World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision
Africa and Asia together will account for 86 per cent of all growth in the world’s urban population over the next four decades, adding that this unprecedented increase will pose new challenges in terms of jobs, housing and infrastructure. Africa’s urban population will increase from 414 million to over 1.2 billion by 2050 while that of Asia will soar from 1.9 billion to 3.3 billion, according to the 2011 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects, produced by the UN Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).
Related Information:
Mind-blowing Reminder of the Day
As of 2011:
- You, as a human, are one of 7 billion.
- The number of people living on less than $1.25 per day is 1.35 billion, or about 1 in 6.
- This year, the number of billionaires in the world rose to 1,210 (or 1 in 5,785,123), with a combined total wealth of $4.5 trillion (up from $3.4 trillion in 2009).
- A billionaire who earns 3% interest annually on just one of those billions makes $82,191 per day.
Therefore:
- The daily income ratio of richest to poorest: about 65,752 to 1.
- The population ratio of poorest to richest: about 1,115,702 to 1.
Drop in U.S. underground water levels has accelerated - USGS
reuters.comWASHINGTON, May 20 (Reuters) - Water levels in U.S.aquifers, the vast underground storage areas tapped foragriculture, energy and human consumption, between 2000 and 2008dropped at a rate that was almost three times as great as any time during the 20th century, U.S. officials said on Monday.
The accelerated decline in the subterranean reservoirs is due to a combination of factors, most of them linked to rising population in the United States, according to Leonard Konikow, a research hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey.
The big rise in water use started in 1950, at the time of an economic boom and the spread of U.S. suburbs. However, the steep increase in water use and the drop in groundwater levels that followed World War 2 were eclipsed by the changes during the first years of the 21st century, the study showed.
As consumers, farms and industry used more water starting in 2000, aquifers were also affected by climate changes, with less rain and snow filtering underground to replenish what was being pumped out, Konikow said in a telephone interview from Reston, Virginia.
Depletion of groundwater can cause land to subside, cut yields from existing wells, and diminish the flow of water from springs and streams.
Where is all the groundwater going?
World population is growing really, really fast
- 12% of everyone who’s ever lived is alive today source
Human Population Growth - pt. 1
Supposedly, the human population on this planet Earth was expected to reach 7 billion yesterday. Seven billion is a number that really can’t be appreciated by the human mind. Human population growth has been accelerating for a while now. One major factor for this growth is that the global birth rate exceeds the global death rate. Advances in medicine, for example, have allowed for people to live longer and have allowed for more successful child births. Other technological advancements have also contributed to extended lifespans.
If you plotted human population over time, this recent success of living has resulted in a graph that exhibits exponential growth — a J-shaped curve. In 1804, human population was estimated at 1 billion. It took about 123 years for the population to increase by a billion to reach 2 billion in 1927, something that took millenia of human existence to achieve the first time. Now, in the span of time from 1987 to 2011—24 years—human population has increased by 2 billion more people.
The recent success of living comes at a cost, though. What does life require to continue its existence, to continue propagation? Resources. Not all resources are equal, but many of them vital to life are limited and most of them require competition in some form. The rub is that to sustain exponential growth, you must either have unlimited resources or be able to eventually replenish or substitute resources exponentially. Either of those are not very likely scenarios.
When an environment reaches its carrying capacity—its intrinsic ability to sustain a population and its demands for resources—corrective, limiting factors will come into play. It’s a capital T Truth derived from the principles of economics and biology and physics. The ultimate question we have to ask ourselves is this: how close are we to reaching the carrying capacity for human population? And are we going to do anything proactive to correct it? Because, if we’re not going to do it, Mother Nature has no qualms at all to correct the situation for us.
In all honesty, though, the issue is a bit more subtle than that. One of my professors framed the issue like this: carrying capacity, in regards to human population, is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe it shouldn’t be thought about or recognized based on hard data. Rather, it should be defined or framed by the quality of life we, as humans, are willing to collectively accept. You can live beyond your means, but there’s a price to be paid somewhere or sometime down the line. You, as a resilient, intelligent life form on top of the food chain, can reside in a wasteland devoid of a lot of things. But do you really want to?
