World’s population reaches 7 billion today - Monday October 31st  

I rather like this cartoon from http://subdude-site.com/WebPages_Local/Blog/topics/environment/enviro_worldPopGrowth_charts.htm which highlights part of the problem of this statistic but there are other problems!

According to the U.N. the world's population will reach 7 billion people today. Since the turn of the 20th century global population has soared from 2 billion in 1927 to 4 billion in 1974 and 6 billion in 1999. This has sparked all sorts of discussion over the past week.  For those of us concerned about the future of our planet this is rather depressing - all these extra humans apart from needing food - and millions of people are already undernoursihed - will use more of our scarce resources and cause more pollution and send even more of the other wonderful life forms we share our planet with, speeding to extinction.  Not that people aren't lovely but you can have too much even of a good thing!

Here in the UK, the Office for National Statistics has released projections showing that the current UK population of 62 million is rising at 0.8% a year and may increase to 73 million by 2035.  The carbon footprint (or impact on the Planet) of UK citizens is much greater than those living in Africa and most of Asia so rising population here and especially in the energy hungry USA is particularly worrying.  Here are some links to some excellent interactive websites which may help you understand why some of us are worried.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/interactive/2011/oct/26/un-world-population-growth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2011/oct/24/how-big-worlds-population-born
http://www.breathingearth.net/

Another good website to exlore is http://populationmatters.org/