PAPE"R"MAIL addresses the issue: Population

Light blue - Population in 2010
Dark Blue - Estimated population in 2050

The population of the world is growing at a rapid pace, only last year did we hit 7 billion people in the world and that number is constantly increasing. In 1800 there was 1 billion people in the world, in 1930 there was 2 billion, 1960 - 3 billion, 1974 - 4 billion, 1987 - 5 billion and in 1999 there was 6 billion people living on this planet so what has caused that number to take such a big jump recently?

At the moment, the birthrate can not be competed to. It is a huge number. There are over 4 babies born every second and people are living longer thanks to breakthroughs in the development of medicine. Also, in the modern day people around the globe have been warned about the effects of smoking and drinking to much. Some people still ignore these rules however they are punished with the qualiy of life they have in the future.

Because of massive advances in health care and how we live the average person lives until they are 69 years-old. In 1960 the average person lived until they were 53. The current birth to death rate per second is 5 birth to 2 deaths so that means that by 2045 the population might be 9 billion people!

China has one off the biggest popuilations in the world and because of that, they Chinees Goverment has brought in a one-child policy (this means families are only allowed to have one child.) There is some extreemly bad side effects to this though, the abortion rate in China has went up as parents only want to have boys as they have a higher chance of being sucsessful and earning more money compared to girls. This is unfair however unless they remove the policy (which would have devistating effects) there is nothing the government can do.

The British Goverment has no restrictions whatsoever on how many children 2 people can have, infact the biggest family in Britain has over 10 children in it. This is OK now, however in the future there will be an extreme lack of resources for everyone. Unfortunately, the British government isn't being pro-active about this problem. My guess is, the British Government will only put some sort of restriction on how many children you can have when it's too late. When something bad has happened such as there is no more places to build houses and all the remaining fields are privately owned. Or we run out of coal, gas or oil. That is a realistic problem which might happen with in the next 10 generations.

5% of us consume 23% of the worlds energy and if more countries start using more energy we are soon going to run out.

One thing we are defiantly not going to run out of soon is space or housing; If everyone in the world stood side by side we could fit easily in the American city of Los-Angles. The National Geographic predicts that by 2050 70% of the worlds population will live in urban areas and by that time we will start to see a lot more megacities (which are basically enormous cities with a population of over 10 million people). I hate to even consider what the pollution is like and what it will be like in these cities in the future. It was made official in 2008 that more people lived in cities that rural areas so I wouldn't be surprised if that estimate by the National Geographic came true. (There are currently 21 megacities at the moment.)