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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gandytron" data-source="post: 3263511" data-attributes="member: 47750">Well, this is a cheery thread!Whilst I can fully empathise with the doom and gloom, and ultimately agree that the probability of an Easter Island-esque collapse on a global scale is high, perhaps we can explore some ways in which the prospective horror can be negated?For starters, as was mentioned in post #7 above, there is an urgent need for the international community to engage with "Population" as a serious challenge to human development.  One way of doing this would be to establish a huge multilateral fund (similar the the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria, or the Global Environment Facility) that focuses on family planning, child and maternal health that can be used at national and regional levels to reduce birth rates and make sure that those kids who are born have a better quality of life, whilst ensuring that women have choices (as well as education that can offer them careers) can make a huge difference to birth rates (look at Singapore and Japan, for example) - mind you, even women I know here in Bangkok, who are very poor Burmese migrant labourers with minimal education are making these kinds of choices  - I know one family where the grandmother was one of 18 children, she had nine children and her daughters have two children maximum and do not want more - whilst this will not stop the direction of demographics in its tracks, it will perhaps slow things down. Big challenges remain in the form of cultural norms and expectations on women, and tackling those will be especially difficult.The other key challenge is meeting the aspirations/desires of the population that already exists (just compare the number of middle class consumers now compared with 20 years ago - the BRICS being huge consumer markets in a way that they just weren't in the mid 1990s).  Regarding the report itself, I would be interested to know if it has been peer-reviewed and how the numbers were arrived at - does it have academic rigour? I know enough people working in the UN system to know that it is often lacking.</blockquote>

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