Sunday, February 20, 2011

The planet, unrecognizable?


Planet could be 'unrecognizable' by 2050, experts sayAFP/NASA/GSFC/NOAA – Undated image of Earth's city lights released by NASA. A growing, more affluent population competing …
WASHINGTON (AFP) – A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an "unrecognizable" world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.
The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, "with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia," said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.
To feed all those mouths, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
"By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable" if current trends continue, Clay said.
The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.
But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years -- tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations -- and add more strain to global food supplies.
People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.
It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.
"More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet," Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.
Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations.
"For 20 years, there's been very little investment in family planning, but there's a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices," said Bongaarts.
"We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning," said Casterline.


citation:yahoo.com

15 comments:

  1. This is really scary :s
    I need to find a solution for this problem ASAP. The number of mouths is growing much faster then the speed that it takes for us to produce food.

    With countries are today in hunger like, the countries of africa, if they fell hunger today, imagine how it will be in 20 years.
    We need a faster way to produce food, and we need to educate people for a better family planning.

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  2. The US could increase population by making Rural states like mine less rural. Only 1.4 million in the Idaho population? I'm used to 1.4 million within driving distance in California!

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  3. Vertical structures for growing will be the norm....hydro or areo

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  4. @Lost.in.Idaho: We don't want more population, we want less!

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  5. We are going to see some great shifts in society man.

    this shall be real exciting.

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  6. i don't like the idea of growing food in the space...

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  7. i think there's a lot of food wasting. we need to take more carefull and don't waste too much.

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  8. oooh that's okay... we won't live past 2012 to see this scenario...

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  9. Thanks for this post, pretty interesting to see how the world changes

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  10. humanity is going to get a wakeup call and when it comes it's not going to be pretty

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  11. eiter we overcome, or we die....

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  12. The population should not be larger than 500m.

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