Читать книгу The New Environmental Economics - Eloi Laurent - Страница 18

The fear of overpopulation occupied the heart of environmental conscience of the 1960s and 1970s, as evidenced by the reverberation of Paul Ehrlich’s (1969) book announcing the imminent explosion of the “population bomb.” As the author acknowledges today, the “bomb” has been partly defused by the decline in fertility rates in the developing world, a drop in which the education of women was the most powerful driver. The annual growth rate of the world’s population reached its peak (about 2%) in the mid 1960s, when Ehrlich’s book appeared, to be divided by almost two (about 1.1%) since then (see table below).

Population growth rate, 1950–2050 in % over 5-year intervals

	World	More developed regions	Less developed regions
1950–1955	1.78	1.20	2.05
1955–1960	1.80	1.17	2.08
1965–1970	2.05	0.84	2.52
1970–1975	1.95	0.78	2.37
1980–1985	1.78	0.58	2.15
1990–1995	1.52	0.42	1.81
2000–2005	1.25	0.33	1.47
2010–2015	1.18	0.29	1.37
2015–2020	1.09	0.26	1.25
2050–2055	0.48	-0.02	0.56
Source: United Nations. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017). World Population Prospects: 2017 Revision, custom data acquired via website

Yet, the population problem is not behind us: According to the latest data revision by the UN Population Division, the global population is still expected to grow substantially: from 7.5 billion in 2017 (6.25 in the developing world and 1.25 in the developed world) to 8.1 billion in 2030 (6.9 in the developing world, 1.2 in the developed world) and then 9.5 billion in 2050 (8.25 in the developing world, 1.25 in the developed world). Hence, the absolute increase of human population in the next decades, and the related pressure on the biosphere, is an inescapable reality driven by the increase of about two billion people in the developing world, especially the fifty countries where demography remains extremely dynamic.