The Human Population: Six Billion and Growing
October 12, 1999 marks the day the Earth's population reaches 6 billion. Over one billion will be adolescents, just entering their reproductive years.

The fact that the fifth and sixth billion both took 12 years is a sign that at last the rate of increase has begun to slow. But humanity's numbers continue to rise. The seventh and eighth billion will probably take another 14 to 15 years each, but that rate is not guaranteed.

About the Cairo and the Hague Forum
In 1999, the international community was engaged in a five-year review of the ICPD Programme of Action. Dubbed "Cairo Plus Five" or "ICPD+5", this process assessed the progress made to date, examne the obstacles remaining, and produce practical recommendations iamed at making the conference’s 20-year goals a reality.

About the Cairo Consensus
The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo in September 1994, was a watershed for global population and development initiatives.

Countries now accept that population concerns are at the heart of sustainable development strategies. Rapid population growth and high fertility hold back development. They help to perpetuate poverty. They make it hard for countries to concentrate on the future, because resources are soaked up by present needs.

But the Cairo conference also put an end to the concept of "population control". The conference recognized that smaller families and slower population growth depend not on "control" but on free choice- the idea, borne out by 30 years of experience, that most women, given the choice, will have fewer children than their mothers did.

AIDS is the Number One Killer
Worldwide, 33.4 million people are infected with AIDS/HIV, including 1.3 million children. The incurable disease has claimed 13.9 million lives since the epidemic began, 3.2 million of them children. In 1998, 2.5 million people died of AIDS. Fully 30% of all tuberculosis deaths are due to HIV/AIDS infections, and if those deaths are counted, AIDS in 2020 will be the single largest cause of adult death from infectious diseases.

Population and the Environment

• Every 20 mnutes, the world adds another 3.500 human lives but loses one or more entire species of animal or plant life, at least 27.000 species per year. This is a rate and scale of extinction that has not occurred in 65 million years.
• Spreading deserts and declining water tables in a third of the planet are contributing to famine, social unrest and migration.
• Over the last 50 years, 12% of the planet’s soils have been severely degraded. That’s nearly 2 billion hectares, the size of China and India combined.

Migration Affects Urbanization Patterns

• The number of cities with more than 1 million people rose from 111 in 1960 to 280 in 1995, and two-thirds of those are in developing nations.
• By 2010, the developing-world total will be 368 such cities, up from 173 in 1990. This will further strain those nations’ capacity to provide services such as energy, education, health care, transportation, sanitation and physical security.

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