“All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder – and ultimately impossible – to solve with ever more people.”
Sir David Attenborough
The megacity challenge: how to deal with rapid population growth
Population levels are rising and nowhere is this felt more keenly than in the world’s megacities – urban sprawls that each house over ten million people. But such growth brings with it a host of problems – Mark Rowe
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My comment : Shanghai is the third largest megacity in the world, but the largest actual single city – I lived in Shanghai for 8 years just prior to the covid pandemic. The city was an amazing place to live, to experience a very different culture and different place. I am a New Zealander with a country of 4 million people in its entirety; China has 1.426 billion people, so a massive contrast! The mot-so-new realities are :
* China has people, people, people, people everywhere
* Whilst China still have significant rural communities, the nation us becoming – like so many – increasingly urbanised and sprawling
* China’s rural areas and countryside are holding their own, the population is ever-expanding and becoming more and more urban
* The Chinese are good at keeping up the pace of their development in relation to housing there people– but it comes at a price – the price of the urban population boom.
Even by 1970, just 39 million people lived in megacities. By 1990, the number of megacities had risen to ten, collectively home to more than 153 million people or slightly less than seven per cent of the global urban population at that time.
As of 2014, the Earth has 28 megacities worldwide – 16 in Asia, four in Latin America, three each in Africa and Europe, and two in North America. They are home to 453 million people, about 12 per cent of the world’s urban dwellers. Shenzhen, described by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) as ‘a small village in the mid-1980s’, is now home to more than ten million people.
The forecasters say that this momentum is far from slowing “ ( Mark Rowe, https://geographical.co.uk )
According to the UN, by 2030 there will be 43 megacities – with all but one of the new ones in Asia (home to 630 million people, 13.6 per cent of the world’s projected urban population) or Africa.
Population Seven Billion
There will soon be seven billion people ( now 8 billion ) on the planet. By 2045 global population is projected to reach nine billion. Can the planet take the strain?
* https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/population-seven-billion
