http://books.nap.edu/catalog/9690.html192OUR COMMON JOURNEYagricultural production, industry, energy, and living resources. Using the Brundtland ommon challenges�concept, we evaluated potential sectorspecific resource and environmental impediments to reaching sustainability goals, along with the opportunities each sector offers to reduce, prevent, or mitigate the most serious threats. In addition, we evaluated progress over the last decade in achieving the measures identified by the Brundtland hallenges.�Human Population and Well-Being In 1987, the Brundtland Commission framed the issue of human population growth in terms of both the balance between population and resources and the need for increased health, well-being, and human rights to self-determination. Today, these issues are strongly linked, and we recognize that the reduction in poverty, poor health, mortality, and the increase in educational and employment opportunities for all are the keys to slowing population growth and to the wise and sustainable use of resources. Thus, one of the most critical challenges for efforts to navigate a transition to sustainability will be to reduce population growth while simultaneously improving the health, education, and opportunities of the world people. Population growth is an underlying threat to sustainability due to the increased consumption of energy and materials needed to provide for many more people, to crowding and competition for resources, to environmental degradation, and to the difficulties that added numbers pose in efforts to advance human development. Today, population growth has ended in most industrialized countries and rates of population growth are in decline everywhere except in parts of Africa (see Chapter 2); yet the population of 2050 is nonetheless predicted to reach about 9 billion. In a classic decomposition of future population growth in developing countries, a researcher examined the major sources of this continued growth: unwanted childbearing due to low availability of contraception, a stilllarge desired family size, and the large number of young people of reproductive age.8 Currently, 120 million married women (and many more unmarried women) report in surveys that they are not practicing contraception despite a desire for smaller families or for more time between births. Meeting their needs for contraception would reduce future population growth by nearly 2 billion. At the same time, such surveys also show that the desired family size in most developing countries is still above two children. An immediate reduction to the level of replacement (2.1) would reduce future growth by about 1 billion. The remainder of future population growth can be accounted for by so-called population momentum, which is due to the extraordinarily large number of youngCopyright 2003 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.Unless otherwise indicated, all materials in this PDF File provided by the National Academies Press (www.nap.edu) for research purposes are copyrighted by the National Academy of Sciences. Distribution, posting, or copying is strictly prohibited without written permission of the NAP. Generated for lgavrila@ub.ro on Tue Aug 26 05:35:30 2003
