World Population guide
If you like this Guide, please make a voluntary micropayment to help OneWorld publish educational Guides (credit/debit card or PayPal).
» Gender and Development Guide
|
| Cambodian children © Thnam Kanha Net |
The optimum strategy for stabilising the world's population is to ensure that the 2015 target for universal provision of sexual and reproductive health services is achieved. Such recognition of women’s rights is however no substitute for tackling the excessive consumption of modern lifestyles. A lower population growth trajectory will relieve pressure on environmental limits but is far from sufficient as a roadmap for sustainable and equitable use of our finite resources.
updated May 2012
If you like this Guide, please make a voluntary micropayment to help OneWorld publish educational Guides (credit/debit card or PayPal).
| £1 | US$2 | EUR2 | AU$2 | CA$2 | NZ$3 | SG$3 | PHP50 |
» Gender and Development Guide
Global Projections
Each day the world population increases by over 200,000, demanding the equivalent of a new city for more than a million inhabitants every week. The total passed seven billion in October 2011 and will almost certainly reach eight billion in 2025. The median projection for 2050 is 9.3 billion.
The whole of the increase of 2.3 billion between now and 2050 is predicted to occur in developing countries. India’s population of 1.25 billion will shortly overtake China, rising to 1.7 billion in 2050. Together these two countries may then account for almost a third of the global population.
Every two years the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs publishes its World Population Prospects, essentially a “revision” of previous projections. Based on the latest national census results and other surveys, this is the acknowledged source of global population data.
The 2010 Revision concedes that the two key variables in population projections, life expectancy and fertility, are fraught with uncertainty over such a long period. For example, the significant impact of HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa could not have been anticipated on the timescale of these projections.
Even a modest error of 0.5 in the assumed total fertility rate (TFR - the average number of children per woman) is sufficient to generate lower and upper estimates of 8.1 and 10.6 billion for the 2050 population projection. This sensitivity is an important motivation for strategies to stabilise the world population.
World Population Teeters on the Edge of 7 Billion - Now What? – PBS News Hour takes a look at the milestone reached in October 2011.
Census Data Collection
Accurate population data is a vital ingredient of social and economic policy. Governments cannot deliver efficient services and infrastructure without knowledge of the national demographic profile – the size of the population, where people live, how old they are, and the net effect of births, deaths and migration.
Compiling this essential information is far from straightforward. The conduct of a census requires professional management, a very large number of enumerators, the application of new technologies and skilled interpretation of the results.
Nigeria is one example of a country which has had consistent difficulty in delivering reliable census results, doubly unfortunate in that it is Africa’s most populous nation. Led by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), international agencies often provide generous financial and logistical support for census production in developing countries.
The UN strives to ensure that data has value in the global as well as national domain. Its 2010 World Population and Housing Census Programme has sought out the cooperation of every country to complete at least one census between 2005 and 2014. This agenda peaked in 2011 with censuses conducted in 70 countries.
Shortened version of a documentary produced by the UN Population Fund on how censuses are conducted in five countries facing very difficult environments.
Demographic Transition
To stereotype the poorest countries with the custom of large family sizes is to turn a blind eye to history. Most people now living in richer countries will discover similar fecundity in their own families by tracing back just a few generations.
The circumstances might have had much in common with contemporary Africa – poverty and high child mortality, dependence on surviving children for economic support, lack of education or job opportunities for women and the unavailability of any form of contraception.
The evolution to lower fertility rates and longer life expectancy experienced in developed countries correlates with their improving economic circumstances. This demographic transition reflects how access to modern medicine combines with greater choice in work, education and lifestyle to lessen the appeal of large families.
In this transition from high to low fertility and mortality rates, the latter has invariably outpaced the former. The consequence is a “baby boom” and a rapid rise in national population. When the birth rate finally stabilises at its lower level, a country’s population profile will progressively age as the “baby boom” generation matures.
Countries around the world find themselves at very different points within the demographic transition. The 48 Least Developed Countries are at an early stage where improvements in health services are just beginning to take effect. The fertility rate remains high at 4.4, 60% of people are aged under 25 and the combined populations are projected to double to 1.7 billion by 2050.
The contrast with richer countries is dramatic. In no fewer than 75 countries, including Brazil, Iran and Thailand, the fertility rate has fallen below 2.1, the threshold for natural population replacement. Almost half of the world’s population is therefore stable or falling.
