A Steady, Unstoppable Wave

It's the Unholy Trinity - climate change, over-consumption and overpopulation. Any of those three is capable of bringing human civilization crashing down. Together, they make it a certainty. We either succeed at solving them all or we must certainly fail at fixing any of them. Which brings me to an item from Foreign Policy on the crisis almost no one wants to address - overpopulation.

While countries across Europe and East Asia are grappling with declining birthrates and aging populations, societies across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia are experiencing youth booms of staggering proportions: More than half of Egypt’s labor force is younger than age 30. Half of Nigeria’s population of 167 million isbetween the ages of 15 and 34. In Afghanistan, Angola, Chad, East Timor, Niger, Somalia, and Uganda, more than two-thirds of the population is under the age of 25.

...Consider India. More than 300 million Indians are under the age of 15, making India home to more children than any country, at any time, in all of human history. To put the size of this generation’s numbers into perspective consider this: If these children formed a country, that country would be the fourth-largest in the world, still smaller than the United States but larger than Indonesia, Brazil, and Pakistan.

...And India is far from being the only country grappling with a booming youth population. Africa’s current population of 200 million young people between the ages of 15 and 24 is set to double by 2045. In the Middle East, a region of some 400 million people, nearly 65 percent of the population is younger than age 30 — the highest proportion of youth to adults in the region’s history.

...Unfortunately, the countries that have most of the world’s young people are also the ones that are the most ill-equipped to grapple with their needs, ambitions, expectations, and inevitable frustrations — let alone capitalize on their potential. According to the United Nations, developing countries are home to 89 percent of the world’s 10- to 24-year-olds; by 2020, they will be home to nine out of every 10 people globally. Like too many developing countries, countries like Chad and Niger rank high on lists of the world’s most fragile states. They also have populations in which half of their citizens are under the age of 16.

The author of the article, Kristen Lord, is the president and CEO of an international development and education NGO. She sees this reproductive bomb as an opportunity - for development and growth. She completely overlooks the impacts of both climate change (and other forms of environmental degradation) and our already massively excessive dependence on the Earth's resources, renewable and non. When we have already exceeded the planet's ecological carrying capacity by a factor of 1.7 and we're racing ever faster to deplete nature's reserves, another 2-billion + mouths to feed and clothe and employ can only worsen the situation in those nations already "most ill-equipped to grapple with their needs." The resources these next baby-boomers will need just to survive much less thrive are already over-subscribed. Where does she imagine more, much more, shall be found?