Urban
Population Explosion Predicted
By next year,
more than half the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, will for
the first time live in towns and cities. That number is expected to
swell to almost five billion by 2030, according to a United Nations
Population Fund report.
The change is
expected to be particularly swift in Africa and Asia, where between
2000 and 2030 “the accumulated urban growth of these two regions
during the whole span of history will be duplicated in a single
generation,” says the report titled “State of World Population 2007:
Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth.”
This surge in
urban populations, fueled more by natural increase, or births, than
the migration of people from the countryside, is unstoppable,
according to the report’s author George Martine.
Cities are
predicted to edge out rural areas in more than sheer numbers of
people. Because poverty is increasing more rapidly in urban areas,
governments need to plan for where the poor will live rather than
leaving them to settle illegally in shanties without sewerage and
other services, the United Nations report warns.