A useful indicator for the demographic transition is the “dependency ratio”. This compares the numbers of available workers with the young and old who are dependent on them, both directly and through government services funded by taxation.
The dependency ratio is causing considerable concern in mature economies, where funding of health and pension provision is inadequate to support ballooning numbers of older people, living ever longer.
The rational solution is to import migrant labour from countries in surplus. But politicians shrink from such options, preferring to provide tax incentives to encourage women to have more children. The presence of such incentives in influential countries, including France, Germany and Japan, is an awkward context for lecturing poorer countries on global population growth.
The apparent headlong rush towards a world population of 10 billion therefore masks a complex mix of underlying trends.
7 Billion and Counting – why is the world population growing so fast if the annual growth rate has slowed? The demographic transition explained by Population Reference Bureau.
Population and Development
The UN’s population projections assume not only that the demographic transition will be reproduced in the poorest countries, but also that it happens relatively quickly, with fertility rates falling as low as 2.2 by 2050.
These assumptions are far from certain and will be closely monitored. Even if they prove accurate, the outcome will not in itself relieve the challenge of sustaining a world population of 9-10 billion but it will create the conditions necessary for long term stability, or maybe reduction.
As the projected increase will occur entirely in developing countries, the task of stabilising world population must be captured within the international development agenda. This was exactly the conclusion reached at the landmark 1994 International Conference on Population and Development whose 20-year Programme of Action, known as the Cairo Consensus, has proved to be a decisive influence on population policy.
Now coordinated by UNFPA, the Cairo Consensus clarified that population concerns are best addressed by redoubling commitment to national poverty reduction plans in general and women’s education and empowerment in particular. For example, a full period of schooling for girls reduces the risk of teenage marriage and increases awareness and demand for contraception.
Professor Hans Rosling explains that poverty reduction is critical to bringing population growth under control, from TED Talks.
Demographic Dividend
The prospective contribution of growth to this strategy for stabilising population is bolstered by an economic theory of demographics. Poor countries enjoy favourable dependency ratios, their populations dominated by potentially productive young people.
This is often described as the “demographic dividend” and has been associated with the tiger economies of East Asia.
Some economists interpret recent strong rates of growth in Africa as evidence of this demographic dividend. Others fear that poor infrastructure, governance and education will stifle the potential. Very high rates of youth unemployment do indeed persist in Africa and parts of the Middle East.
The demographic dividend is a fleeting opportunity which can quickly overturn into social unrest, as illustrated by recent dramatic events in several Arab countries.
There is further concern that a hard core of about 25 of the very poorest countries cannot possibly benefit from the demographic dividend. They show signs of being trapped in a demographic vortex, where low resilience to the impact of climate change on food and water scarcity offers no escape from exceptionally high fertility rates of around 8 children per woman.
Whilst there is some truth in the adage that “development is the best contraceptive,” it is wise to award at least equal status to the view that “contraception is the best development.”
In an interview on Frost Over The World, Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, the head of the UN Population Fund, answers core questions about population growth, from Al Jazeera English.
Reproductive Health
After much prevarication, a target of universal access to reproductive health services by 2015 was included in the Millennium Development Goals.
Progress is disappointing, especially for the family planning component. Dr Hania Zlotnik, Director of the UN Population Division, has warned that: “in most high fertility countries, contraceptive prevalence is increasing by less than 1% per year.”
As a result, 215 million women in developing countries have an unfulfilled wish for family planning services. A 2010 report by the Guttmacher Institute estimates that the cost of meeting this need would be $3.6 billion per annum.
Such an investment would bring an immediate return through the savings in maternal health support for the pregnancies avoided, quite apart from the longer term benefits of smaller family sizes. Nonetheless, global donor funding of family planning services has fallen steadily since 2001, both in real terms and as a share of the overall health budget from foreign aid.
The Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, has said that “neglect of sexual and reproductive health results in an estimated 80 million unintended pregnancies, 22 million unsafe abortions and 358,000 deaths from maternal causes.”
Empowering Women – Saving Lives: interview with Garima Deveshwar Bahl, Program Director of SNEHA in Mumbai, on the challenge of introducing family planning in disadvantaged urban areas.
Obstacles to Family Planning
Campaigners for universal access to reproductive health must contend with some of the most sensitive issues in international development.
