The world population currently stands at 7.53 billion. According to pretty much every estimation that comes out, this figure is only going to go up over the next few decades. By 2050, it’s expected that there will be 9.8 billion people on the planet, which is quite a shocking statistic. Some would say the planet is overpopulated, whereas others don’t think the human population is quite near that level just yet. However the population is classified now, it’s clear that in the coming years, the planet is definitely going to be overpopulated no matter how the term is defined.
In an ideal world, everyone on the planet would have a good quality of life with access to food, water, medicine, jobs, accommodation and all the components of a comfortable, enjoyable life. However, this isn’t an ideal world. There’s a huge number of people across the planet – over 3 billion – living on less than $2.50 a day. Right now the way things are, we as a race can’t sustain the population we have. How will the world population cope with billions more people in the next few decades? There’s such an unequal balance right now and there’s every chance it’s only going to get worse. The chance of all 9.8 billion people on the planet in 2050 living out of poverty with plenty of resources for a decent life is incredibly slim indeed.
We’re already struggling with the number of people there are, there’s no denying that. So how are we going to cope for the inevitable future growth in the world’s population? There’s going to come a point when the planet doesn’t have enough resources to sustain its human population. You can well argue that we’re already heading to the point. After all, so many people live in hunger, have poor accommodation standards and don’t have access to medicines they need.
A number of potential solutions to prevent population growth have been proposed. These include encouraging prospective parents to have just one child and imposing higher taxes on families with larger numbers of children; better education on things like contraception, abstinence; providing access to safe, legal abortion facilities and making birth control products more easily accessible; improving family planning services; raising awareness about overpopulation and its negative short- and long-term effects.
There are lots of things that can be done to prevent too many people being born in future generations. However, to really have a noticeable effect, it’s going to take a lot of motivated action from governments and high-up, influential organisations around the world if overpopulation is going to avoided, or even just delayed. It’s a complex, far-reaching problem that doesn’t have an easy, short-term solution. To prevent overpopulation from occurring, it’s going to take a lot of action that should start right now and keep on going indefinitely.
