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AP file
Building denser cities like Manhattan -- as shown in this aerial view Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2007, in New York - could be part of the answer.
Cities worldwide are on track to expand by nearly 580,000 square miles – more than twice the size of Texas – in less than 20 years, according to experts at a major international science conference.
Yale University professor Karen Seto said the North American suburb had “gone global, and car-dependent urban developments are more and more the norm.”
The world’s population is expected to grow from the current 7 billion to about 9 billion by 2050, according to the United Nations.
Experts meeting at the Planet Under Pressure 2012 conference in London said in a statement released by the organizers Tuesday that unless changes were made, “humanity’s urban footprint” would increase in size by 1.5 million square kilometers (nearly 580,000 square miles) by 2030.
This is significantly more than twice the size of Texas or, according to a "back-of-the-envelope calculation" by Seto, more than 43,000 football fields every day for the next 18 years.
”The way cities have grown since World War II is neither socially or environmentally sustainable and the environmental cost of ongoing urban sprawl is too great to continue,” Seto said in the statement.
“People everywhere, however, have increasingly embraced Western styles of architecture and urbanization, which are resource-intense and often not adapted to local climates,” she added. “The North American suburb has gone global, and car-dependent urban developments are more and more the norm.”
Eco-friendly skyscrapers?
Seto was one of the authors of a report in the journal PLoS One about global urban sprawl, along with Michail Fragkias of Arizona State University, who is one of some 2,800 participants at the London conference.
The Planet Under Pressure conference is designed to give an idea of the health of the globe ahead of the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June.
Fragkias told msnbc.com that "the answer [to urban sprawl] is denser cities."
"The main message is we are not going to get away with cities like Phoenix or cities like Los Angeles," he said. "These are the typical cities of the single-family house, with a huge lot and huge highways that connect various areas of the cities because there is no way you can have an efficient or cheap enough mass transit system to support them."
Instead, densely populated areas such as Singapore or Manhattan -- but not New York City's surrounding urban sprawl -- provided possible models for the future. "If cities can develop in height rather than in width that would be much more preferable and environmentally not as harmful," Fragkias said.
Census: 8 out of 10 Americans are now urbanites
But Seto told msnbc.com that density was only part of the answer, saying someone who lives close to where they work in Phoenix could have a low environmental impact, compared to someone living in a densely packed city who commutes through congested streets in a car.
Cities are not 'bad'
And she said that increasing the urban population was "absolutely" the way to deal with the rising number of people in the world.
"For a long time, environmental activists said 'cities are bad.' The rationale was cities take up space and that could be better used for gorillas and butterflies," and other wildlife, Seto told msnbc.com.
But she said the global population was increasing and "we certainly don't want them strolling about the entire countryside. We want them to save land for nature by living closely [together]."
The conference statement said that creating more environmentally friendly cities included better infrastructure planning; “reversing the trend to ever larger homes;" and ending subsidies that favor cars over public transport.
Beijing's 'hubs' haven't curbed population pressures
Inner city schools should also be improved and other urban issues such as income inequality and crime rates addressed, the statement said.
"Cities are being built so quickly, we have to rethink how we do things ... Rome wasn't built in a day, but Chinese cities are," Seto quipped, saying most urban growth was taking place in Asia.
UNICEF: Millions of kids live in urban squalor
On Tuesday, organizers of the conference also highlighted a website called Welcome to the Anthropocene, referring to a term adopted by scientists and environmentalists to describe what they say is a new epoch, one uniquely influenced by human actions.
The idea the world had entered the Anthropocene was first put forward in 2000 by Dutch Nobel laureate Professor Paul Crutzen and U.S. academic Professor Eugene F. Stoermer.
"This century is special in the Earth's history. It is the first when one species -- ours -- has the planet's future in its hands," Martin Rees of the Royal Society, Britain's academy of sciences, said at the conference Monday according to the AFP news agency. "We've invented a new geological era: the Anthropocene.”