The first obstacle has been the narrow dividing line between voluntary family planning and coercion. Fears have stemmed largely from the history of over-enthusiastic birth control policy in India in the 1970/80s and the one-child policy imposed by China since 1979.
China’s policy is explicitly coercive but claims to have averted 400 million births. However, a high price has been paid in the denial of human rights in family life and in the unspoken tolerance of sex-selective abortion. The Chinese authorities themselves estimate that, by 2020, there will be 24 million more men of marriageable age than women. Similar distortion is found in India.
Although the Cairo Consensus has provided reassurance about coercion, it has been unable to overcome the further obstacle of religious conservatism. The Catholic Church, which claims over 1.1 billion followers, opposes all forms of contraception, despite evidence of the consequent human distress.
Islamic teachings generally adopt a pragmatic interpretation of the Koran, supporting the right of women to space their children through use of family planning within marriage. Government programmes in Bangladesh and Indonesia have been praised for their success in reducing high fertility rates.
The Obama administration has been consistently supportive of higher levels of funding for reproductive health but faces strong resistance from a Republican-dominated House of Representatives.
Answerable to the religious right in the US, the House seeks to deny funding for UNFPA and to reinstate legislation known as the Global Gag rule. This blocked US funds from supporting any developing country organisation whose programmes implied tolerance of abortion.
Wary of religious and racial sensitivities, aid agencies and environmental groups have tended to suppress their views about population issues. Their silence may have contributed to the long term downward trend in funding for overall population assistance.
The Roman Catholic church in the Philippines opposes new legislation which would provide modern family planning services, from UNFPA Asia.
Overpopulation or Overconsumption?
In the animal world, species move through demographic cycles which typically follow a pattern of “boom and bust.” Rampant reproduction encounters a threshold known as “carrying capacity” beyond which the environmental resources essential to that species deteriorate, leading to a sharp decline in its population.
Humans possess the unique power to determine their own carrying capacity. They know the factors that will dictate its level – the global population, the economic means of individuals to consume resources, the technology available and the choice of lifestyle.
Exercising wisdom in mixing this cocktail is proving highly problematic, largely because of the extreme inequality in our current consumption.
According to the Global Footprint Network, if all countries adopted the American lifestyle, we would require five planets to supply the necessary resources. Yet that is the not unreasonable aspiration of poorer countries. Almost a third of the world’s population lives on less than $2.00 per day
Such are these extremes that, even if the population of developing countries was stabilised tomorrow, the roll-call of environmental threats – climate change, loss of biodiversity, water scarcity – would remain barely diminished. An influential 2009 scientific study published by the Stockholm Resilience Centre suggests that three out of nine environmental boundaries critical to a sustainable planet have already been crossed.
The immediate priority is to find a narrower and less damaging range of consumption in which the less fortunate can live in dignity but which in aggregate remains within our planetary boundaries.
The obstacle is our global addiction to a measure of economic success which rewards consumption of resources rather than efficiency of their use. Economic “growth” is arguably far more damaging to the planet than population growth, yet is relentlessly pursued.
The 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (known as Rio+20) presents a crucial opportunity for world leaders to adopt strategies which acknowledge the interconnection of population and consumption with sustainability. As a minimum, they will be pressed to reaffirm the original 1992 Rio Principles which include:
Royal Society report 'People and the Planet' - Eliya Msiyaphazi Zulu, Executive Director, African Institute for Development Policy, explains why both consumption and population growth need to be addressed in parallel.
Food, Water and Energy
Prospects for our three essential household needs illustrate how our global population can be sustained if rich and poor can be persuaded to meet halfway.
A 2009 UN conference billed as “how to feed the world in 2050” generated much public anxiety. In the event, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) declared itself to be “cautiously optimistic” whilst stressing the “need for a proper socioeconomic framework to address imbalances and inequalities.”
Water scarcity is another favourite subject for doom-mongers, armed with visions of water wars. But the 2006 UN Human Development Report observed that “there is more than enough water in the world for domestic purposes, for agriculture and for industry.... scarcity is manufactured through political processes and institutions that disadvantage the poor.”
