Effects Of Population Growth

In the last two hundred years, the earth has seen an astonishingly dramatic increase in the human population on earth. Humans have been on this planet for an estimated three million years and we have grown to a current population of approximately seven billion. Environmental scientists question the limits of the earth and how long many people it can accommodate before too much of a toll is taken and the population can no longer be sustained by the resources we have on earth. For thousands of years, the hunter and gatherer ways kept the population to a manageable ten million people. The growth of agriculture then allowed for communities to support more people and the population began to flourish. Birth rates were high but life expectancy was …show more content…
In fact, there is a formula to express the time it would take a nation to double its population, appropriately called the doubling formula. This is the percentage of the current growth rate divided by the number sixty nine. This simple formula yields the number of years it will take for that country to double its population given the growth rate percentage remains the same. Two countries that have been growing at alarming rates are China and India. China is currently the most populated with 1.357 billion citizens and India’s at 1.252 billion. Together these countries account for about 43% of the world’s population. Even though China is a bit more populated, India is expected to have a higher population by 2028, in just twelve years from now. The fertility rate for each country varies slightly over time but China’s fertility rate is approximately 3.5% and India’s is about 2% on average. The doubling time (time needed for the current population to double) for China is about sixty seven years and, for India, about forty two years. These numbers may seem small but compared to the U.S, who boasts a large population as well, the doubling time for this nation is one hundred and sixteen years. When sixty seven and forty two are compared to one hundred and sixteen, you can really see how quickly China and India are growing. The United States and India have similar fertility rates but since the difference in population is significant, India’s population yields more births at 2% than that of the United States’. China and India’s population is an occurrence of exponential growth as long as it continues to grow at the same percentage each year. The overall population of India is growing with a positive