More from msnbc.com and NBC News:
- Teen rescued after 28 days adrift at sea
- Grumble, grumble: Brits revel in gloom ahead of Olympics
- Afghan abuse victims jailed over 'moral crimes'
- Man cuts off foot, throws it in furnace to avoid job assignment
- Turmoil builds in China's Tibetan regions
- French rail company to pay out after delays cost commuter job
- World's cities to expand by twice the size of Texas by 2030
Follow us on Twitter: @msnbc_world
Leave a Comment:
Population control please!
Agreed. One child per family for say 3 or 4 generations and we can all live just fine on this earth. Otherwise, we will all be destroyed. Yes, I only had one child.
Soylent Green is the answer.
J_L: Tastes like chicken.
I also agree. There is no better argument for making sure all women have access to free birth control. That debate should be over now but there will be those who have to pull the religious card. How does that weigh out? We either control the number of births happening for all who are in existence today (and for some generations to come) and human existence continues through the unforseeable future OR we let the religious folks who throw temper tantrums because they can't have those dozen children their god says they are supposed to have ruin it for all of us and we go out like a light in the next 100 years. Common sense says we don't listen to the complaining by the "saved" and just do what is right for all of humanity. Maybe, just maybe, self preservation will win out and they'll stop listening to the voices...
If we would pass out free contraceptives world-wide we could head off this massive population explosion.
I have seen models in the past that showed the world population going up as far as 12 billion and then a massive population collapse occurs taking it back down to about 3 billion. Frightening and unnecessary if we can just limit ourselves.
.
can't do that. that makes too much sense. forcing people to make the responsible (for everyone) choice because they are too stupid or ignorant to do so is seen as a terrible infringement on people's rights to be stupid and ignorant.
In general, the white population is already doing "birth control" by adapting to not just bread ahead without the capacity to support. Teach this to the others!!! or, make them. That will stir up the pot.
200,000+ more human bodies every day. They have to live in poverty somewhere. I can't see us figuring it out anytime soon. Crunch and crash.
Agree with the posters here! In fact, let me ask you guys a hypothetical: if tomorrow we woke up to a country with the population of CHINA'S, (1.5 BILLION) do you think we'd like that? What would the environment be like? What about our quality of life???
The reason why I ask this is the U.S. is on track to achieve this population mark by the end of this century, if nothing is done about it.
If you stack the population of the world chockablock, you'd have a 1 mi³ cube, which is "small" enough to fit well within the Grand Canyon (with plenty of room left over). Overpopulation isn't the problem, it's overconsumption and distribution of resources. That would require that Western cultures curtail their consumption habits, so we end up with the bogeyman of overpopulation to distract us from the real problem.
World.I,
Do you really believe that access to free birth control is the problem? Religion is the problem? In my opinion getting people to actually use any form of birth control is the problem. As Stupidpeoplearekillingusall said, the concept of limiting family size based on ones ability to provide is considered an assault on individuals rights. The rest of the population is expected to take on that responsibility.
For the record every not religious person mass producing children. I know alot of couples with 0-2 children.
But da bigga mah family, da bigga mah welfare check!
Just more extremist scare tactics trying to put us on a guilt trip. It's liberal tree hugger's trying to control our lives.
perhaps urban cloning might work. People could raise themselves.
JohnSixty - Then you'd double the population! NOOOOOOOO!
Republicans don't want population control, neither does the Catholic church.
Gotta keep producing more Catholics!
Now if i do the math by multiplying 134 million( Number of births) by the number of years from now until 2050, which is 38, I come up with 5,092, 000,000. Now I take 56 million, the number of deaths per year, and multiply it by 38 I get 2,128,000,000. I subtract the number of deaths from the number of births, and I come up with 2,964,000,000. Now I add that to the current population of 7 billion which comes out to nearly 10 trillion at 9,964,000,000.
How does the UN come up with this estimate taken right here from this article?......
and these are figures not factoring in any advances in medical technologies or other improvements the rest of the world's population is sure to enjoy....are they expecting a bit of a die off? Where do they put the missing 10 percent from current trends?
Spray the cities with birth control and don't let them drink booze.
J_L
Except now it will have to be "Soylent Black"
Well, the water supply's already contaminated with birth control hormones. Enough to affect aquatic fauna, so your idea's closer to fruition than you think!