Likewise, the exponential future demand for energy that converts into projections of runaway climate change is caused by the extremes of personal consumption. The WorldWatch Institute’s State of the World 2010 records that “the world’s richest 500 million people (roughly 7 percent of the world’s population) are currently responsible for 50 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, while the poorest 3 billion are responsible for just 6 percent.”
Such appeals to the principle of equity in distribution of resources do not deny the awesome challenge of overcoming scarcity as population numbers rise. Food production must increase by 70% by 2050 and freshwater demand will rise by 53% by 2030. Energy security is not just about incremental demand but also the basic needs of 1.3 billion people who have no access to electricity at all.
Future population growth will indeed aggravate all aspects of sustainability. Deploying it as a smokescreen for our incompetence in the equitable management of finite resources will not improve our chances.
William Rees explains his Eureka moment that led to the concept of the human ecological footprint, from Post Carbon Institute.
If you like this site, please make a voluntary micropayment to help OneWorld publish its educational Guides (credit/debit card or PayPal).
Each day the world population increases by over 200,000, demanding the equivalent of a new city for more than a million inhabitants every week. The total passed seven billion in October 2011 and will almost certainly reach eight billion in 2025. The median projection for 2050 is 9.3 billion.
|
| School in Burundi © Judith Basutama / IRIN News |
Every two years the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs publishes its World Population Prospects, essentially a “revision” of previous projections. Based on the latest national census results and other surveys, this is the acknowledged source of global population data.
The 2010 Revision concedes that the two key variables in population projections, life expectancy and fertility, are fraught with uncertainty over such a long period. For example, the significant impact of HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa could not have been anticipated on the timescale of these projections.
Even a modest error of 0.5 in the assumed total fertility rate (TFR - the average number of children per woman) is sufficient to generate lower and upper estimates of 8.1 and 10.6 billion for the 2050 population projection. This sensitivity is an important motivation for strategies to stabilise the world population.
World Population Teeters on the Edge of 7 Billion - Now What? – PBS News Hour takes a look at the milestone reached in October 2011.
Census Data Collection
Accurate population data is a vital ingredient of social and economic policy. Governments cannot deliver efficient services and infrastructure without knowledge of the national demographic profile – the size of the population, where people live, how old they are, and the net effect of births, deaths and migration.
|
| Problems with counting in Nigeria © OneWorld TV |
Nigeria is one example of a country which has had consistent difficulty in delivering reliable census results, doubly unfortunate in that it is Africa’s most populous nation. Led by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), international agencies often provide generous financial and logistical support for census production in developing countries.
The UN strives to ensure that data has value in the global as well as national domain. Its 2010 World Population and Housing Census Programme has sought out the cooperation of every country to complete at least one census between 2005 and 2014. This agenda peaked in 2011 with censuses conducted in 70 countries.
Shortened version of a documentary produced by the UN Population Fund on how censuses are conducted in five countries facing very difficult environments.
Demographic Transition
To stereotype the poorest countries with the custom of large family sizes is to turn a blind eye to history. Most people now living in richer countries will discover similar fecundity in their own families by tracing back just a few generations.
|
| Market in Mali, still a high fertility country © Dan Gerber |
The evolution to lower fertility rates and longer life expectancy experienced in developed countries correlates with their improving economic circumstances. This demographic transition reflects how access to modern medicine combines with greater choice in work, education and lifestyle to lessen the appeal of large families.
In this transition from high to low fertility and mortality rates, the latter has invariably outpaced the former. The consequence is a “baby boom” and a rapid rise in national population. When the birth rate finally stabilises at its lower level, a country’s population profile will progressively age as the “baby boom” generation matures.
Countries around the world find themselves at very different points within the demographic transition. The 48 Least Developed Countries are at an early stage where improvements in health services are just beginning to take effect. The fertility rate remains high at 4.4, 60% of people are aged under 25 and the combined populations are projected to double to 1.7 billion by 2050.
The contrast with richer countries is dramatic. In no fewer than 75 countries, including Brazil, Iran and Thailand, the fertility rate has fallen below 2.1, the threshold for natural population replacement. Almost half of the world’s population is therefore stable or falling.
|
| Migrant labour can influence demography © Liz Highleyman / Independent Media Center |
The dependency ratio is causing considerable concern in mature economies, where funding of health and pension provision is inadequate to support ballooning numbers of older people, living ever longer.
