UNITED NATIONS — A baby born somewhere on Tuesday will be the world’s eight billionth
person, according to a projection by the
United Nations.
اضافة اعلان
“The milestone is
an occasion to celebrate diversity and advancements while considering
humanity’s shared responsibility for the planet,” UN Secretary-General Antonio
Guterres said in a statement.
The UN attributes
the growth to human development, with people living longer thanks to
improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine.
It is also the
result of higher fertility rates, particularly in the world’s poorest countries
— most of which are in
sub-Saharan Africa — putting their development goals at
risk.
How many is too many?
Population growth has also magnified the environmental impacts of economic
development.
But while some
worry that 8 billion humans is too many for planet Earth, most experts say the
bigger problem is the overconsumption of resources by the wealthiest people.
“Some express
concerns that our world is overpopulated,” said UN Population Fund chief
Natalia Kanem. “I am here to say clearly that the sheer number of human lives
is not a cause for fear.”
Joel Cohen of
Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Populations told AFP the question of how
many people Earth can support has two sides: natural limits and human choices.
Our choices result
in humans consuming far more biological resources, such as forests and land,
than the planet can regenerate each year.
The overconsumption
of fossil fuels, for example, leads to more carbon dioxide emissions,
responsible for global warming.
Slowing growth
The current population is more than three times higher than the 2.5
billion global headcount in 1950.
However, after a
peak in the early 1960s, the world’s population growth rate has decelerated
dramatically, Rachel Snow of the UN Population Fund told AFP.
Annual growth has
fallen from a high of 2.1 percent between 1962 and 1965 to below 1 percent in
2020.
That could
potentially fall further to around 0.5 percent by 2050 due to a continued
decline in fertility rates, the UN projects.
The UN projects the
population to continue growing to about 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in
2050, and peaking around 10.4 billion in the 2080s.
Other groups have,
however, calculated different figures.
The US-based
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated in a 2020 study that the
global population would max out by 2064, without ever reaching 10 billion, and
decline to 8.8 billion by 2100.
Black Death
Since the emergence of the first humans in Africa over 2 million years ago
the world’s population has ballooned, with only fleeting pauses to the
increasing number of people sharing Earth.
Our ancestors were
hunter-gatherers, who had few children compared to later settled populations in
order to maintain their nomadic lifestyle.
The introduction of
agriculture in the
Neolithic era, around 10,000 BC, brought the first known
major population leap.
From around 6
million in 10,000 BC, the global population leapt to 100 million in 2,000 BC
and then to 250 million in the first century AD, according to the French
Institute for Demographic Studies.
From the 19th
century on, the population began to explode, due largely to the development of
modern medicine and the industrialization of agriculture, which boosted global
food supplies.
Since 1800, the
world’s population has jumped eight-fold, from an estimated 1 billion to eight
billion.
The development of
vaccines was key, with the smallpox jab particularly helping zap one of
history’s biggest killers.
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