Nine Billion People Will Eat The Planet In 2050

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Video: Nine Billion People Will Eat The Planet In 2050

Video: Nine Billion People Will Eat The Planet In 2050
Video: 78- Earth Observation, AI and Feeding Nine Billion People in 2050 2024, March
Nine Billion People Will Eat The Planet In 2050
Nine Billion People Will Eat The Planet In 2050
Anonim

The number of earthlings is constantly increasing. Developing countries account for almost 100% of the growth.

Residents of developed countries have access to the achievements of science and medicine. On the other hand, they give birth very little. So it turns out that developed nations are steadily aging, and developing nations are getting younger and filling the planet.

New record

By the end of 2011, the world's population may grow to seven billion people. And back in 1999, there were only six billion of us. In the future, the rate of growth of humanity will increase even more, experts say. “By 2050, the world's population will increase by another 2.3 billion people. This increase is comparable to the total population in 1950,”writes David Bloom, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, stressing that this is a rough estimate. The real growth may be 4.5 billion people.

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Experts and researchers from the Department of Economic and Social Afairs of the United Nations predict an increase in the number of earthlings to 10, 1 billion people in 2100.

David Bloom is confident that in the next forty years, population growth will come from developing countries: Africa will provide 49% of the growth, another 48% of new earthlings will appear in developing countries on other continents. “The population of the developed countries will hardly change, but the average age of the developed nations will steadily increase. In developed countries, the balance will shift towards the elderly, they will experience a lack of youth to provide them with social benefits,”continues David Bloom.

First billion

David Bloom and his colleagues, who published several demographic studies in the new issue of Science, note that throughout history, the number of earthlings has increased very slowly. “In 1800 alone, the world's population reached the one billion mark,” writes David Bloom.

The increase in the population is associated with the availability of energy resources, food and clean water, scientists are sure. “Representatives of the species Homo 2 have been collecting for 4 million years. Only 11,500 - 3,500 years ago, agriculture began to appear in some regions (China, New Guinea, Ethiopia, the countries of the eastern Mediterranean and some parts of the Americas), writes Jean-Pierre Bocquet- Appel) from the National Center for Scientific Research, France. "Shortly before the advent of agriculture, about 6 million people lived on the planet, over the past 11,000 years, the Earth's population has increased 1200 times."

Bouquet-Appel explains that the Neolithic Revolution (man's shift from gathering and hunting to agriculture and animal husbandry) increased the number of mouths per square kilometer. "During the period of gathering and hunting, one square kilometer of land could feed 0.5 people, in our time - 54 people, in 2050 this figure will increase to 70-80".

Birth and death

The researchers note that with the advent of agriculture, women's fertility has also increased. They began to give birth to more children at shorter intervals, which rejuvenated the population as early as 1000 years after the Neolithic Revolution.

True, the increased birth rate was partially suppressed by new problems - infections associated with fecal pollution of water bodies: children died from bacteria that pets used to pollute the water.

David Bloom notes that in modern society, the fertility rate (the ratio of the number of births to the number of women of reproductive age) varies greatly from country to country. Among Europeans, it fluctuates between 1, 1 - 2, 2, in Niger - 7, 0, in Afghanistan - 6, 0. "The infant mortality rate is falling everywhere, and the fertility rate is changing ambiguously," continues David Bloom, explaining this significant increase in the general population of Homo sapiens.

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