sensitise you. It will take you out of your narrow work confines or suburban coffee shop. But you will need to ask key questions as you read. How can I adapt and take advantage of the pressure of population growth and the demands that brings? What choices do I have when it comes to opening up to new markets and cultures with new technologies? Will I be able to compete with a competitor who understands that exposure to Asia will be the profit generator of the future? How do I get ahead of the pack and move into the African business environment? What happens to my family’s future if I live longer than even my wildest expectations? And, for those with children: What must my child know about the world to equip him or her to survive and be successful?
These trends were deliberately chosen because they aren’t going to go away. For the rest of our lifetime, they will be part of us all. Enjoy the ride but make sure you fasten your seat belt!
Chapter 1
People and the Planet
This is a unique period for the world. The era of the fastest-ever population growth is with us and will peak in 2050 before tapering off. The strain on the planet of more than 9 billion people by 2050 will be immense. Demographic changes will pit generations against each other and alter the power balance between the developed and developing world. The challenges and opportunities of environmental trends and food and water security will shape humanity in the decades to come.
By 2050 the planet’s population will have hurtled to a record 9.1 billion. Put more starkly, the global population has risen by almost four billion people since 1950 and will grow by another two billion in the next 40 years. To make this dramatic population rise more meaningful, let us note that at the start of this chapter the global population stood at 6 889 797 914. You can flip to page 32 (but do come back and read it all) to see how many people have been born while the author has been writing.
Some time by the beginning of 2012 or sooner, the seven billionth living person will be born. While it took an initial 250 000 years for the planet to play host to a billion inhabitants (circa 1800), each successive billion has taken substantially shorter periods. More than a century passed to reach two billion in 1927. The billion after that took only a third of the time (1927–1960) and the next billion half as long. The most recent additional billion took just 12 years, and the one before that, 13 years.
Fertility rates will slow
There is, however, an important surprise ahead. This era of unprecedented acceleration is over, or it will be pretty soon. It is just as important to understand this as to acknowledge the overall rise in the population thus far. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Baby Boom resulted in high birth rates in richer countries and even higher rates in poorer nations. These are now falling. Momentum is shifting and numbers being added to the total population are dropping. The current population rise, as dramatic as it is, will be the last to happen in such a short period.
Fertility rates (children per woman in a lifetime), the underlying impetus for growth, are now falling and families are getting smaller. This change has been breathtaking in some developing countries noted for their historically high birth rates. In Iran, for example, fertility fell from seven to below two in 2006; in Bangladesh – a long-time culprit of mass population expansion – from six to three between 1980 and 2000[1]. Significantly, these changes are occurring not just in the West or Japan, but in large developing nations normally associated with very high birth rates. The West can no longer assert that it is the poor who will continue to procreate without thought about the responsibilities larger families bring. Even in Africa longer-term trends show a real decline.
A new milestone will shortly occur and it will change the way we live, think and interact with one another. Half of mankind will soon be living in countries or regions where fertility rates are at 2.1 or below. This is an accepted replacement rate where a country has just enough children to keep the population stable (births balancing deaths). With the global population sprinting to over nine billion, humanity is ironically confronting a future of depopulation and sub-fertility for the first time. These phenomena will become core concepts in everyday speak and in political action in the future.
In the latter part of this century, slower or even negative population growth will fortunately allow the world more time to deal with the demographic and environmental problems overpopulation trends have caused to date.
Urbanisation, education, advancements in medical science and a rising middle class will be the core drivers for such a numbers decrease. A decline in mortality will therefore be pretty positive for the planet. So, while we have always feared overpopulation – which may well reach a peak by 2050 – the opposite will become the focus of attention. It is going to be increasingly difficult to find young people after the middle of the century.
However, while long-term projections forecast a more manageable planet – at least in terms of population growth – this is probably beyond the lifetime of most people reading this book. For the rest of our current lifetimes (the next 40 years) the planet will add almost 30 percent of its current humanity to its grand total. Most of the additional 2.3 billion people will swell the population of developing countries, which is projected to rise from 5.6 billion in 2009 to 7.9 billion in 2050. The rise in humanity will be distributed among the population aged 15–59 (1.2 billion) and 60 or over (1.1 billion) because the number of children under the age of 15 in developing countries will decrease[2].
In contrast to the large population increases in China, India and other developing nations to 2050, the population of the more developed regions of the world is expected to change minimally, passing almost unnoticed from 1.23 billion to 1.28 billion. In fact, developed world populations would decline to 1.15 billion were it not for the projected net migration from poorer to richer countries, which is projected to average 2.4 million people annually from 2009 to 2050[3].
Larger workforce in developing countries
The uniqueness of this era is further enhanced by the fact that in both developed and less developed regions the number of people in the main working ages of 25 to 59 is at an all-time high – 605 million in developed regions and 2.5 billion in less developed regions. Yet whereas in developed countries that number is expected to peak over the next decade and stagnate thereafter, in the developing world it will continue rising, increasing by almost half a billion over the next decade and reaching a total of 3.6 billion in 2050[4].
These population trends justify the urgency of supporting employment creation in developing countries. Only such domestic economic growth can offset growing internal frustrations that often lead young, unemployed men to resort to crime and terrorism.
The sheer numbers of potential workers in the developing world will shift business even further away from the developed world. While globalisation resulted in offshoring for price, the future motivation for offshoring will be necessity and practicality. There are simply going to be fewer workers in the West and many more in the developing world. This is good news for the developing world because a rising proportion of younger people entering the workforce (with skills) should drive productivity and economic growth closer to home and, if they are lucky, discourage emigration to the West.
Fewer workers in the West also means ageing populations. Between 1950 and 2000, the percentage of the world’s population older than 60 years rose marginally from 8 percent to 10 percent. By 2050 this percentage will almost double to 21 percent. Age will be the key demographic trend in many countries, particularly in Western Europe and Japan, where the share of population aged 60-plus will be more than 40 percent by mid-century. In South Korea, the entire working age population will barely exceed the 60-and-older population. The world is currently witnessing the fastest growth ever
