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In 1989, the Governing Council of the United Nations Development Program recommended observing July 11 as World Population Day. The reason given was to focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues in the context of overall development plans and programs and the need to find solutions for these issues.
The world population is now over 7.2 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s population clock, with projections that the 8-billion mark will be reached in 2025. According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. population, currently at over 321 million, is making a net gain of 1 person every 13 seconds.
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In a report about world population, the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) has developed three population projections for the end of the twenty-first century. The highest projection is 17 billion people; middle projection is 11 billion by 2100; and the lowest projection is around 7 billion—holding basically at today’s world population. The UNPF says that the difference depends on how fast fertility rates fall.
A number of diverse organizations, including the Wilson Center, Greenpeace, and HowMany.org, have been warning about the relationship between climate change, population growth, and resource scarcity. Some have been advocating for years now that environmentalists should include population growth as one of the major strains on the environment. The Center for Biological Diversity claims that all our efforts worldwide to curb our carbon footprint are for naught if we continue at an unsustainable population growth.
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What Do You Think?
This was just a brief review of some organizations’ views on population growth. What do you think? Are your requirements and efforts at environmental management futile in the face of a world population growth out of control? Are you paying for this growth as a cost of doing business?