billion) saw their populations continue to age, and the number of people of working age dwindled.
- The worldwide recession appears to have caused declines in birth rates in some developed countries, such as Spain and the United States; and slowed down increases where birth rates had begun to rise, such as in Norway and Russia.
- The U.S. would have zero population growth already except for immigration.
- Africa’s population is projected to double to 2 billion by 2050, although this growth could be greater if birth rates do not decrease faster than currently. Africa’s total fertility rate is 4.7 children per woman.
The good news is that the rate of growth is slowing down. U.N. projections predict that the world population may level off, and eventually start to decline again in the best-case scenarios. But this won’t happen until we reach 9 billion or more.
Time Magazine‘s Bryan Walsh asks:
Can the planet Earth really support 7 billion people, especially with the population expected to top 9 billion by mid-century? With some 1.5 billion people already living on less than $1.25 a day, nearly 1 billion people hungry and the natural world already heavily damaged, are we on the path to destruction?
Amazingly, the people of the world have done a much better job of surviving than many previous predictions have given us credit for. It might actually be possible to make it past the peak of 9 billion without exhausting all the resources on the planet. Let’s hope, because that’s where we’re headed by 2050.