The current world population is estimated to be slightly over 6.8 billion people. By the year 2040, the world’s population is expected to increase by almost one half so as to be approximately 9 billion. Even more remarkable, in just another ten years, or by 2050, the world’s population is projected to be 10.6 billion and by the year 2100 is expected to be 15.9 billion. What this reflects is the increasingly exponential rate of world population growth, with the world’s population having increased fourfold in just the last 100 years. This has been a characteristic of human population since the first homo sapiens, with the human species being unique in the way that it has spread and populated the globe. As humans have learned to control disease and increase food production, however, so has the human population exploded beginning around the 1400’s, or shortly after the Black Plague that previously had killed off much of the population of Europe. Such an explosion of the human population has occurred despite two world wars and world-wide disease epidemics such as the 1918 flu. Because of the exponential nature of the explosion of the human population, this creates resource and environmental management problems that are increasingly raising questions as to the earth’s carrying-capacity to support our human population at current population growth rates and demands that our current society place on the environment (i.e. human “foot-print” impacts). Each day more than 200,000 people are added to the world’s population and thus demand for food and other natural resources. Following in the sections below are a discussion of some these global environmental and resource issues caused by the rapidly increasing human population.

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Tags: population, world population, world population growth