As world population continues to grow, natural resources are under increasing pressure, threatening public health and social and economic development, warns a new report from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Most developed economies currently consume resources much faster than they can regenerate. Sustainable development requires slower population growth, the Hopkins report concludes. While the rate of population growth has slowed over the past few decades, the absolute number of people continues to increase by about one billion every 13 years, and the environment continues to deteriorate. For the future, how people protect or abuse the environment could largely determine whether living standards improve or deteriorate, according to the report.
Air pollution kills three million more.
In 64 of 105 developing countries, population has grown faster than food supplies. Overcultivation, largely due to population pressures, has degraded some two billion hectares of arable land - an area the size of Canada and the United States. In 25 years, humankind could be using more than 90 percent of all available fresh water, leaving just 10 percent for the rest of the world's plants and animals. Half of all coastline ecosystems are now under pressure because of high population densities and development. About half the world's population occupies a coastal strip 200 kilometers wide - just 10 percent of the world's land surface.