I am a Republican, and I want population control! The only problem is, I dont want to infringe on people's rights. Look at a graph of a bacteria colony from birth to death and it looks just like the history of human population growth, with us being at the steep climb just before the peak followed by a steep decline after all resources are burned, and the imminent death.
I would stop worrying about global warming, because we aint gonna make it long enough to see it into its entire actuality...and thats assuming global warming is really happening at all.
I'm glad I'll be dead in 50 years or so! Mankind and his concrete jungles are a cancer on Mother Earth, I wonder how long before she kills us all!!
A concreted planet is as life giving as the dead tumble of rocks on Mars. The tragedy is, almost everyone is clueless as to how the Earth functions to create and support all life, including man's, and it has nothing to do with concrete, steel, cars, energy or jobs but everything to do with the natural and wild Earth or ecosystems and their plant and animal biodiversity, the creators and saviors of ecosystems.
And, cities' climates are hotter; thus they are referred to as, "heat islands". Danger, my fellow man.
There is a really easy answer to two problems if only all democrats and greenies would just hold there breath long enough we can lower CO2 emmisions from them not exhaling AND bring down the population numbers at the same time.
Eventually nature will take care of the problem. We won't like her solution.
Out come the babies and down go the trees!
You lemmings who want forced population control and think babies are a bad thing should live up to your professed convictions and just march yourselves off the edge of a cliff.
Let the meek inherit the earth.
We don't need forced population control. A method that would work is you get tax deductions for your first two kids. If you have 3, you lose all tax deductions and for everyone after that you pay an, if you will, "excessive you use of resources" tax proportional to your net worth. The biggest problem with this is implementing it world wide, as the majority of the population control needs to take place in developing countries.
Not even necessary. If you were to eliminate tax credits for more than two children, except in cases of legal adoption you would have a win/win situation. You would eliminate incentive for producing more offspring and cut down on the number of "unwanted" children at the same time by incentivizing adoption... I disagree regarding developing countries, however, simply because their child, and infant mortality rates (14 and under) serve to greatly offset their birthrates by quite a clip. You can look up statistics (for instance re. Africa) by googling pretty easily. It makes it easier to understand why non-industrialized societies have larger numbers of children to satisfy what might be called the "Biological Imperative." However (and I mean this in the least hateful way possible), Mormons, Catholics, and the Duggars have NO excuse for their excessive reproduction. That being said, the television industry is doing nobody any favors by glorifying such behavior through the channels of "reality" (unreality) television. Got that "Kate" and "Jaycee"? Cut the lines, already!
You know a tax credit equals 1000.00, believe me it costs a whole heck of a lot more than a thousand dollars a year to raise my daughter.
Why should you get any tax break for having children? Its your choice to have children and its your responsibility to pay for them.
I'll gladly pay for the the education system including post-secondary education. I have no responsibility to provide you tax breaks (welfare) for each additional child you bring into this world. That financial burden is yours to bear.
Same goes for mortgage interest deductions. Buy what you can afford without the rest of us subsidizing your purchase.
hmmmm I paid 6000.00 in taxes last year and got a refund of 2200.00, I think I upheld my end of responsibility as well as a few others don't you think Edward?
What does that have to do with me subsidizing your family based on the number of children you have
Governments do not want population control because our entire central banking, capitalist, and pyramid 'social' tax system requires an expanding base. When you are born and receive your birth certificate your value is already calculated and included into the system. No number, no participation, you do not exist, and have no rights. Any body else see how economic slavery works....
Google Slavery by Consent and watch some interesting things.
I volunteer all the liberals to be depopulated first.
Keep your laws off my body. Respect MY reproductive rights, my reproductive choice, and remember that my womb is off limits. You all don't have any right to my vagina and my womb so don't you dare try and tell me how many kids I can or can't have. My body my choice. My body my choice. My body my choice!!!!!
sooner or later..... it's all gunna come crashing down. The saddest part is.... we can all see it coming and yet we do nothing to stop it.
Greed greed greed. There won't be an Earth in under 100 years. So who cares?
There will be an Earth alright, mankind may not be a part of it though, at least not in the grotesque numbers we exist with today!
