Slowing Africa’s Population Boom to Save People and Wildlife Both

By Garry Rogers @Garry_Rogers

“Ask any serious conservationist to name the most pressing issues today for African wildlife, and right at the top of the list, you’ll almost certainly hear about the wholesale killing of wildlife for the bushmeat trade, or the slaughter of 33,000 elephants a year to make ivory trinkets.

“But the truth is that these are symptoms. And if they sound hard to fix, take a look at the much larger underlying problem, the one nobody wants to talk about: Human populations in some of most revered habitats on Earth—notably including Kenya and Tanzania—are on track to quadruple or even quintuple in this century. Nigeria, already almost ungovernable with 160 million people in an area the size of France, will grow to just under a billion people over the next 85 years.

“Across sub-Saharan Africa, according to the latest United Nations forecast, the population will rise from 960 million today to almost four billion by 2100. Population density will match that of modern China. That’s bad news for human populations and catastrophic for wildlife.”  Sourced through Scoop.it from: strangebehaviors.wordpress.com

“Good God! I’ve been sayin’ it. I’ve been sayin’ it for ten damn years. Ain’t I been sayin’ it, Miguel? Yeah, I’ve been sayin’ it.” —Russell Casse, Indpendence Day.

GR:  Human population, the source of Earth’s problems.