World Populaion growth-Solutions to overpopulation:This article is populated with solutions to world population growth … Putting World Population Growth Statistics in Context — and Finding …
Jennifer Delamide: BSCS2A
When we talk about world population growth statistics, we get into very large numbers with many confusing zeroes at the end. While lots of 0′s may bring back fond memories of our days of test scores and playing hooky from school, they do nothing to help us understand a factual sentence like: “The earth’s population is projected to rise from 6,400,000,000 in 2004 to 8,900,000,000 in 2050.
That means we will likely increase world population by 2.5 billion people in the next half-century, but how do we put such a large number in context to make it easier to grasp? Does population growth just mean a few more people at the next block party, or will the teeming masses start falling off the edge of whatever cliff they’re closest to?
In this article, we’ll try to make sense of world population growth statistics, and then we’ll discuss why this increase in global population is significant.
WORLD POPULATION GROWTH —
THE STATISTICS AND TRENDS IN CONTEXTvvv
For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume the population increase between now and 2050 will be linear. (Experts predicts that population growth will be faster in the early part of the period than in the later part, but for our purposes, working with an average increase will be fine.) Remember, we’re talking about the NET population growth—the number of new people born minus the number who die.
If we convert the total population growth of 2.5 billion for the first half of the 21st century to an annual rate of growth, we can expect 54 million additional people per year to occupy the planet. That large a number still seems pretty hard to relate to, though, so if we take it down to a per-day figure—which would be 149,000 net additional people per day—it’s
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more understandable because we can compare it to figures we’re familiar with. For instance, 149,000 is two or three football stadiums worth of people (depending on the stadium capacity). Maybe that doesn’t seem like so many people at first, but remember how shocked we were when we were told about the death toll from the December 2004 Asian tsunami—several hundred thousand people died. Yet today we’re adding that many new people to the planet’s population every two days. |
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So, should we be cold, calculating statisticians who see that a high number of deaths from a natural disaster or, say, the one million people who die each year from malaria don’t matter because we’ve got so many new humans coming down the population-growth conveyor belt anyway? No, of course not. One of our top goals as a society should be to reduce and eliminate suffering wherever and whenever possible.
Does this leave us with the seemingly conflicting goals of keeping humanity’s numbers at a reasonable (sustainable) level vs. not wanting people to suffer and die?
