Hi everyone,
A nice article from BBC about the future of the world in terms of population growth and availability of space.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150901-is-the-world-running-out-of-space***************************************************************************
Sometimes it’s difficult to fathom that the world could actually become even more crowded than it is today...
New estimates issued by the United Nations in July predict that, by 2030, our current 7.3 billion will have increased to 8.4 billion. That figure will rise to 9.7 billion by 2050, and to a mind-boggling 11.2 billion by 2100.
... as the world becomes even more crowded, will it become practically impossible to find a patch of land free from human settlement or presence? Will we eventually overtake all remaining habitable space?
...an increasing number of us will live out our lives in cities. As agriculture becomes more efficient, people abandon jobs in that shrinking and difficult sector and instead take up ones in urban manufacturing or service. This has been going on for some decades. In 1930, just 30% of the world’s population lived in cities, compared to about 55% today. By 2050, however, about two-thirds will be based in urban areas.
“It boils down to more than one million additional people living in cities every five to six days from now until 2100.”
It takes capable governments and institutions to organise basic amenities such as freshwater, sanitation and waste disposal. “But the problem,” Cohen says, “is that managerial talent is in short supply.”
Worryingly, the places that are most in need of such oversight today are also the ones where most of humanity’s growth is projected to occur. Much of the future population increase will come from Africa, which will shoot up from its current one billion people to over four billion by 2100.
Even in developed countries, however, standards of living will probably not continue to improve at the same rate as in recent years. “We’ve had a few decades of extraordinarily rapid economic growth, with poverty declining in both rich and poor countries,” Bongaarts says. “But this will become much more difficult in the future.”
The reasons, he says, are three-fold. Wealthy countries are ageing, meaning their rate of growth and innovation will begin to slow. Secondly, the environmental odds of unencumbered growth are stacked against us: we have already used up the most productive land, dammed the most energetically profitable rivers and tapped into the easiest-to-reach groundwater.
Finally, inequality is becoming an increasing problem. While the average American’s median income has not budged much in the past few decades, the top 1% is doing increasingly well. “That phenomenon will continue into the future and in part will be driven by environmental issues,” Bongaarts says.
None of this, however, means that we will run out of actual space to live. Around half of the world’s land currently holds around 2% of the planet’s population, whereas only about 3% of total land supports more than half of humanity.
Many decades from now, human population might even begin to decline. For the foreseeable future, however, we are headed toward an increasingly crowded Earth – although the conditions of that world are still uncertain.
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Cheers.
Sriram
