http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/05/index20article4.html
The demographic force can be described in one short sentence: we will go from an already overstretched planet of 5 billion people in 1990 and 6 billion people today to about 8 billion by 2020-2025—in less than one generation.
The good news is that after that, the planet’s population will either stagnate or, even if it grows some more, reach a plateau at around 9-10 billion in the second part of this century, after which it may even decline. About fifteen years ago, forecasters fretted about much more worrisome scenarios. Happily, they were wrong. Some experts may therefore feel that I am overdoing it a bit when I talk about an explosion.
But consider the bad news: like a locomotive, global population growth requires a long braking period before it comes to a halt. In other words, there’s nothing one can do about this increase to 8 billion. The people who will have these children are, for the most part, already or about to be born. And this figure does reflect the recent and ongoing decline in birth rates in much of the developing world. At any rate, this increase of about 2 billion over today’s population, coming to a planet that is already overstretched, will act and feel like an explosion sending ripples into various directions.
Some readers may still resent my use of the term “demographic explosion,” which has become politically incorrect. To those I would respond that I am not a Cassandra or even a Malthusian, but that the resources and living space of the planet will be far more stretched with 8 billion people a few short decades from now than with 5 billion in 1990, let alone 3 billion in 1960. Just consider the following… implications.
More than 95 percent of the 2 billion people to be added over the next two decades or so will live in developing countries. Most will keep flocking to the cities, producing in 2020 a world where more than one person in two lives in a city. There will be some sixty cities with more than 5 million inhabitants (almost double their number in 1990), and perhaps twenty-five huge agglomerations of 10 million and more people (up from fewer than ten in 1990).
Karachi, Sao Paulo, and Dhaka will hover at around 20 million. Asian-style urban overcrowding and congestion will become a regular feature across the globe, with many negative consequences for poverty, health, and social stresses. Imagine the challenges of traffic, housing, waste management, sewage, and water supply in these sprawling cities. Even Africa will face ever-increasing urbanization rates, averaging 50 percent by 2020, double the level of a generation ago.
With this population increase and with higher living standards in developing countries, the world’s food production will have to increase by 40 percent over the next twenty years. Cereal consumption may rise by 30 percent, and meat consumption by 60 percent. Some people even forecast higher increases. In any case, even if most people agree that there’s no risk that the world won’t be able to feed itself overall, getting there will be a tall order. It’s becoming very hard to expand arable land, and the growth of crop yields will slow—in part because soils are rapidly becoming eroded or ruined by salt deposits. In many places, the limits of ever more intensive agriculture have become ominously clear. Declining underground water levels and nitrate pollution by fertilizers are just two frequent symptoms, in rich and poor countries alike.
Similarly, energy consumption will rise to the point where, in 2020, the developing world may be close to overtaking the rich countries in total carbon emissions from burning oil, gas, coal, and wood. Overall energy consumption will be close to double what it is now, even triple in many developing countries. In some, power production could rise fivefold.
While there’s not the slightest risk that the world will run out of energy by then, many global, regional, and local problems are connected with rising energy use. Global warming, for one, will be one of the big worries of the decades to come. But there will also be many regional and local stresses. China will need one new 1,000-megawatt power plant every month. If all those new plants are based on coal, and with India also needing to expand power supplies at considerable rate, acid rain could build up to a sizeable problem in Asia by 2020. For instance, acid rain could have a dramatic impact on Japan and its forests, just as it badly damaged spruce trees in the Adirondacks and red maples in Pennsylvania over the last decades.
In Nepal and other poor areas in the Himalayas, increasing fuel-wood collection under pressure from rural population growth has contributed to the near-irreversible disappearance of the forest cover—with many negative consequences, including flooding in low-lying areas such as Bangladesh. And with a mix of deforestation and drought, people in some parts of Africa, such as Mauritania, see the desert advance 10 kilometers a year.
The list of stresses that will come with the population increase goes on—infectious diseases, loss of tropical forests, fisheries depletion, biodiversity losses, pollution of the seas, and increasing water scarcity, to name a few. Like global warming, these problems are all urgent global issues.
— J.F. Rischard,
High Noon:
Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them
Filed under: natural philosophy
