Monday, November 6, 2017

Population Explosion

Without reducing rapid population growth, will it will be possible to solve the world’s global
Challenges? My first thought was that population would continue to put an increasing burden on our natural resources and force a confrontation on the issue to continue solving other environmental issues. Then, I discovered the statistics that undernourishment and those without access to clean drinking water have declined rapidly over the past 30 years. In 1987, 19% of the world's population were undernourished and 27% did not have access to clean drinking water. Today, those numbers have dropped to 11% and 9%, respectively. This is despite the fact that the world population has increased from 5 billion to 7.5 billion people. Add to this that the population growth rate that exploded after the industrial revolution (0.5% - 0.6% between 1700 and 1927, increasing sharply to 2.1% in 1974) has started to decline (1.2% today). Some population models predict a leveling off of population around 11 or 12 billion people in 2100. This suggests that population is not yet a crushing burden on our resources and that we can solve many of today's environmental issues without immediately addressing world population growth.

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