As the number of people living on Earth nears 8 billion, Dr Natalia Kanem, executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), a senior UN official has said, "Some express concerns that our world is overpopulated, with far too many people and insufficient resources to sustain their lives. I am here to say clearly that the sheer number of human lives is not a cause for fear.”
Kanem said that if governments focused on the numbers alone they ran the risk of imposing population controls that had been shown by history to be “ineffective and even dangerous”.
“From forced sterilisation campaigns to restrictions on family planning and contraception, we are still reckoning with the lasting impact of policies intended to reverse, or in some cases to accelerate, population growth,” she said. “And we cannot repeat the egregious violations of human rights … that rob women of their ability to decide whether [or] when to become pregnant, if at all. Population alarmism: it distracts us from what we should be focused on.”
On immigrants that had a higher birthrate than the country in which they had arrived, Karem explained, “These are not causes for fear. In fact, in terms of the ageing crisis, we’re going to have to look for solutions that include migration of people who are willing to help with elder care etc,” she said. “While there may be some variability … this should not stoke xenophobia and hatred of ‘the other’, which sometimes this type of dynamic is manipulated in order to do.”
As a result of falling birthrates, the pace of worldwide population growth, which reached a recorded peak at just over 2% a year in the late 1960s, has now fallen below 1%.
60% of people live in countries with fertility levels below the recognised replacement level (when a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next) of an average of 2.1 births for every woman.
Just eight countries, including Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Philippines, are forecast to account for half of all population growth by 2050.
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