You don’t have to be a demographer to understand or learn the fundamentals of human population growth. In fact, everyone must come to understand these issues if we’re going to ensure a positive quality of life for generations to come.
Population growth stretches natural resources to their limits. Deforestation, food and water shortages, and climate change are all intensified by the addition of nearly 80 million people a year to the world's population.
According to the United Nations, the global population could be as high as 11 billion in 2050 or as low as 8 billion, if the right programs are put in place now. Population Connection strives for the world to achieve the lower projection - for the sake of the environment itself and for the people who depend upon it.
Since 1968, Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth or ZPG) has been America's voice for population stabilization. Population Connection are the largest grassroots population organization in the United States, with over 30,000 individual members (donors); 45,000 email activists; and 450 volunteer teacher trainers who bring the workshops to 12,000 teachers each year. They educate young people about unsustainable population growth through K-12 lesson plans that reach 3 million students a year. They also inform constituents across the country about their congressional representatives' stances on population growth and family planning. And they work directly with Congress and the White House to inform family planning policy. The global population has grown from 3.5 billion when ZPG was founded, to 6.9 billion today. Population growth rates have fallen around the world because of the success of voluntary family planning programs. But the global fertility rate is 2.6--still higher than the "replacement level" of 2.1 children per woman. At this rate, the world's population will grow to 11 billion by 2050. Population Connection works to ensure that every woman around the world who wants to limit her childbearing has access to the health services and contraceptive supplies she needs in order to do so. Typically, when woman have access to affordable birth control, they have fewer children, regardless of income or educational levels.
The question is not “How many people can the Earth support?” rather “How many people can't the Earth support?”
For example, at present the Earth can't support the 9.2 million children who die every year, mostly from preventable or treatable diseases. The Earth can’t support the nearly 900 million people who don’t have access to safe drinking water. The Earth can’t support the 2.5 billion people who don’t have access to basic sanitation. The Earth can’t support its estimated 967 million malnourished people. How many people the Earth can support is not a population question, but a social, economic, and political question.
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