The Philippines joins other countries in marking Sunday “World Population Day 2021” with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on fertility taking center stage as the main theme for the commemoration.
To mark the day, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund, is organizing an online panel discussion of leading demographers and population experts on Wednesday to discuss the impact of the pandemic on fertility preferences and behaviors, the availability and use of family planning, teenage marriage, challenges of data collection and more.
This July, the global population has reached 7.7 billion and is expected to grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, and 10.9 billion in 2100.
To think it took hundreds of thousands of years for the world population to grow to 1 billion – then in just another 200 years or so, it grew sevenfold.
Experts have said overpopulation is a major cause of most of the world’s problems. Whether it is a question of food shortage, lack of drinking water, or energy shortages, every country in the world is affected by it—or will be.
Partly thanks to the import of goods from abroad, any particular country is able to maintain its own welfare. But this cannot go on indefinitely.
In fact, the number of inhabitants is rising in every country. The world population is threatening to rise in the next few decades to nearly 10 billion. There is a good chance that more and more countries will need their own products themselves.
At the same time, the United Nations Population Fund or the UNFPA, an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity, said research in March this year suggested an estimated 12 million women experienced disruptions in family planning services.
UNFPA also works on population and development, sexual and reproductive health, and gender, its goals—achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health, including family planning, promoting reproductive rights, reducing maternal mortality, and accelerating progress on the ICPD agenda and the MDGs—inextricably linked.
Today, the International Conference on Population Development, which refers to the global consensus that reproductive health and rights are human rights, said these are a precondition for women’s empowerment, and that women’s equality is a precondition for securing the well-being and prosperity of all people.
It is time to redefine our priorities.