The lesson here is that as population grows, people flock disproportionately to the most desirable places, which, in the absence of equally fast growth of infrastructure, causes some major problems. In Bangalore, for example, the influx of people has outpaced both the infrastructure and the availability of natural resources, making it routine for electricity and water to be available for only parts of the day in those areas of the city that even have access at all. Yet that lack of supply leads to higher prices, so even as the quality of life goes down, the cost of living goes up. In the state in which Bangalore is located, Karnataka, the cost of keeping the lights on, and supplying the population with fuel and food, has more than doubled since 2005. This reflects a general trend in the ten most populous states in India.
The flip side is that if cities do develop adequate infrastructure to handle high population densities, the cost of living goes sky high because of limited supply of homes and office space in the face of high demand, and the costs of maintaining all that infrastructure. Manhattan, for instance, has a population density of 18,500 people per square kilometre, not too far below that of Mumbai. A nice place to live, for sure, if you like city living, but at $3,973 per month, the average apartment there will cost you about $2,800 more per month than the nationwide average for the United States. New York City as a whole, with 10,600 people per square kilometre, is the fifteenth most expensive city in the world. Greater London is even more pricey: with 5,600 people per square kilometre, it was the most expensive city in the world in 2014. Such figures drive home the point that it costs a lot – and to many people, is prohibitively expensive – to live in a city that is both densely populated and has a well-functioning infrastructure, although of course the correlation between population density and cost of living is modified by a host of other factors, such as governmental system, proximity and access to natural resources, town planning, and so on.
The general lesson of rapid growth of a city’s population outstripping its capabilities to provide adequate infrastructure applies worldwide. In China, Beijing provides another cogent example. In the decade 2000–2010, China’s population grew about 6 per cent, reaching a little over 1.3 billion people. In the same decade, Beijing’s population increased 30 per cent, from about fourteen million to twenty million. The difference in percentage-growth is because, just as happened in Bangalore, many, many people migrated from the countryside to the city. As a result, Beijing too is experiencing problems: a water supply that can only support 60 per cent of the city’s residents, inadequate housing and public transportation, lack of access to medical care and education, and air pollution so bad that on many days the only way to see what the sunrise would look like is to look at a stock picture on a big video screen in Tiananmen Square.
As far as nations with growing populations go, India and China are probably the lucky ones, because the end of their population growth is in sight. Given the pace at which birth rates have been decreasing in those countries, both are on track to see growth of their populations stop by mid-century, and then at least remain stable and possibly even decline. And both are large nations that are rapidly advancing their economies, technology and social systems with at least some foresight of population-growth impacts, and with the full awareness of their governments that slowing population growth is a priority.
Not so with many countries that are in much worse shape economically, and with even less adequate natural resources. According to the most recent demographic projections, it seems a fait accompli that by 2050, ‘Five least developed countries – Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Republic of Tanzania and Uganda – will be among the twenty most populous countries in the world.’ By 2100, three more least developed countries will climb into the top twenty list for most populous – Niger, Sudan and Mozambique.
In fact, it seems to be a general rule that the poorer the people, the faster their population grows. This correlation holds both within countries, and from nation to nation. In India, for instance, birth rates among higher economic classes are pretty much at replacement value; the growth that is still occurring is in the poor rural population. And at the global scale, it is the poorest countries that are the population-growth hotspots. The UN Population Division projects that most of the forty-nine least developed countries are on track to see their populations triple or more between 2013 and 2100, and several are heading for a fivefold increase, including Burundi, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda, the United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia. You might have noticed that countries in Africa seem to be showing up with high frequency on these lists, and indeed Africa is the place that promises to launch a tidal wave of global change from its rapidly growing masses.
Which brings us back to the impacts on developed nations. Sudan and South Sudan are regions that provide a window into where the world would be headed if population growth in Africa plays out as predicted. The two countries’ combined populations grew from 8.3 million in 1950 (Sudan 5.7 million; South Sudan 2.6 million), to 45.5 million in 2010 (Sudan 35.6 million; South Sudan 9.9 million), to 58.5 million in early 2014 (Sudan 47.5 million; South Sudan eleven million). That sevenfold increase of numbers of people in the region has been accompanied by a twenty-two-year-long civil war that in 2011 finally split what used to be one country into two; genocide in Darfur that has gone on since 2005 as Janjaweed (the ‘devils on horseback’) militia and Sudanese forces maraud through villages on ethnic-cleansing missions; and widespread hunger, disease and death. These are life-and-death problems for the countries’ inhabitants – in South Sudan alone, in February 2014 a third of the population, nearly four million people, were desperately hungry, nearly a million people had been displaced from their homes, many thousands had been killed, and government forces and rebels were razing towns for what seemed no good reason.
That translates to some very noticeable global impacts. The cost of humanitarian aid to South Sudan quickly rose to over £800 million, and the conflict drew in neighbouring countries, in this case army and rebel fighters from Uganda. At an even larger scale, war-torn, unstable countries become breeding grounds and safe havens for international terrorist groups, which is exactly what happened as far back as the 1990s in the Sudan region, and which continues to be a problem there today.
The link between rapid growth, local wars and escalating global conflict is one of the most important population-growth impacts. We devote Chapter 9 to that topic, but a pertinent issue to mention at this point is that with rapid population growth usually come important changes in the so-called population pyramid. The ‘population pyramid’ refers to the number of people in infant, child-age, teenage, young adult, older adult and geriatric age groups. Rapid population growth bulges the teenage and young adult categories, which means there just get to be too many curious, energetic young people with no productive way to channel their energy. You can see that bulge in recent trouble spots such as Sudan, South Sudan, Egypt, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where about 20 per cent of the population is fifteen to twenty-four years of age. In much of Africa, about half the population is aged fifteen or below, and just 3 per cent are sixty-five or older. Contrast that with more stable countries, like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway or Japan, which have only about 17 per cent of their populations under the age of fifteen, and 16 per cent aged sixty-five or older.
The problem with swelling the ranks of young people relative to the rest of the population, especially in poor countries, is that unemployment increases disproportionately among young people as well. Indeed, unemployment among young people was one of the key drivers that led to the Arab Spring uprising that toppled rulers throughout the Middle East, including Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt in February 2011. The same problem was still causing huge protests that threatened Mubarak’s successor Mohamed Morsi in early 2014, when eight out of every ten jobless Egyptians were under the age of thirty. The projections of the population pyramids for these and other poor countries, even assuming they drop their current higher-than-replacement birth