By the way JohnSixty, I care! I hope many more do as well. Maybe an extraterrestrial civilization will find us and either save us, eat us, or take us away to populate other places. I hope the second choice never happens!!!! LOL
No, Deemo, I don't think the majority believe the Earth is struggling under the weight of man's more and more planet devouring. They are clueless as to the how's and why's man exists. Mankind exists and breathes because of Earth's natural, physical body or her ecosystems, the wild, natural Earth. Man's changes to the Earth are as dead as the tumble of rocks on the surface of Mars.
Our policy-makers and leaders require, at least, a kindergarten education in the science of ecology, which reveals how Earth gives and supports all life. After all the trees are gone, man cannot eat, breathe and drink paper monies. Eco-scientists claim, man is, "suicidal" when he kills ecosystems for any reason. And, this is what modern man does best!
Kornfed - 9,964,000,000 is nine billion, nine hundred and sixty four million - not trillions. BUT, still way too many!
90% of the earth's population occupy 10% of the land.
There's plenty of room. If you feel crowded, move to Wyoming, where you can drive for hours (or walk for weeks) without ever seeing another human being.
This article makes some fantastic points. It is better to have everyone grouped into dense population centers rather than spread out equally. It's kind of a containment strategy for the environment, when you get down to it. If you keep us all in one place, we can't cause damage everywhere (until there are enough of us).
How would soccer moms get fat?
These idiotic comparisons e.g. more than twice the size of texas, or more than 43,000 football fields are purely idiotic. You think that makes it easier for people to imagine than 1.5 million square kilometers (nearly 580,000 square miles)???
It just sounds so stupid, like you are explaining these things to retards who can only think in terms of sports areas or states... Way to dumb things down.
also this is why Americans are so stupid in math... Johnny, what's 2+2? Ehhhh... could you rephrase it using a football or baseball analogy?
but, at least you understand it ??
2+2. Whaddya want it to be?
Although square miles makes sense to begin with and is generally easier to imagine/compare if you know the size of your own surroundings, I find it odd that they chose one random state for us all to compare it to. In other words, if you're not from Texas, how is that information going to help you any? (This crossed my mind immediately because I'm in Rhode Island, so comparing something to the size of Texas is sort of abstract in my opinion. Our states obviously vary greatly in size. They might as well have said France or Madagascar or any other random geographical area.)
Also, I doubt ANY reader actually sat there and tried to imagine FORTY-THREE-THOUSAND football fields at once.
drive across texas and you will get an idea how large that is
2+2 is not 4 if a group consensus says its not. Remember children there are no wrong answers. MORONS!!!!!!
And yet still smaller than the size of Alaska..... ;) (586,000 square miles.)
People think the world is too crowded only because they can't imagine the numbers involved. Scientifically, there is easily enough room on the planet for 100 billion people.
A mere 10 billion will be no strain on the planet, and 10 to 12 billion is probably much closer to where the planet's population will stabilize if existing dynamic trends continue (extrapolating linearly is a fool's game, even if you can tell the difference between billion and a trillion).
Saying that 7 or 10 or even 15 billion people is "too many" is simply fatuous. Scientific advances increase along with, but much faster than, population growth.
Don't believe me? What was the world's population when we developed the steam engine and how long did it take us?
From that time, how much did world population grow and how long did it take before we developed commercial air travel.
And then how much more did world population grow and how much less time did it take for us to send the Voyager probes millions of times farther, to the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond?
43,000 football fields, each with a capacity of 100,000, is enough room for 4.3 billion people to have a massive tailgate party.
If there are 268,000 square miles in Texas, and that's enough for 21,500 football fields, and there are 57,500,000 square miles of land area on Earth...
that's enough room for one great big tailgate party of 461 billion people, but what would we do with all the trash and left over hot dog buns and beer bottles.
Hopefully not "paved". Strange...I'd think we would not need to live nearly as centralized now.
Can we strive more for quality of life instead of just adding years?...cheney
As populations increase people will need to move into cities to maximize efficiency of land use and preserve arable land for food production; as opposed to urban sprawl, where everybody puts up their little fence to protect their acre of useless grass.
