Population Dynamics

What do we need to know? What has happened to global population – historically, currently and future trends? Socio-cultural and economic factors affecting birth and death rates. Factors driving changes in fertility and mortality rates. How and why population change varies? Issues relating to youthful and ageing populations. Why some countries wish to control their population? The impact and effectiveness of policies to control population. What policies exist to manage migration? Why countries adopt different migration policies? Tensions that arise as a result of inward migration.

Learning Objectives To know what has happened to global population over the last millennium. To know how population increases. To be able to explain what exponential growth is.

What has happened to the global population? http://math.berkeley.edu/~galen/popclk.html The population is constantly increasing. How much do you think it will have increased by at the end of the lesson? http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/is-the-worlds-population-spiralling-out-of-control/531.html

Total World Population Estimate What makes the population grow? When is the rate of growth the quickest? What do you think exponential growth means? Year When did population growth start to increase rapidly? Why might this of happened?

Exponential Growth Has been occurring – it is the amount of time taken for the population to double. For example in 1804 it had taken 300 years to double from ½ billion to 1 billion. In 1999 the double time had fallen to 39 years from 3 billion to 6 billion.

The world population is growing at an alarming rate – in 2008 at least another 65 million people were added to the global total. What do you think is going to happen in the future? What problems do you think we are going to cause? Since 2000 the rate of growth has began to slow down, but the population will reach 9 – 10 billion before it starts to decline, that is 33% more people in the World than today. http://math.berkeley.edu/~galen/popclk.html