UNFPA tells people not to panic as world population reaches 8 billion

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With the global population anticipated to reach a milestone of 8 billion on November 15, a senior UN official advised the world not to partake in “population alarmism” as this causes worries about the impact on a global state exhibiting inequalities, the climate change crisis, and conflict-driven displacement and migration.

The number of individuals forced to abandon their homes to escape wars, violence, human rights violations, and persecution has surpassed 100 million, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in May, with conflicts throughout the world exacerbating the crisis.

Countries were called on by the executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), Dr. Natalia Kanem, to focus on helping the women, children, and those marginalized who were most vulnerable to demographic change rather than panicking about the numbers.

She said, “I realize this moment might not be celebrated by all. Some express concerns that our world is overpopulated, with far too many people and insufficient resources to sustain their lives. I am here to say clearly that the sheer number of human lives is not a cause for fear."

She added that diverting attention solely to the numbers would jeopardize population controls - proven by previous enforcement as “ineffective and even dangerous."

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“From forced sterilization campaigns to restrictions on family planning and contraception, we are still reckoning with the lasting impact of policies intended to reverse, or in some cases to accelerate population growth,” Kanem said. 

The track or pace of worldwide population growth has fallen below 1% as a result of falling birth rates, after recording a peak level of just over 2% a year in the late 1960s. “And we cannot repeat the egregious violations of human rights … that rob women of their ability to decide whether [or] when to become pregnant, if at all. Population alarmism: it distracts us from what we should be focused on,” she added. 

According to UN estimates, 60% of the globe deals with fertility levels below the replacement level, of an average of 2.1 births for every woman, which indicates when a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next. 

Almost every country in Europe lies below the 2.1 level, and Germany, Italy, Finland, and Hungary, for example, also have different gender norms and different public policies to support families and working mothers, but they all share a consistently low Total Fertility Rate (TFR). The same goes for the US which has a low fertility rate of 1.66.

However, by 2050, just eight countries including Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Philippines, are expected to account for half of all population growth but one of the eight, India, is anticipated to surpass China next year as the world’s most population-dense nation. The UN report also predicts a population of 10.4 billion people to be recorded during the 2080s and to remain so until 2100.

In light of that, areas, where new immigrant communities recorded higher birthrates than the country in which they arrived, may blur the global statistics, but Kanem suggests that the difference should not be “manipulated” and exploited against the communities to spike social tensions. 

“These are not causes for fear. In fact, in terms of the aging crisis, we’re going to have to look for solutions that include migration of people who are willing to help with elder care, etc,” she said. “While there may be some variability … this should not stoke xenophobia and hatred of ‘the other’, which sometimes this type of dynamic is manipulated in order to do.”

The Sun on Sunday issued a report that an unidentified British minister encouraged a baby boom by giving tax cuts to women who have more children.