OVERPOPULATION THREAT

Up To The Minute Current World Population
The world's population, currently passing 6 billion, will climb to 8 billion by 2026. It will reach 8.9 billion by 2050 according to the Census Bureau. 99% of the increase occurs in the developing regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. By early in the next century, in the more developed nations, deaths will exceed births. The world's age structure will also shift, becoming progressively older.
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Ever wonder how many people are born around the world every second of every day? Here's a list of world vital events compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau for 2000.
Births:
Month — 10,949,135
Day — 358,988
Hour — 14,958
Minute — 249
Second — 4.2

JULY 2000 - More babies needed as Russian population dwindles. President Vladimir Putin warned that Russia could become a "senile nation" and the population could shrink by another 22 million in the next 15 years. And every third child born in Russia has some kind of health problem.

MAY 11, 2000 - India's population officially hit 1 billion today.

JANUARY 2000:
Twice As Many Americans By 2100. New population projections from the Census Bureau today call for the population to jump from the current 275 million to 571 million in 2100, with a median age rising above 40 and larger proportions of minorities.

DECEMBER 1999:
The future is bleak, says the New South Wales Premier, Bob Carr, and no amount of fireworks and television footage of people dancing in the streets can change that. Overpopulation is the biggest threat to the future. The exploding world population - doubling since 1960 - has increased the impact of emerging problems such as destruction of the ozone layer, acid rain and global warming. "The TV hype we saw on January 1 was a folkloric gloss on a very scary moment in human history."" From Easter Island to Mesopotamia, the world has seen civilisations collapse because even in ancient times the birthrate outstripped the capacity of the land to sustain it. Now, in an age of globalisation, we are doing to the whole planet what the Sumerians did to one little corner of it in 5,000 BC. In the view of many scientists the millennium sees us embarked on the riskiest experiment since our species emerged blinking from the primeval forest."

Apocalypse now? Let's just hang on a moment ... Premier Bob Carr has been a little too eager to join the doomsday set, argues Ron Brunton.

NOVEMBER 1999:
''There's all sorts of evidence ... that things are working a little bit better with a little less pounding on the environment,'' said William Clark, an authority on environmental issues at Harvard University and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation ''genius grant.'' Clark predicted that, by the late 21st century, the global population may finally level off, ending 200 years of dramatic growth that has fuelled a vast increase in environmental damage. ''For your children, each passing year will add fewer people than it did the year before. That is a statement that could not have been made from this podium any other time in the last 1,000 years."
The world population grew almost fourfold in the 20th century, to 6 billion, creating sprawling cities that erased the natural landscape and sucked up natural resources on an astonishing scale. Humans dammed up so much water that geophysicists say it has perceptibly altered the way the planet rotates. But food production exploded in the 20th century, allowing a single hectare of US farmland to feed 80 people where it had fed only three before. Tens of thousands of acres of less productive farmland were abandoned, bringing forests back in places such as Massachusetts, which had been nearly treeless in the 19th century.



OCTOBER 1999:
China, the world most populous country, pledged Tuesday to stick to its rigid birth control policy as the planet's population topped the symbolic six billion mark. The official People's Daily newspaper hailed the communist party's "one child" policy adopted in the late 1970s, saying if Chinese families had not been limited to just one child the world's population would have reached six billion four years ago.

A population clock at U.N. headquarters hit 6 billion and started racing toward 7 billion as an anxious world pondered what the new millennium holds for an increasingly crowded planet. More than 1 billion young people just entering their reproductive years will determine how quickly the next milestone is reached. Even with a continuing decline in fertility rates and family size, the sheer numbers of the largest "youthquake" in history guarantee enormous population growth through 2050, U.N. population experts say.

Only 12 years have passed since we hit the 5-billion mark, so reaching the 6-billion mark this month has been greeted with portentous warnings of a "population time bomb" and a "demographic disaster". But delve behind the words of the doom-mongers, say some demographers, and you'll find evidence that in the not-too-distant future, the world population may actually start to shrink. According to this very different picture, the world's population will peak some time in the 21st century, then start falling. So while today's youth are exhorted to have fewer children, their grandchildren may be actively encouraged to go forth and multiply. Twice in the past three years, the UN's statisticians have lowered their projections of future populations.

SEPTEMBER 1999:
According to some experts, India's population has passed 1 billion , making it only the second nation -- China was the first -- to reach that milestone. Demographer Ashish Bose said he is extremely concerned about the slowly building impact of population growth on a country where 350 million people live in dire poverty, where 400 million are illiterate, where the amount of crop land per person has shrunk by half since 1960.


