Population clock On 30 April 2009 at 08:18:22 PM (Canberra time), the resident population of Australia is projected to be: 21,746,528 This projection is based on the estimated resident population at 30 September 2008 and assumes growth since then of: one birth every 1 minute and 50 seconds, one death every 3 minutes and Continue Reading →
2008 Revision of World Population Prospects Key Findings 1. In July 2009, the world population will reach 6.8 billion, 313 million more than in 2005 or a gain of 78 million persons annually. Assuming that fertility levels continue to decline, the world population is expected to reach 9.1 billion in 2050 and to be Continue Reading →
Population control – ultimate greening By Green Living Tips | Published 02/5/2009 | family The ultimate green tip – don’t have kids The issue of population, or more accurately overpopulation, is a really, really sensitive subject, so I want to state from the outset that this article is not directed to those people with children, Continue Reading →
Last month, the Pope made reference in his world peace day address to the “false correlation between poverty and birthrate.” The Pope has criticized population policy a number of times this year, observing in Sydney Australia during World Youth Week that developed nations have a population crisis and must increase their birth rates to re-establish population growth.
The focus on population growth has been building all year as a result of looming crises in water, food and energy supplies, coupled with the apparent failure of attempts to address World Poverty.
The irony of the fact that world leaders were in New York to discuss World Poverty on the day the financial markets decided to collapse has been lost on the two billion people in the world who do not have enough to eat and whose future looks more bleak than their past.
The Australian Senate this week voted not to consider the challenges of population growth. Greens leader Bob Brown put a motion to the Senate, calling on the government to develop a white paper to address the challenges of supporting the projected stable population of 9-10 billion people on a planet constrained by climate change and Continue Reading →
John Feeney in The GuardianÂ
Only since 1800, in the last 0.01% of the history of Homo sapiens, has the human population shot into the billions. Now at nearly 6.7 billion, with 9 billion looming 40 years away, few environmentalists seem to care.
Yet the population-environment link is clear. Our environmental impact, as gauged by total resource consumption for a country or the world, is the product of population size and the average person’s consumption.
Today’s crumbling environment, racked by climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, collapsing fisheries and more is evidence our total consumption has gone too far. We are destroying our life-support system. In ecological terms we are in “overshoot” of Earth’s “carrying capacity” for humans, our demand exceeding the planet’s absorptive and regenerative capacities.
To avert catastrophe, we need to reduce both factors in the equation: our numbers and per person consumption.