World Population Becoming More Urbanized; United Nations Still Doesn’t Get It
The United Nations recently released a report on the continuing urbanization of world population. According to the State of the World’s Cities Report 2001, urbanization is continuing at a quick pace. Every year the percentage of the world’s population living in cities grows by 0.8 percent (which may not sound like a lot, but represents very rapid expansion).
In highly industrialized countries such as the United States, up to 80 percent of the population live in cities, and the developing world is beginning to catch up to those figures. Moreover, the number of megacities keeps expanding. By 2010, there will be 21 cities worldwide with populations of 10 million or more people.
Unfortunately, as the report notes, many of those living in cities are living in poverty, with up to 1 billion people living in slums and squatter settlements in urban areas around the world.
Ironically the United Nations still can’t see the forest for the trees. On the one hand it notes that consumption of oil and fresh water are now at levels that are five and two times the consumption level of the mid-20th centuries — largely due to increased usage in developed industrialized countries — but on the other hand fails to see the connection between those indicators and the alleviation of poverty.
The report says that, “A child born in the industrialized world consumes and pollutes more in its lifetime than do 30-50 children in developing countries; yet the environmental damage from global consumption falls most heavily on the poor.” But saying that children in developed countries consume more resources than children in less developed countries is simply an unnecessarily opaque way of saying that children in the developing world are extremely poor compared to children in the developed world.
With economies that discourage efficient deployment of resources such as oil, fresh water and other important commodities, citizens of the developing world lack an economic base to deal either with age old environmental problems, such as malaria, or more recent environmental problems, such as smog.
The solution is for such nations to begin producing as many resources as the developed world (the UN and others always conveniently forget that the developed world produces far more resources than the rest of the world), which will require serious long term economic and political changes in those nations.
None of which, of course, seems likely to happen in the near term.
Sources:
Number of city-dwellers growing, U.N. says. Matt Crenson, Associated Press, June 4, 2001.
The State Of The World’s Cities Report 2001. The United Nations Center for Human Settlements, June 2001.
The World Population Becoming More Urbanized; United Nations Still Doesn’t Get It by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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