JULY 1999:
SIX BILLION SERVED - by John Fetto
You've seen them before, those clocks counting down the minutes and seconds to Y2K. But what about the lesser-known clock counting down to WP6B? Like many a stepchild, this one, monitored by the U.S. Census Bureau, isn't getting the attention it deserves, even though it will strike 12 long before Dick Clark and his ball take cover in Times Square.
So just what is WP6B? It's the acronym for World Population 6 Billion, a global milestone that's coming faster than you might think. On July 17, at approximately 8:45 p.m., the world population is expected to cross the 6 billion mark. But it isn't likely that there will be a worldwide party to celebrate.
In the past year, the world population has grown by more than 76 million people. That's just shy of the population of Vietnam, the 14th-most-populated country on the planet. The good news is that the net increase is on the decrease, and has been since 1989, when annual growth topped out at more than 86 million. The bad news is that, at the current rate of growth, even accounting for a continual decrease in the growth rate, the world population is headed for double digits within 50 years.
"It's well within the world's reach to stabilize the population in the foreseeable future. The issue is to not postpone it," says Joseph Chamie, director of the United Nations population division. "If you wait 20 more years, the problem will be extremely more difficult to deal with."
The United Nations predicts that the population of the world will stabilize at about 11.6 billion some time around the year 2200. But getting to zero population growth will be complicated. "Population is not just about size," Chamie says.
Age, AIDS, international migration, and health are all aspects that have a profound effect on the raw numbers. Take age, for example. Even with a replacement fertility rate of 1, which most of the industrialized world currently has, the population can still continue to rise as life spans increase. The opposite is true with AIDS. As many as 24 million Africans will be HIV-positive by 2000, according to UNAIDS, a consortium of international health organizations.
While an Armageddon-like asteroid probably won't cause the earth's population to stabilize, neither will an ultra-widespread virus like Ebola or AIDS, Chamie contends. Instead, stabilization will occur because people make a conscious decision to have fewer children. The same forces that caused lower fertility rates in industrialized nations-urbanization, increased education, lower mortality, the changing status of women in society, and smaller living quarters-are now present worldwide, regardless of religion or background. For those who doubt Chamie, he points to the world's Catholics, who currently have the lowest fertility rates.
Demographers call the process by which a population experiences a decline in mortality and a subsequent decline in fertility the "demographic transition." As a country goes through such a demographic transition (after mortality rates decrease, but before fertility rates drop), it experiences enormous population growth. Most countries at least double or triple their numbers before finally stabilizing. Although it's a silent revolution, Chamie says, demographic transition has been responsible for the greatest increase in population in the shortest period of time the earth has ever seen or probably will ever see again. Five developing countries today are responsible for more than 50 percent of the world's increase in population: India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Nigeria.
While Chamie is optimistic about stabilization, he acknowledges that major changes will take place as a result of the dramatic rise in the world population. "America's stability in the world will become of increasing concern as populations grow abroad," he says. "National borders are not sufficient to isolate the problem [of growing populations]." By 2050, demographers predict Africa's population will be more than three times greater than that of Europe's, and India will surpass China as the most populated country on earth. "For demographers this is the most exciting period to be living-1950 to 2000 is the most dynamic 50-year period we've ever seen," Chamie adds. "Population is an extremely important issue that should be on the top of the list of discussions, irrespective of the country and its level of development."


POPULATION GROWTH IS SLOWING DOWN BECAUSE DEATH RATES ARE RISING IN MANY PARTS OF THE WORLD

According to the authors of a new book released by Worldwatch Institute, Beyond Malthus: Nineteen Dimensions of the Population Challenge, left unchecked, high levels of population growth will run into the natural limits of resources such as shrinking cropland, fisheries, fresh water, forests and fuel.
Last year the United Nations revised its projections for world population for 2050 from 9.4 billion to 8.9 billion. Rising death rates accounted for one-third of the drop. This is still 2.8 billion more people than are alive today. "The projections may be misleading because they give the impression that projected population increases are likely, when in reality ecological and social life-support systems may collapse long before they materialize," says the book. "Will the 21st Century, a bright new millennium, bring to realization the dire prediction by 18th Century intellectual Thomas Malthus that population growth will at some stage breach the natural limits of nature and give rise to widespread death?" The most immediate threat, the HIV virus is reversing the gains in life expectancy of the last several decades: In Botswana, life expectancy has fallen from 62 years in 1990 to 44 years in 1998; in Zimbabwe, it has fallen from 61 years in 1993 to 49 years in 2000 and could drop to 40 years in 2010. Dozens of countries face acute water shortages in the next century, impacting crops.

In the U.S. -
"Achieving stability in population growth in the United States and elsewhere is the most important of the hundreds of challenges facing us...If the public after listening isn't worried about the U.S. population going to half a billion, which we'll certainly reach by 2070, then I'd be surprised. Twice as many people means we'll have to double the entire infrastructure in this country in the next 70 years: more houses, jails, roads, sewers, power plants...everything you can think of. I'm afraid there eventually won't be any open spaces that amount to anything."
-Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day