World Population Day

http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,16087508,00.html

More than 7,057,608,000 are expected to be alive on earth by the end of World Population Day this Wednesday. The global population is still growing overall, but demographic discrepancies are widening. More than 7 billion people inhabit planet earth, with the overall growth continuing unabated on World Population Day. According to figures from DSW, the German world population foundation, the number of people on earth rises by 2.6 per second, 158 per minute, over 225,000 per day, or almost 83 million per year. Modern population growth is fueled primarily by Africa, Asia and Latin America, while populations are steady - or even sinking - in much of Europe. DSW estimates that the number of people in Africa will increase more than threefold this century, reaching around 3.5 billion. A spokeswoman for the DSW foundation, Ute Stallmeister, told the dapd news agency that this was largely owing to the number of unplanned births in Africa. World leaders will convene in the British capital on Wednesday for the London Summit on Family Planning, which hopes to raise $4 billion (3.25 billion euros) to give an additional 120 million women access to contraception by 2020. The UN estimates that 220 million women in the developing world do not want children, but also cannot access contraception. The cause has attracted high-profile patrons such as Microsoft mogul Bill Gates. "Because we didn't have contraception or family planning on the agenda, we weren't putting new money into it," Gates said in an interview with the Reuters news agency. "We weren't saying this is a priority. So this is our moment in time to say this is a priority and we need to fund it." Countries like Germany, on the other hand, are dealing with lower birth rates and higher life expectancies, with the population dropping slightly even after being bolstered by immigration. "It's a challenge of historic dimensions, because the number of people of employment age will drop by about 30 percent by 2050," social scientist Steffen Kröhner told Germany's ARD broadcaster in an interview. "I wouldn't class it as a catastrophe. But we will have to say farewell to a lot of things, not least the idea of perpetually increasing wealth. And we will need to come up with totally new ways of thinking when it comes to pensions, healthcare, and infrastructure in more sparsely populated rural areas."