Soaring Population Raises Climate Concerns

Global population is predicted to rise by a third in the next three decades as the planet is increasingly challenged by climate change and loss of ‘natural capital’.

Human numbers are predicted to grow by 33% in the next 33 years – and that is worrying news for a world already struggling to deal with the impacts of climate change.

By 2050 there could be 9.9 billion people alive on the planet, and the global total is expected to hit 10 bn by 2053, according to the latest calculations by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a private not-for-profit organization based in the US.

By 2050, the population of Africa will reach 2.5 billion, which was roughly the population of the entire globe at the close of the Second World War in 1945.

The number of people on the two American continents will rise by just 233 million to 1.2bn, and Asia will gain 900 million to reach 5.3bn, but Europe’s population will fall from 740 million to 728 million.

“Despite declines in fertility rates around the world, we expect population gains to remain strong enough to take us toward a global population of 10bn,” says Jeffrey Jordan, president of the PRB.
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These numbers will soar in a world increasingly challenged by climate change and the potential loss of “natural capital” in the form of natural biodiversity in forests, wetlands and other ecosystems that underwrite or deliver for free a whole range of natural services, from pollination to water management.
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In the light of such projections, scientists have warned of growing numbers of climate refugees, and have been trying to calculate ways in which harvests could increase to keep pace with human numbers, over decades in which prolonged drought and a greater frequency of heatwaves are expected to hit yields.

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