The Population Crisis

People are always talking about how the world population is growing at a rate that will exceed the carrying capacity of the earth. Well, I recently watched a video for my family relations class that says the opposite is occurring. It had some interesting facts that I thought I would share with you all.

The video I watched said that we can most likely expect a decrease in the population during the next 40 years, or so. One of the reasons for this is the drop in fertility rate. Fertility rate is how many children, on average, a woman has in her lifetime. The current fertility rate, for the world, is about 2.47 children. The fertility replacement rate is about 2.13 children. This means that we need a fertility rate of about 2.13 children to maintain the current population. While it may seem that we are at a good place right now for maintaining the population since we are over the replacement rate, research shows that it has been dropping each year. For example, in about 9 years it dropped from 2.6 to 2.47, which is crazy for such a short amount of time, and it will just continue to get lower and lower. Not to mention that in Japan, the fertility rate is 1.2 children. There are more adults than children, and the decrease in their population started in 2005. Also, in Russia, about 40% more people are dying than being born. Just imagine if more countries follow their lead; the population will be decreasing in no time!

People have been predicting that there will not be enough resources to go around. In fact, in the sixties they were predicting that there wasn't enough to support 4 billion people. Today we have over 7 billion people, and we are still doing fine thanks to human resources. People are innovative and creative, and keep coming up with ways to make new things to support human life. If the population continues to drop, though, there will be less people to create those new technologies and innovations.

Feel free to watch the video that I did, and do your own research! I will put the link to the video below:

http://www.byutv.org/watch/59b6b917-984a-478f-93b1-521a647779c4/new-economic-reality-demographic-winter-part-1

Thanks for reading!