The rational solution is to import migrant labour from countries in surplus. But politicians shrink from such options, preferring to provide tax incentives to encourage women to have more children. The presence of such incentives in influential countries, including France, Germany and Japan, is an awkward context for lecturing poorer countries on global population growth.
The apparent headlong rush towards a world population of 10 billion therefore masks a complex mix of underlying trends.
7 Billion and Counting – why is the world population growing so fast if the annual growth rate has slowed? The demographic transition explained by Population Reference Bureau.
Population and Development
The UN’s population projections assume not only that the demographic transition will be reproduced in the poorest countries, but also that it happens relatively quickly, with fertility rates falling as low as 2.2 by 2050.
|
| Education for girls |
As the projected increase will occur entirely in developing countries, the task of stabilising world population must be captured within the international development agenda. This was exactly the conclusion reached at the landmark 1994 International Conference on Population and Development whose 20-year Programme of Action, known as the Cairo Consensus, has proved to be a decisive influence on population policy.
Now coordinated by UNFPA, the Cairo Consensus clarified that population concerns are best addressed by redoubling commitment to national poverty reduction plans in general and women’s education and empowerment in particular. For example, a full period of schooling for girls reduces the risk of teenage marriage and increases awareness and demand for contraception.
Professor Hans Rosling explains that poverty reduction is critical to bringing population growth under control, from TED Talks.
Demographic Dividend
The prospective contribution of growth to this strategy for stabilising population is bolstered by an economic theory of demographics. Poor countries enjoy favourable dependency ratios, their populations dominated by potentially productive young people.
This is often described as the “demographic dividend” and has been associated with the tiger economies of East Asia.
Some economists interpret recent strong rates of growth in Africa as evidence of this demographic dividend. Others fear that poor infrastructure, governance and education will stifle the potential. Very high rates of youth unemployment do indeed persist in Africa and parts of the Middle East.
The demographic dividend is a fleeting opportunity which can quickly overturn into social unrest, as illustrated by recent dramatic events in several Arab countries.
There is further concern that a hard core of about 25 of the very poorest countries cannot possibly benefit from the demographic dividend. They show signs of being trapped in a demographic vortex, where low resilience to the impact of climate change on food and water scarcity offers no escape from exceptionally high fertility rates of around 8 children per woman.
Whilst there is some truth in the adage that “development is the best contraceptive,” it is wise to award at least equal status to the view that “contraception is the best development.”
In an interview on Frost Over The World, Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, the head of the UN Population Fund, answers core questions about population growth, from Al Jazeera English.
Reproductive Health
After much prevarication, a target of universal access to reproductive health services by 2015 was included in the Millennium Development Goals.
Progress is disappointing, especially for the family planning component. Dr Hania Zlotnik, Director of the UN Population Division, has warned that: “in most high fertility countries, contraceptive prevalence is increasing by less than 1% per year.”
As a result, 215 million women in developing countries have an unfulfilled wish for family planning services. A 2010 report by the Guttmacher Institute estimates that the cost of meeting this need would be $3.6 billion per annum.
Such an investment would bring an immediate return through the savings in maternal health support for the pregnancies avoided, quite apart from the longer term benefits of smaller family sizes. Nonetheless, global donor funding of family planning services has fallen steadily since 2001, both in real terms and as a share of the overall health budget from foreign aid.
The Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, has said that “neglect of sexual and reproductive health results in an estimated 80 million unintended pregnancies, 22 million unsafe abortions and 358,000 deaths from maternal causes.”
Empowering Women – Saving Lives: interview with Garima Deveshwar Bahl, Program Director of SNEHA in Mumbai, on the challenge of introducing family planning in disadvantaged urban areas.
Obstacles to Family Planning
Campaigners for universal access to reproductive health must contend with some of the most sensitive issues in international development.
The first obstacle has been the narrow dividing line between voluntary family planning and coercion. Fears have stemmed largely from the history of over-enthusiastic birth control policy in India in the 1970/80s and the one-child policy imposed by China since 1979.
|
| Population control at a price in China © Teachers Without Borders |
Although the Cairo Consensus has provided reassurance about coercion, it has been unable to overcome the further obstacle of religious conservatism. The Catholic Church, which claims over 1.1 billion followers, opposes all forms of contraception, despite evidence of the consequent human distress.
