John Ibbitson Jornalist Jornalista do The Globe & Mail, of The Globe & Mail, Ottawa Ottawa
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ix years ago, Darrell Bricker, who is the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, a global polling firm, and I decided that we would examine one of the most commonly held assumptions of our time. That assumption is that the Earth’s human population is exploding, that the population boom is one of the great challenges of our century, affecting the environment, our food supply, global security, and that addressing the population growth is one of the most urgent tasks. However, we were aware that there is a group of dissident demographers who were questioning the population projections of the United Nations Population Division, and we wanted to see to what extent there was validity in those objections. We went into six continents over two years, talking to demographers, statisticians and academics, but talking mostly to young people, especially to young women, asking them what their plans were, and what they intended to do in the future. We talked to university students of the Seoul National University, we talked to aid workers in the favelas in São Paulo, we talked to people in Nairobi, to slum dwellers in New Delhi, to millennials in a dinner party in Brussels. And we came to the conclusion that the demographers are
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Conferência de Lisboa – 4 _ 2020 Lisbon Conference – 4
right. The UN Population Division is wrong in projecting that the population of the Earth would grow from seven billion today to over eleven billion in the end of the century. In fact, the Earth’s population is going to stabilize, and then start to decline, somewhere around nine billion people, somewhere in the middle of the century. It will be the very first time, in human history, that the population of the Earth will deliberately go into decline. And the decline that has started will not stop for the foreseeable future, and by the foreseeable future, I mean for the rest of the century. So why do we believe this? The most important reason can be summarized in a single word: urbanization. This planet is urbanizing at an incredible rate, there are now more people living in cities than living in rural environments around the world, and that process is accelerating. As a population in a given community urbanizes, four things happen: 1) The first is that a child ceases to become an economic asset and becomes an economic liability. In a rural environment, a child might actually be a source of income - another pair of hands to work in the fields. In the city, the child simply becomes another mouth to feed, so there is an expense involved in having children in the city and couples reasonably decide to limit that expense.
A ACELERAÇÃO DAS MUDANÇAS GLOBAIS THE ACCELERATION OF GLOBAL CHANGE
