Earth and humans better off in 2050?
In 2008, for the first time ever, more people will live in cities than in the country. Photo: Flickr user ndanger
Trends in human population over the next 50 years may be positive for both humanity and the natural world.
That’s according to Joel Cohen, Professor of Populations at Rockefeller University and at Columbia University. Cohen said that – among the biggest population trends – billions more people will share this planet with other forms of life by 2050.
Yet the rate at which population grows is expected to drop in the next 50 years, in both richer and poorer countries. As a result, Earth’s population will age, with the elderly dominating a higher percentage of the population worldwide. Some wonder, will this aging of human population lead to greater wisdom?
What’s more, in 2008, for the first time ever, more people will live in cities than in the country. Cohen spelled out what those cities might mean for – to name one example – public health.
Joel Cohen: They could be a sort of a hotbed of infectious diseases, or if they’re managed properly, the infectious agents that come with people could be controlled more easily because you can have better sanitation, better public health measures, more trained professionals – people, the doctors want to live in the cities, the public health people want to live in the cities. A lot of this is a matter of choosing rather than an inevitable fate.
Cohen added that more than half of the people on Earth today lack access to sanitary facilities, such as toilets. In general he seemed positive about the shift to cities, both for humanity and for the natural environment.
Joel Cohen: It means that the pressure in the rural areas on the local environment could increase less rapidly than it would have if people were spread out evenly all over the place. So urbanization actually increases the possibility of preserving natural habitats outside of the cities.
Future directions of population growth
Listen to a 9-minute podcast with demographer Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau
Cohen says, “They [growing urban centers] could be a sort of a hotbed of infectious diseases, or if they’re managed properly…” and I share his hope, but, really, does anyone think they will be “managed properly”? Depending on the study urban can mean 1,000, 10,000, 100,0000, yet most of us I think immediately think of NYC, LA, Mexico City, Mumbai (Bombay), Tokyo, Bejing, etc. None of the world’s largest cities strikes me as being a wellspring of human well-being or a place that is managed properly in the public health sense of the phrase.
I wonder if we could go in the other direction, not to rural life, but to a state where megacities decline and a notion of city size becomes at least comprehensible.
Trinifar,
I think cities can be managed properly. We hear and read a lot of encouraging things about cities …
Best,
Deborah
We are discussing a population of 6.63 billion people now growing to 9.2 billion in 2050. That is a 40% increase in the global human population in the next 43 years.
Let’s look at what is happening now. We have millions of people who are conspicuously over-consuming Earth’s limited resources and becoming obese; on the hand, billions of people do not have substantial sustenance, are going hungry, living in poverty and many are emaciated.
How on this good Earth are we going to “manage properly” 2 1/2 billion additional people to our current numbers by 2050 and improve life for the family of humanity? Is such a goal realistic? If so, how? If not, then what can be done to move forward in a more humane, reality-oriented way, thereby preserving life as we know it and the integrity of Earth? Skyrocketing absolute global human population numbers could soon threaten life as we know it; and obscence per human over-consumption of resources, at a rate that dissipates resources faster than they can be restored for human benefit could irreversibly degrade our planetary home.
Scientific research, reason and common sense fail to provide good evidence of how such improvement is realistically accomplished between now and 2050. I am supposing that we cannot keep doing what we are doing now: that is, over-consuming and overpopulating the planet we inhabit. Such ideas remind me of magical thinking and such a strategy looks like a prescription for disaster.
Endless growth of cities, or of any other human construction, for that matter, is bound to become patently unsustainable at some point in time in a finite world, will it not? Whatsoever is is, is it not…..regardless of human wishes and intentions to the contrary?
Is it reasonable and sensible to consider an alternative? Let us examine the probability that in 2050, we will have millions more people over-consuming resources, just as we are doing now. We will also have billions more people going without substantial sustenance by 2050.
If such an unsustainable situation was somehow likely to occur in first half of Century XXI, then we could begin now to protectively and ably respond by putting forward a more reality-oriented “action plan” both for limiting per-capita over-consumption of finite resources and rapidly reducing absolute global human population numbers.
that is the weiredest prediction i’ve ever heard!!!!!!!!
that is the weiredest prediction i’ve ever heard!!!!!!!!