World will become unrecognizable by 2050

Almaty. February 24. Kazakhstan Today - Researchers at a major US science conference warned the earth could become "unrecognizable" by 2050, if a growing global population keeps consuming more resources, Kazakhstan Today reports.

The earth's population could top nine billion by 2050, leading to an 'unrecognisable' world as people compete for scarcer resources a U.S. science conference heard yesterday, Daily Mail reported.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) heard how the world's population's will increase rapidly in poorer countries resulting in the need to produce the same amount of food in a 40 year period as had been produced in the previous 8,000 years.

Population growth is expected to be highest in African and South Asian states, while incomes are also expected to rise in these countries by up to four times.

This will lead to further strain as research has shown that people earning higher wages consume more food.

"More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet,' Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund told the AFP news agency.

Mr Clay urged scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.

But while Mr Clay called for changes in food production, others are calling on more funding for family planning to control the number of humans, particularly in the developing nations.

John Bongaarts, vice-president of the UN Population Council, said: 'For 20 years, there's been very little investment in family planning, but there's a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices.

'If we make much larger investments in family planning right now, the number of people could be closer to 8 billion. Such an investment would have a very beneficial impact on human welfare and any environmental issue we care about.'

However Mr Bongaarts also said that any forecast of population was highly uncertain as fertility and mortality variables are difficult to forecast.

UN analysis of fertility rates across the globe show very low levels in Southern and Eastern Europe and this is expected to continue to other parts of the globe in the coming years.

But were this trend not to unfold and fertility rates remained higher than the UN predicts, the world's population could top 10 billion by 2100.

Life expectancy in developed countries could also play its part as predictions are that it will exceed 100 years by the turn of the century.

Were it to do so, and birth rates did drop, then the world's population would again exceed 10 billion.

The world's population is expected to top seven billion at some point in 2011. The estimated population of the United Kingdom in 2010 was around 62 million.

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