Morning View: The challenge of an ever growing world population

Global population numbers can only ever be estimates, albeit carefully informed ones.

The United Nations thinks that the number of people in the world hit three billion in 1960, four billion in 1974, five in 1987, six in 1999 and seven in 2011.

Yesterday that total was said to have reached eight billion.

The time gap between each increase of a billion is getting ever smaller.

In less than half a century the number of inhabitants of this planet has doubled.

Concern about over population is not new. The News Letter was reporting on such theories at the end of the 1700s, when the economist Rev Thomas Malthus expounded on some of his ideas about the need to control the number of humans.

Such thinking has always been controversial, with some observers saying that the consistent increases in global living standards in recent decades disprove fears about ever rising populations.

But there is an undeniable challenge in Africa. The poorest continent in the world has the highest population growth rates.

While much of the rest of the world has low reproduction rates and growing prosperity, Africa faces immense strains from breathtaking increases in population.

Nigeria, which as recently as 1990 had fewer than 100 million people, is expected to have almost 400 million by 2050.

Meanwhile there is a vast imbalance in wealth between most of Africa and the west.

It will only take a tiny fraction of the African population to try to flee in desperation towards Europe for the current influx of immigrants across the Mediterranean to be made to look minor.

Cop27 is looking at the huge issue of climate change. But climate is not the only environmental problem.