My city has parks and lakes and pastures and farms.
Nice.
Fear not mortals.
When I tire of your doings,
I shall purge you from my back,
like the parasites you are.
Sincerely,
Mother Nature
by late December all of the world's problems should be solved
People suck.. except you and me..
what the article does not point out, is that there are other ways to have cities than just concrete, copper wire, synthetic carpet, etc. Granted, eventually, building "up" rather than "out" will be the only answer, but the article ignores things like green roofs, nature friendly fences, surburban backyard habitat programs, etc. Even if we do build "up", these concepts along with reduced consumption will be necessary.
I live in LA and don't have a car. I live downtown, take the metro rail to work and walk eveywhere else. The mtero goes just about everywhere. You don't need a car in LA.
How can you do a drive by without a car??? HAHA
This is based on our current energy situation. There is no way our current energy sources will be affordable enough, let alone abundant enough to support this kind of growth. Barring some Manhattan Project style initiative towards energy, I don't see how this is possible.
Exactly correct. Time to fundamentally change how we live on this planet, or perish. That IS how adaptation works. What would be really sad would be for a species with such a short lifetime in the fossil record (homo sapiens) to fail, and to do so miserably at the hand of our own egos.
Higher density would likely make crime alot easier.
Were doomed.
More crime and death in a more compact city.
people need to stop breeding.
Instead of feeding the poor we need to find a way to make THEM a viable food source. Any ideas?
No, the poor are too valueable as WiFi, 4G "hot spots".
People PLEASE: Spay or neuter your humans!
No offense city dwellers, but I wouldn't live in a "Manhattan" if my life depended on it. Stock humans like cattle, forget it.
Sometimes I am grateful for an anomalous education early on. Critical thinking is not widely appreciated in this country.
REAL populations in most of the world (but especially in Asia-East and South) have only actually been being counted for a very short time. The real populations of the African continent have NEVER been counted. There is ZERO evidence that the world population was approximately 1 billion 100 years ago. There is also no way that has been devised to standardize and collate population data worldwide. Americans claim overpopulation is such a huge problem in Africa, where the overall death rate exceeds (in most areas) the birth rate. I suppose that it is easy to believe what amounts to blatant propaganda, regarding population, in North America (and Western Europe) which has seen massive population expansion, but in reality this has been more a result of people moving around as opposed to real percentage increases in the birth rate vs. the overall death rate. Infant mortality in decline (but not in the U.S., which has the highest in the W. hemisphere) is probably the most significant factor involved in net population growth.
Is anyone even aware of how the UN counted population in places like India 20 years ago?... They took PICTURES of densely populated areas and ESTIMATED how many people were in the pictures and then extrapolated that over a given geographical area. Hardly amounts to real evidence, eh? You are just as well off estimating the rate of population growth based on rhetorical accounts of places like Mumbai and Hong Kong and Shanghai from 150-200 years ago... But guess what, they've been crawling with people for at least the last several hundreds of years.
OOOOOHHH! Soylent Green! OMG 50 million people in Manhattan! OOOOHHH! That was a scary movie! Guess what, it's a movie. It is not based on REAL EVALUATIONS OF EMPIRICAL DATA. Run around scared, little sheep.
Oh yeah, and I'm working on my second child right now and I feel ZERO guilt over it. Probably, if I want any more, I will adopt. When are we, as a society, going to admit that what we have is not a population problem, but a MANAGEMENT problem? Facts are stubborn things. Don't let them get in the way of what your TV tells you to believe.
PS-Do you know what more dense cities will get you? They will get you MORE AND MORE VIRULENT outbreaks of disease. You want links for that? Google the black death (and please don't leave out the plagues in North Africa this time)... and do your own looking into the bs propaganda that you've been fed all these years. But first you have to be willing to admit to yourself that you've been fed a PACK OF LIES AND HALF TRUTHS for your ENTIRE LIFE.
I don't see much critical thinking in this post.
Thanks for the constructive commentary, Roger. You're a peach. Shalom.
Believe it or not, not all Africans live in mud huts.
