Population growth in 21st century

It is widely reported that 2050 will have 9 or 10 billion humans, up from current 7.7. This matters much for all we might call 'environmental'.

Starting here with Africa for several reasons. There, total fertility rate (children born per female during lifetime) includes highest. Many country economies are not in good shape there. Warfare and other violence are troubling.



After making these I thought it might have been better to invert GDP color scale and make red lowest and thus most troubling. Did not, but perhaps it's clear enough this way.

On TFR side, a basic idea is that 2 means stable population. In poor countries one would consider lower survival of young ones vs. disease and nutritional challenges. So broadly, it may be countries above TFR 3.1 where pops would increase rapidly. Africa has many such countries.

On GDP side, see first that almost all countries are (globally) low. In many African countries, low GDP and high TFR occur together. One could certainly see that as their problem, but famines, conflicts and large population displacements are often of interest to rich world.

These images together may inform on areas of particular concern. May inform on areas where external nations, including one large Asian nation, are paying attention to Africa. Read about that elsewhere.

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Broadly speaking, increased population presents economic burdens on rich countries elsewhere when growers have least GDP. Move up from that and +pop could represent economic trading opportunities. In future posts I will show other regions.

The whole thing about providing water, food and energy for more people depends on where new ones are added.

The whole thing about stabilizing population at 9 or 10 billions in 2nd half of 21st century will require higher mortality rates, at least in TFR hot spots. Sorry that I can't say that in any other way.

 

Watching Rosling now on TED (not youtube) and I agree with you completely.. Except I don't think it's too long.

 

Salamader_King's post completely changed what I had in mind for this thread. Should be a great improvement. Now we can consult Dr. Rosling's website

Gapminder: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view.

Generate individual hypotheses that folks want to discuss, and discuss them.

User-defined data animation is vastly better than looking at any static color charts I might make.

 

That TED talk used data up until (about) 2002. Gapminder data sets are much more current, so folks intrigued by that TED talk could readily do updates.

There is only one difficultly and it only affects those in places where docs.google.com are unavailable

I'll look into that myself and report if there are interesting results.

 

Responding to the second post, it would be better to say that economic growth often occurs on both sides of a border. Making a wall superfluous.

 

Relationships between high fertility rate and low economic status persist. At national or other levels. It seems pretty clear where the next few billions will be added. Challenges remain to make poor countries anything other than poor countries with larger populations in future decades.

This is not inconsistent with Dr. Roslings optimistic and accurate assessments of previous decades.

It was my thought, going in, that most people don't realize how few countries (or states within India) have very high fertility rates. In terms of future optimism this could indicate that problems are more tractable than they would be if high fertility were spread across all poorer countries.

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Japan is probably furthest along the opposite problem as iplug describes above. It may be incipient in China, where removal of one-child policy did not lead to an immediate baby boom. Where else? US may be short on new Social Security inpayers, which seems like a precursor to elder care in a broad sense. Italy seems to pop up similarly, and no doubt there are other examples.

It is good to realize that population challenges include both 'too many somewhere and too few somewhere else' but that alone does not point to solutions.

 

On food-supply side, be aware that feasible modifications to photosynthesis could increase agricultural yields:

How to feed the world by 2050? Recent breakthrough boosts plant growth by 40 percent -- ScienceDaily

Without getting into details, photosynthesis is a complicated multi-step system with several inefficiencies. These are under serious study. Going further, more efficient plants potentially means that trees could trap CO2 more rapidly. This is not claimed in the Science article indirectly referenced above, but neither is it fanciful.

Obviously there are plants that people don't want growing faster. So some caution is required.

 

I made maps of India by states but not yet posted here. It might be a very good 'laboratory' for what iplug suggests.

In contrast province-level data for China are not all readily available. They may be more deeply buried; at this time I am not asserting hidden. But fundamentally the one-child policy has distorted demographics there so maybe not such a good example.

Interesting to see both Philippines and Indonesia listed. I think of both of them in terms of (various) natural disasters. Maybe a feature, not a bug, in this context.