Issues We Address
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Population
Population: An Underlying Theme in Addressing Some of the World’s Most Challenging Problems
The world’s population is now more than 6.6 billion and continues to grow by 78 million people per year. During the last half-century, the world’s population more than doubled. Between 1950 and 1999, the world population rose from 2.5 billion to 6.0 billion. In other words, there has been more growth in population in the last fifty years than the previous 2 million years that humans have been walking the earth. At current rates of birth and death, the world’s population is on a trajectory to double in 49 years.
This extreme growth in human population numbers is taxing the earth and its resources. As a result, the earth is imposing its own “checks” on population. We can witness these “checks” in the form of widespread disease and the emergence of new disease strains, food and water shortages, poor harvests and violent and destructive weather caused by climate change. The earth is a finite sphere and cannot endure infinite growth.
If we look forward to the next 50 years, the most significant population growth will take place in the developing world where resources are the scarcest. Ninety-nine percent of the population growth is occurring in the world’s poorest countries that are already struggling to provide for their existing populations in the face of poverty, civil unrest, and a scarcity of resources. Developing countries today need approximately $1 trillion per year in new infrastructure to accommodate their dramatic population growth. This figure is effectively impossible to meet, which means the continued growth in human population numbers will result in an increase in the number of people living in poverty, unemployment and with inadequate health care.
The median projection of population size by the U.N. Population Division envisions that population growth rates will decline over the coming several decades. But even if that median projection is achieved, the number of people expected to be added to the world’s population in the next 50 years will be almost as large as the number added in the last 50 years. That magnitude of increase, coming on top of the unprecedented growth that has occurred in the last half-century, will be felt in all aspects of life. It will further stress already strained ecological systems and worsen poverty in much of the developing world, thus aggravating threats to international security.
Population growth is not the only threat facing humanity, but it will be a major contributor to the crises that await us in the coming century. Overpopulating the planet puts us all at risk of extreme environmental and social consequences that we are beginning to see today.
