Chinese officials are drawing up plans to further loosen birth restrictions and transition toward policies that explicitly encourage childbirth, according to people familiar with the matter, reflecting increased urgency in Continue Reading
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air-conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the Continue Reading
Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation have warned that the planet is not prepared for an ongoing global population crash, and that the impact Continue Reading
More than three-quarters (76%) of the world’s population now live in urban areas, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Center’s (JRC’s) new Atlas of the Human Planet 2019 . Continue Reading
Greece wants to install a floating barrier in the Aegean Sea to deter migrants arriving at its islands’ shores through Turkey, government officials said on Thursday. Greece served as gateway Continue Reading
Fewer than one in four women of child-bearing age in Shanghai is willing to have a second baby, exposing another threat to a Chinese economy that is already growing at Continue Reading
In 1937, John Maynard Keynes gave a lecture on “Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population”. Many at the time felt the world was overpopulated and fewer people could only Continue Reading
Too often, it seems, matters of population are overlooked in discussions of global sustainability. And this is true, despite some rather obvious points: A world of, say, 5 billion people Continue Reading
Cavan Images, via Alamy Population growth in the United States crept along at its slowest pace in decades in 2019, stymied by a sharp decline in the number of new Continue Reading
Over 40 years ago, scientists from 50 nations pivoted on a longstanding “global cooling” thesis that was going to blanket the earth in ice, and instead adopted what was then Continue Reading
Forty years ago, scientists from 50 nations converged on Geneva to discuss what was then called the “CO2-climate problem.” At the time, with reliance on fossil fuels having helped trigger Continue Reading
Windstorms have whipped up wildfires across California , forcing tens of thousands to flee the inferno. But while our collective attention has justifiably focused on the fires, they aren’t the Continue Reading
Hunger is the most awful and profound expression of poverty. It exists in every country. It is something that most people can identify with on some perhaps primordial level. The Continue Reading
French Institute of Demographic Studies projected that by the end of this century there will be 10 to 11 billion people on the planet. The world population will jump from Continue Reading
Overpopulation reigns as one of the most eminent dangers facing mankind today; and conveniently remains tremendously overlooked. Most people can acknowledge the threats of global warming, the lack of food Continue Reading
As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown Continue Reading
Facts are facts, and one of them is that while everybody talks about the growing forced movement of people –be they migrants or refugees—decision-makers haven’t seriously acted on the root Continue Reading
As the inimitable Yogi Berra once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” And indeed it is. Some guesswork is always involved and surprises crop up that Continue Reading
It is now a well-known fact that humans are depleting vital groundwater resources across the globe. But a new study shows one of the biggest causes of disappearing groundwater is Continue Reading
A recent output disruption at Mexico’s largest refinery may have contributed to Colonial Pipeline’s June decision to cancel some shipping on its gasoline-only Line 1, USGC gasoline market sources have Continue Reading
Humanity is facing an unprecedented dilemma — how to feed a burgeoning population while resources decline and the ability of the Earth’s ecosystems and atmosphere to absorb pollution diminishes. A Continue Reading
Advisers to Donald Trump are exploring ways he can green light the Keystone XL oil pipeline on the day he is sworn into office, including by rescinding a 48-year-old presidential Continue Reading
More than three times as many migrants were tracked entering the European Union by irregular means last month than a year ago, official data showed on Tuesday, many of them landing on Greek islands after fleeing conflict in Syria. While the increase recorded by the European Union’s border control agency Frontex may be partly due to better monitoring, it highlighted the scale of a crisis that has led to more than 2,000 deaths this year as desperate migrants take to rickety boats. Italian police said they had arrested eight suspected human traffickers that they said had reportedly forced migrants to stay in the hold of a fishing boat in the Mediterranean as 49 of them suffocated on engine fumes. Some of those traffickers were accused of kicking the heads of the migrants when they tried to climb out of the hold as the air became unbreathable, prosecutor Michelangelo Patane […]
Reconciling energy and environmental concerns was challenging enough when global population seemed headed for a plateau around 9 billion. A new forecast of up to 12 billion people by 2100 raises large questions about the capacity of current energy technologies to meet future global needs. The combination of forecasted global economic weakness and growing non-OPEC production continues to weigh on oil prices. Brent crude has fallen below $90 per barrel , and the US benchmark has been flirting with $80. But just when the rapid growth of energy supplies has undermined the mood of energy scarcity that prevailed for the last four decades, a group of demographers has thrown us a curve ball , though admittedly a very long one. In the 1970s many people were concerned about a “population explosion.” Dystopian fiction–already a well-established sub-genre–featured visions of a grossly overcrowded future earth, along the lines of “ Soylent Green .” […]
Can 11 billion people survive on this planet? By 2100, there could be an extra four billion people roaming the planet – making it difficult to discern whether Earth will have enough resources to support the birth of practically another planet-worth of people. (Earth hit four billion in 1974). That’s 11 billion people total, according to a new study by the University of Washington and the United Nations. The running estimate for total world population was that it would hover at 9 billion and then level off or decline, but the new UW study shows we are in for many more neighbors than that. Where they’ll be Most of the growth will be in Africa, according to the UW study, where there is an 80 percent chance that the population will quadruple from around one billion to between 3.5 and 5.1 billion by the end of the century. Asia, […]
There are some-more than 7 billion people on Earth now, and roughly one in 8 of us doesn’t have adequate to eat. The doubt of how many people a Earth can support is a long-standing one that becomes some-more heated as a world’s population—and a use of healthy resources—keeps booming. This week, dual opposing projections of a world’s destiny race were released. As National Geographic’s Rob Kunzig writes here , a new United Nations and University of Washington study in a biography Science says it’s rarely expected we’ll see 9.6 billion Earthlings by 2050, and adult to 11 billion or some-more by 2100. These researchers used a new “probabalistic” statistical process that establishes a specific operation of doubt around their results. Another investigate in a journal Global Environmental Change projects that the global population will arise during 9.4 billion after this century and tumble next 9 billion by 2100, formed on a consult […]
