Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers
Paul MorlandSözler ve Alıntılar
It may be that population is about to meet a global disaster and get knocked back, finally proving Malthus right after two hundred years. In the wake of Covid-19 we are certainly more aware of the destructive potential of pandemics. But for the moment, the population of Chad and its neighbours continues to boom. And just as China has been rocking the world's economic foundations in recent decades, Africa is set to transform our global demography. The great economic shift has taken place in the east, and the great demographic shift will occur in the south.
Town dwellers are likely to live in smaller, better-insulated homes than those in the countryside, so they will be more fuel efficient and their overall emissions lower. A 2004 study, for example, found that Londoners' carbon emissions were around half the UK national average,22 while New Yorkers are reckoned to emit around 30 per cent less carbon than the average American.23 Highly urbanized New York has the lowest per capita emissions of any US state.24 As the urban designer and planner Peter Calthorpe put it, "The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city-dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower density. Our tendency to live in towns and cities allows half of all humans to live on less than 3 per cent of the world's surface.
Modern humans are so overwhelmingly the product of uban culture that we hardly see how striking this is. We forget that while the city is thousands of years old, it has only recently housed any more than a tiny share of the population. Just 1.6 per cent of Europes population was urban in 1600, and a little over 2 per cent in 1800. But by 1801, 10 per cent of England and Wales was urban, and the majority of their populations lived in cities well before 1900.18 In urbanization, as in the rest of the demographic transition, the British Isles were pioneers;" a majority of the Earths population has only been urban since the early years of this current century.