A new UN report estimates that the world population – which currently hovers around 7.7 billion – will grow to 8.5 billion by 2030 and peak at around 11 billion early in the next century. In simpler terms, we are currently adding 80 million people (roughly the population of Germany) to the world every 12 months. Latin America and the Caribbean are projected to grow 18 percent by 2050 and sub-Saharan Africa will nearly double in the same period. Coupled with recent overall increases in life expectancy this made 2018 the first year in which people over 65 outnumbered children under 5. During the next thirty years the number of people aged 80 or older will triple to a staggering 426 million.
Rapid population growth presents obvious developmental challenges, but it also offers enlightened governments a ‘demographic dividend’ which, if they invest in health and education, can stimulate sustainable economic growth for decades. Although global numbers are increasing, the rate of population growth is slowing: global fertility rates have fallen to 2.5 births per woman from 3.2 births per woman in 1990. That is likely to decline further to 2.2 births per woman by 2050. In fact the UN projects a population decrease in 55 countries or areas of one percent or more by 2050 with countries like Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine facing losses of 20 percent or more.
The World Population Prospects 2019 numbers also show a striking disparity between developed and developing nations. People in poor countries die seven years earlier than their wealthier counterparts – mostly because of child and maternal mortality, military conflict and the impact of the HIV epidemic. It is also worth emphasizing that immigration from many of these countries continues – despite all misinformation and fear-mongering to the contrary – to make important net contributions to developed economies. For instance the media group Axios recently reported that between 2014-2017 nearly a third of the population growth in America’s top 100 metropolitan centres was due to immigration.
In 1968 the American biologist Paul Ehrlich warned that a “population bomb” could place unmanageable stresses on the planet. His book was published when the global population was less than half of what it is today and there were 60 million more births than deaths each year. Although the overall growth rate of the planet is now slowing, the population has doubled. Some of the fastest growth has taken place in countries which have struggled to accommodate it. Nigeria and Pakistan, for example, have practically doubled during the last 30 years, creating large numbers of young people with discouraging social and economic prospects. Unless development aid addresses the rate of population growth in these countries, and the infrastructure needed to build a better future for them, further political instability, conflict and migration seem inevitable.
More than anything else, what emerges from the UN report is the need for a new kind of politics. One that is less obsessed with financial growth, competitive trade and military dominance and more focused on human development. Thirty years ago, in a collection of essays called “Small is Beautiful” the economist E.F. Schumacher presciently wrote that “An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth – in short, materialism – does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.” As the global population edges past what many analysts consider its sustainable maximum, that insight has never been more important.
