Why do we celebrate World Population Day?
World Population Day, which is celebrated every year on July 11, was instituted by the General Council of the United Nations Development Programme in 1989. It marked the outgrowth of the Day of Five Billion, marked on July 11, 1987. It aims to increase awareness about various population issues including family planning, gender equality, poverty, maternal health and human rights to curb population explosion.
World Demographics
The world population was six billion in 1999 and seven billion in 2011. Currently, it's 7.43 billion. Presently, every second worldwide, five people are born and two people die, leaving three more humans to inhabit the earth. China and India have the world's highest populations of 1.38billion and 1.33billion, respectively. Roughly 6% of all people who have ever lived on Earth are alive today.
Reverse Migration
Urban landscapes are experiencing a transformation owing to population boom in small towns. Reverse Migration is when people move out of big cities to satellite areas and beyond, forming peripheral settlements and giving rise to these boomtowns and a forced stuttered growth in metro cities.
Population control: Need of the hour
The Millennium Development Goals of the UN seek to eradicate poverty and hunger and ensure environmental sustainability.Overpopulation leads to shrinking water resources,desert expansion, melting of glaciers, outbreak of diseases, species extinction etc. It promotes poverty, illiteracy, high fertility rate, decline in mortality rates and immigration in developing countries. The Global Footprint Network estimated that two Earths will be needed by 2030 to sustain us.
UN's theme for World Population Day 2016
This year the UN seeks to draw attention towards the discrimination, exploitation and poverty faced by teenage girls. Their main agenda is to empower girls by providing equal opportunities for education. Child marriage which is often followed by pregnancy is highly discouraged. Investment in teenage girls is critical for the world's future because today 1.8 billion of the world's 7.3 billion people are youngsters.
The refugee situation
According to the UN, around 21.3 million people worldwide were refugees in the 2015, out of which 54% come from Syria, Somalia and Afghanistan. Over half of the total refugees are below 18 years of age. Around 10 million people have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, health care, employment and freedom of movement.
The Heidelberg Appeal
The Heidelberg Appeal was signed by 425 prominent scientists, including 52 Nobel Prize laureates, at the end of the conference in Rio in 1992. It called overpopulation a 'plague' comparable to 'hunger and pandemics' and stated that it shared the objectives of the 'Earth Summit'.
