100 Million Will Die by 2030 If World Fails to Act on Climate: Report

[GliderGuider]

54. Other assessments are quite a bit more dire

Last edited Wed Sep 26, 2012, 12:16 PM - Edit history (1)

A recent paper from the Australian government research organization CSIRO compared the real-life trends of the last 40 years to the models published in the "Limits to Growth" study of 1972. The match they discovered prompted them to estimate that global birth rates and death rates could be equal by 2030, marking the peak of world population.

That's my gut feeling right now as well. Over the next 20 years there will be a combination of accelerating climate change (decreasing food supplies and increasing the spread of infectious disease), along with growing resource shortages and deepening global economic breakdown. That combination would raise mortality rates and decrease birth rates very rapidly, in line with the experience of Russia whren the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the 1980's.

If the crude birth and mortality rates were to meet at 12 per thousand in 2030 there would be an extra 180 million deaths over current UN projections. In addition, there would be almost 400 million fewer births than the UN expects.The population would peak just short of 8 billion in 2030. If the same trends held, the world population would then drop to about 2.5 billion by the end of the century.