GINK: Green Inclinations, No Kids
“Well-meaning people have told me that I’m “just the sort of person who should have kids.” Au contraire. I’m just the sort of person who should not have kids.
Population isn’t just about counting heads. The impact of humanity on the environment is not determined solely by how many of us are around, but by how much stuff we use and how much room we take up. And as a financially comfortable American, I use a lot of stuff and take up a lot of room….
….When someone like me has a child — watch out, world! Gear, gadgets, gewgaws, bigger house, bigger car, oil from the Mideast, coal from Colombia, coltan from the Congo, rare earths from China, pesticide-laden cotton from Egypt, genetically modified soy from Brazil. And then when that child has children, wash, rinse, and repeat (in hot water, of course). Without even trying, we Americans slurp up resources from every corner of the globe and then spit 99 percent of them back out again as pollution…..
…..And so, for environmental as well as personal reasons, I’ve decided not to have children. I call myself a GINK: green inclinations, no kids.
So says Lisa Hymas in the Guardian this week, explaining her views on population and why she decided to become a ‘GINK’. No, I hadn’t heard of it either, but her piece is an interesting article, not too long and well worth reading it in full.
In it, Hymas muses about the prejudice that people without kids experience, the strange quizzical looks she receives when she tells people why she doesn’t have children.
It’s an awful situation really, that in an age of reproductive freedom (in the West at least), not having kids is perceived as though it were taboo. It got me thinking about the way I myself perceive couples, and especially women, who don’t have children….
Density is in our genes
The benefits of living close to other people are evident even to hunter-gatherers. Though their societies have changed over the millennia, studying characteristics of present-day hunter-gatherers can let us peer into the past. That’s what was done by three anthropologists—Marcus Hamilton, Bruce Milne, and Robert Walker—and one ecologist—Jim Brown. In the process, they seem to have discovered a fundamental law that drives human agglomeration. Though their survey of 339 present-day hunter-gatherer societies doesn’t explicitly mention cities, it does show that as populations grow, people tend to live closer together—much closer together. For every doubling of population, the home ranges of hunter-gatherer groups increased by only 70 percent. -Tim de Chant (Hunter-gatherer populations show humans are hardwired for density).
India Offers Free Cars For People to Get Sterilized
treehugger.comby Stephen Messenger, Porto Alegre, Brazil It could be said that two of the biggest challenges facing our planet arrise from a surging, resource-hungry human population, and from the steady rise in the amount of greenhouse gas emissions which threaten to alter its climate — but in an unprecedented move to counter the former, the government of India is essentially spurring the latter. In the Indian state Rajasthan, health officials are hoping to lure at least 30,000 men and women into voluntarily being sterilized by offering them expensive incentives, like cars, to ensure that there’s never a baby on board.
With 1.21 billion people within its borders, India is on track to become the world’s most populous nation — already accounting for 17 percent of humans on the planet. For decades the Indian government has tried implementing programs geared towards slowing its population growth, but so far none have been sufficiently effective. Census records show that just in the last ten years alone, India’s population grew by a whopping 181 million people, or a little over half the total US population.
The city’s chief medical officer tells The Telegraph that he thinks people will jump at the chance to trade in their reproductive ability for the chance to own a car or color TV.
“We are confident that this idea will work well” Mr Sharma said of the three-month long scheme.
The inducements on offer contributed by a local charitable trust include one Nano, the world’s cheapest car for the first volunteer, five motorcycles and an equal number of colour televisions and food blenders for disbursal amongst subsequent candidates.
Others would be paid varying cash amounts that would supplement the federal government’s Family Welfare scheme which offered Rs1000 [$22.83] to those undergoing vasectomy and Rs200 [$4.50] to the one who motivated them.
As population growth rates skyrocketing throughout much of the developing world, often in regions that can’t quite sustain it, offering incentives for couples to have smaller families may be the most humane alternative. Of course, talk of controlling human reproduction remains one of the most controversial subjects, but as the population nears an estimated 9 billion people by the year 2050, with climate related problems looming on the horizon as well, such conversations may be unavoidable.
The question remains, however, whether we can bribe our way out of more crowded world.