Islamic teachings generally adopt a pragmatic interpretation of the Koran, supporting the right of women to space their children through use of family planning within marriage. Government programmes in Bangladesh and Indonesia have been praised for their success in reducing high fertility rates.
The Obama administration has been consistently supportive of higher levels of funding for reproductive health but faces strong resistance from a Republican-dominated House of Representatives.
Answerable to the religious right in the US, the House seeks to deny funding for UNFPA and to reinstate legislation known as the Global Gag rule. This blocked US funds from supporting any developing country organisation whose programmes implied tolerance of abortion.
Wary of religious and racial sensitivities, aid agencies and environmental groups have tended to suppress their views about population issues. Their silence may have contributed to the long term downward trend in funding for overall population assistance.
The Roman Catholic church in the Philippines opposes new legislation which would provide modern family planning services, from UNFPA Asia.
Overpopulation or Overconsumption?
In the animal world, species move through demographic cycles which typically follow a pattern of “boom and bust.” Rampant reproduction encounters a threshold known as “carrying capacity” beyond which the environmental resources essential to that species deteriorate, leading to a sharp decline in its population.
|
| Are we smarter than the animal kingdom? © Piet van der Poel |
Exercising wisdom in mixing this cocktail is proving highly problematic, largely because of the extreme inequality in our current consumption.
According to the Global Footprint Network, if all countries adopted the American lifestyle, we would require five planets to supply the necessary resources. Yet that is the not unreasonable aspiration of poorer countries. Almost a third of the world’s population lives on less than $2.00 per day
Such are these extremes that, even if the population of developing countries was stabilised tomorrow, the roll-call of environmental threats – climate change, loss of biodiversity, water scarcity – would remain barely diminished. An influential 2009 scientific study published by the Stockholm Resilience Centre suggests that three out of nine environmental boundaries critical to a sustainable planet have already been crossed.
|
| Bluefin threat: population or greed? © WWF-Canon/M. Sutton / WWF International |
The obstacle is our global addiction to a measure of economic success which rewards consumption of resources rather than efficiency of their use. Economic “growth” is arguably far more damaging to the planet than population growth, yet is relentlessly pursued.
The 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (known as Rio+20) presents a crucial opportunity for world leaders to adopt strategies which acknowledge the interconnection of population and consumption with sustainability. As a minimum, they will be pressed to reaffirm the original 1992 Rio Principles which include:
To achieve sustainable development and a higher quality of life for all people, States should reduce and eliminate unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and promote appropriate demographic policies
Royal Society report 'People and the Planet' - Eliya Msiyaphazi Zulu, Executive Director, African Institute for Development Policy, explains why both consumption and population growth need to be addressed in parallel.
Food, Water and Energy
Prospects for our three essential household needs illustrate how our global population can be sustained if rich and poor can be persuaded to meet halfway.
A 2009 UN conference billed as “how to feed the world in 2050” generated much public anxiety. In the event, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) declared itself to be “cautiously optimistic” whilst stressing the “need for a proper socioeconomic framework to address imbalances and inequalities.”
Water scarcity is another favourite subject for doom-mongers, armed with visions of water wars. But the 2006 UN Human Development Report observed that “there is more than enough water in the world for domestic purposes, for agriculture and for industry.... scarcity is manufactured through political processes and institutions that disadvantage the poor.”
|
| What if everyone owned a car? © Greenpeace UK |
Such appeals to the principle of equity in distribution of resources do not deny the awesome challenge of overcoming scarcity as population numbers rise. Food production must increase by 70% by 2050 and freshwater demand will rise by 53% by 2030. Energy security is not just about incremental demand but also the basic needs of 1.3 billion people who have no access to electricity at all.
Future population growth will indeed aggravate all aspects of sustainability. Deploying it as a smokescreen for our incompetence in the equitable management of finite resources will not improve our chances.
William Rees explains his Eureka moment that led to the concept of the human ecological footprint, from Post Carbon Institute.
If you like this site, please make a voluntary micropayment to help OneWorld publish its educational Guides (credit/debit card or PayPal).
| £1 | US$2 | EUR2 | AU$2 | CA$2 | NZ$3 | SG$3 | PHP50 |
»
Your right of reply
Does this OneWorld Guide contain any inaccuracies?
Has something important been omitted?
Your views are welcome
»
Please write to the Guides Editor Has something important been omitted?
Your views are welcome
Printable version
top of the page