Internet and other medias joyously celebrates the birth of 7 billionth baby. Among the world it is Danica May Camacho from Philiipines whereas in India, it was Nargis Yadav from Lucknow. Its quite cherishing to see new born baby but at the same time we are forgetting the fact that Our world is heading towards danger.
Seven billion ( 7000000000 ) people now inhabit Earth, the United Nations has announced, reviving long-held fears about overpopulation on a planet with limited resources. "How large a number can our Earth sustain?”I think that future generations will look back on 2011 and wonder, "Where is the world heading to...?"
This is the year that the world's population hit 7 billion, just 12 years after hitting the 6 billion mark in 1999, and 24 years after hitting 5 billion in 1987. The world's population has doubled since 1967, in a single generation. Obviously this growing population will require ever more food and more energy for electricity, transportation, communication, and heating and air-conditioning.
This is also the year of increasingly extreme weather conditions, widespread drought, enormous forest fires, and especially historic rainfall and flooding. We are talking about natural disasters happening in the heartland of the developed world in the full glare of the international media.
Further fueling concerns, estimates suggest the world will reach eight billion by 2025 and possibly ten billion by the end of the century. Within 38 years Asia and Africa will each add another 1 billion people to the planet, demographers have warned. Experts wonder how certain regions in those continents, which have been hit by famines and soaring food prices in recent years, can cope with an additional 2 billion mouths to feed.
“With an estimated 925 million hungry people in the world, 13.1 percent, or almost 1 in 7 people are hungry,” the World Food Program announced earlier this year. The UN organization said that overall the world was not making enough progress towards goals to reduce the number of undernourished people.
Worries have also arisen from calculations that show some of the globe’s regions will experience little or no growth, while a few, like Eastern Europe, will actually see their population shrink. According to the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau, Europe will shed 15 million people by mid-century.
In its report, the UNPFA urged global actors to take a step back from the awe-inspiring 7 billion figure. “When we look only at the big number, we risk being overwhelmed and losing sight of new opportunities to make life better for everyone in the future,” it stated.
Alarm bells over exploding population growth have rung in the past. In 1798 the English thinker Thomas Malthus famously wrote that "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." His warning, pronounced as the world's population reached the one billion mark, would nonetheless be followed by unprecedented population growth.
French demographer Gilles Pison says rapid population growth has not heralded the doom of mankind, as Malthus predicted. “Two hundred years ago a greater percentage of people died of hunger than they do today,” Pison pointed out.
While they can closely predict population trends over the next fifty years, they say it is fairly difficult to pin down anything after that. As Malthus could not have predicted the population boom and boon produced by the industrial revolution two hundred years ago, they say the next two centuries are equally unpredictable.
We all need air, but how much of it do 7 billion people consume?
People breathe at different rates, depending on their age, sex, fitness level and what they're doing at the time. In broad strokes, though, the average person breathes about8 litres of air every minute while at rest, or about 11,520 litres a day.So the world's population inhales at least 80,640,000,000,000 (80.6 trillion) litresof air a day, and converts more than 3,850,000,000,000 (3.85 trillion) litresof oxygen to carbon dioxide.
A University of California study determined that the average person breathes about 52 litres a minute when running, so if the entire world went jogging together for an hour we'd breathe about 21,840,000,000,000 (21.8 trillion) litres of air.
One hectare of average forest creates about enough oxygen to support 19 people, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Using that as the benchmark, the world's population needs at least 368,421,052 hectares of forested land to provide us with the air we need .
The irony is that our allocation of resources is getting out of whack in large part because of “population bomb” fears. Malthusians have long preached that the world’s growing population would sap the planet of resources. Societies have slowed their birth rates partly in response to such predictions, China’s one-child policy being the most dramatic example.
But it is more reasonable at this juncture to ask whether the problem isn’t that we will have too many people using up resources, but that we will have too few prime-age people working to produce innovations in the types of resources we use and the ways we use them. The trend for innovations in the energy sector, to name one example, is to make available resources more expensive in order to encourage the use of resources that are harder to harness. Working-age people stand to be ever-more burdened as they are asked to maintain old-age welfare systems built for a differently proportioned population.
Its the duty of each person to personally think over the issue and find out a remedy for this issue. Campaigns are to be set in all part of the world and it has to be strictly followed. Everyone has to accept the fact the world is not interfering in anyone's personal freedom but such measures are to be strictly followed for our own future to make a Better World...........
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