Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
8.00
7.00
6.00
Oman
Equatorial Guinea
5.00
Gabon
4.00
Saudi Arabia
3.00
Qatar
Kuwait
World
2.00
1.00
Moldova
0.00
0
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
70000
80000
90000
GDP (dollar per capita)
Figure 2.7
Fertility rate versus gross domestic product per capita for most countries in the world.
Data from the Central Intelligence Agency (2008).
Projections for the future world population
The future of the world population will depend on two important factors: fertility rate and mor-
tality rate. If the fertility rate remains constant at current levels (constant-fertility variant),
global world population will reach 11.7 billion by 2050. Will this scenario be possible?
Probably not; therefore, the United Nations Population Division came up with other three
probable scenarios named high-, medium-, and low-fertility variants. The high-fertility variant
assumes a fertility rate half a child above a medium-fertility variant and a low-fertility variant
is set at half a child below the medium-fertility rate. A medium-fertility variant is somewhere
in between. By following any of these three scenarios the world population will reach either
10.6, 9.0, or 7.7 billion by 2050, respectively (United Nations, 2004).
Rising standards of living
The GDP is often used as a measure of the standard of living of a country or a region. To
capture other indicators than just wealth, the United Nations created the Human Development
Index (HDI) that includes three basic aspects: life expectancy at birth, adult literacy rate, and
the gross enrollment ratio of primary, secondary, and tertiary education, along with GDP
(UNDP, 2010, p. 13). The index, which ranges from 0 to 1, ranks countries in four groups:
very high, high, medium, and low development (UNDP, 2010, p. 27).
Since 1980, the HDI has progressively increased all around the world including countries
in the low development group (UNDP, 2010, p. 28), which implicates an increase in living
standards. Certainly, this comes at a cost of greater need of natural resources, energy, and
deterioration of the environment. Even when the HDI was designed as an alternative to the
GDP, they both correlate with each other. The GDP also correlates positively with the