Every city in the world requires some sort of ID. Get stopped for speeding in Mumbai, the officer is going to ask for identification.
Every nation that draws taxes collects a census. The census was originally invented for purposes of taxation.
Your naive assumption that most of the worlds population is not accounted for in a file cabinet somewhere speaks volumes of your elitist world view. Dragging up how they did the census in India ~50 years ago~ does not make a very strong case for why we can't know how many there are today. In today's information age, most nations report their population themselves. No fly over photography sessions needed.
I'm not talking about 50 years ago ("...today's information age..." is not as old as your comment implies). And I don't have an elitist worldview. I'm saying that linear extrapolation of population data to predict changes past and future is inaccurate at best, and to buy into it is naive. How many homeless people live in the US? Please don't pretend that you know the answer or can provide a link. The local government doesn't even know how many are in this county.
However, the overpopulation "problem" is definitely one of the more effective neo-colonialist LIES ever.
Incidentally, why would I have reason to believe that all Africans live in mud huts? There is, however, plenty of the world's population that lives outside the confines of what we refer to as "civilization."
There is a fundamental error in this article. The cities that are growing are the cities of the Developing World. Their growth is informal. Look at Lagos as an example. By 2015 it will be the 3rd largest city in the world with 25 million. More than 70% of its population will live in informal settlements, not the nice urban high rises you describe as part of urban intensification. These informal settlements are shantytowns stuck along the edges of urban centres. In Rio they are favelas clinging to the hills. In Bogota they cling to hillsides overlooking the downtown. They have little in the way of services and infrastructure. Sanitation is poor. Water quality is awful. Yet this is where the growth in cities is occurring at a record rate as rural Developing World inhabitants move to urban centres. This is the future of urban growth.
For cities in the Developed World intensification will be the norm. Cities will become more dense, rising vertically. But the problem of infrastructure and resources in these locales pales in comparison to the looming crisis of the urban Developing World. I have written several pieces on this subject on my blog at and invite readers to learn more about the challenges of urban growth in the 21st century.
At least somebody here can grasp the bigger picture. Kudos.
It is not the available land area the restricts the number of people. Singapore is building both up & down, and filling-in large water areas...
It is the availability of; water, food, and jobs that will support the needed life style...
It is projected that water needs will DOUBLE in 13+years. Crop irrigation is the largest user of water and major changes will have to be made to the current methods, to conserve the available assets...
Food production will have to INCREASE, just to keep-up with the growing populations. While the World food production trend is currently DECREASING per-capita. Many people will be FORCED to change their eating habits and start consuming foods that require less water & energy to grow...
The USA & EU have experienced what FREE TRADE has done to their modern life-style. The ASEAN Nations are now going to do the same to their member Nations. The base wages are being INCREASED in China & Thailand and the labor intensive jobs are already moving to other countries...
Unfortunately a lot of this isn't possible on an individual basis. I agree the US doesn't have that much of a problem amoung it's citizens as birth rates are stagnant I believe. Immigrants, legal and illegal are adding to our population as this is a country of immigrants. Especially if they are of Catholic background as religious dogma is the problem world wide.
If you could get the pope to change the Roman Catholic dogma about conception a lot of problems with population growth would slow. If you could get, say the Muslim community to not support a man having multiply wives with ??? kids the problem would slow. Not to pick on just these two religions, but I'm sure the point can be made that many of the more machismo areas of the world have men dictating to women who, what, where and why. It unfortunately is a reality that women in many countries with these religions have to hide their birth control from the "man of the house". I expect if it were up to the women in the world there would be less population growth.
It's just a matter of time before a world wide pandemic "thins the heard". Nature has a way of keeping populations of any species in check. Although humans have the capacity to replace nature's checks and balances through wars.
Will never happen!!! Folks will be moving to other countries to avoid being around over crowding. Its called MIGRATION!!!! Does MSNBC have the same dumb azz writers as yahoo???? Geessshhhhh
People need to stop having kids. Limit 1 per person that's what I say, we need to feed and take care of the people suffering now.
Any futurist will tell you denser, taller cities will be coming soon. Watch Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, etc.
Gonna look kinda like that. At least we might get flying cars...