DIMIDIA, LLC

Tunisia/Population Meets Desert

Moving Towards Mega-Cities

If all of the forecasts are correct, then the ongoing migration of people to existing metropolitan areas will only get more intense over the next 30 years. The UN estimates that between 2015 and 2020, urban population will exceed rural for the first time. The following tables show the current populations of the largest metropolitan agglomerations (or clustering of larger masses into super-sized cities), by Continent. One of the challenges of such a rural-to-urban migration will be the role of human capital in both urban and rural economic activities.

     (see: http://pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00003707/01/rural_to_urban_migration.pdf )

                    Largest Metro Agglomerations
                              Top 10 / 2006-2007

Almost all population growth is in the developing world. As a result of differences in population growth, Europe's population will decline from 13% to 7% of world population over the next quarter century, while that of sub-Saharan Africa will rise from 10% to 17%. The shares of other regions are projected to remain about the same as today. The top 20 percentile of the world’s population consumes about 83% of total output, while the bottom 20 percentile consumes only 1.4%. Income disparities are worsening – the per capita ratio between the richest and the poorest 20 percentile groups was 30 to 1 in 1960 and over 80 to 1 by 1995.

The mutual dependence of the peoples of the world on a single common planetary biosphere means that the environmental decline of one country or region is a problem for the entire community of nations.

• The human history of civilizations created by Ancient Egypt, Ancient Babylon, Ancient India and Ancient China are, in fact, the history of the Nile River, the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, the Indus River and the Yellow River. These rivers were critical to each civilization's existence and development. It is proven by history that human civilization cannot come into being - not develop - without rivers. Rivers are the origin of human civilization. They not only gave birth to human civilization but also moistened the growing of human civilization. ( Keep Healthy Life of Rivers—A Case Study of the Yellow River )
• Changes in land use and land cover date to prehistory and are the direct and indirect consequence of human actions to secure essential resources. This may first have occurred with the burning of areas to enhance the availability of wild game and accelerated dramatically with the birth of agriculture, resulting in the extensive clearing (deforestation) and management of Earth’s terrestrial surface that continues today. Industrialization has encouraged the concentration of human populations within urban areas (urbanization) and the depopulation of rural areas, accompanied by the intensification of agriculture in the most productive lands and the abandonment of marginal lands. All of these causes and their consequences are observable simultaneously around the world today.
• By 2050, two-thirds of the world's population is expected to live in cities, with developing countries claiming 54 megacities - those containing more than 10 million people - compared with 15 now.
• According to the United Nations, one billion people live in slums, largely in Asia (550 million), Africa (187 million), and Latin America and the Caribbean (128 million). In Africa, 72% of urban residents live in slums, the highest concentration in the world.
• Nearly all demographers agree that the world's population will top out at about 8.5 billion in about 2040 and then slowly decline through the remainder of this century.
• More than a third of the planet's people live and work in densely settled cities which occupy just 2% of the Earth's land area.
• Based on the most recent UN population projections, the future for many parts of the world looks bleak. The most alarming projection suggests that nearly 7 billion people in sixty countries will live water-scarce lives by 2050. Under the lowest projection, just under 2 billion people in forty-eight countries will struggle against water scarcity in 2050.