| The West African megalopolis 09:39 - Oct 27 with 1072 views | StokieBlue |
This is an interesting read, nobody can deny that these countries have the right to grow and improve but some of the numbers are pretty scary given the problems the world faces with population growth and climate change.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/27/megalopolis-how-coastal-west-afric
- Africa currently makes up 1.4bn of the people on Earth, by 2100 this will be 3.9bn.
- The current population of the megalopolis currently has 40m people, by 2100 it will be 500m people.
- By 2050, 40% of the people in the world under 18 will be African.
- Lagos will have a population of 25m by 2035.
Hopefully the rest of the world can offer expertise on how to support this growth with the appropriate climate-friendly infrastructure. This would probably require cash from the rest of the world as we benefited from burning fossil fuels during our development and if we don't want Africa to do the same we are going to have to fund and support that as clearly burning coal is cheaper than building a renewable infrastructure.
SB
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| The West African megalopolis on 10:54 - Oct 27 with 954 views | WeWereZombies |
Like some of the interviewees in the article I am not so sure that Africa needs expertise from the rest of the World, African problems need specifically African solutions and the particularities for each region, Nation state and urban / rural zone will require the sensitivities of those local to them rather than far off. In a connected World all educated people can plug in to see what is happening elsewhere and decide whether to follow, adapt, pass over or relinquish what has previously been implemented. Some of it will work out and some will not, this is also true of Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania. |  |
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| The West African megalopolis on 11:30 - Oct 27 with 920 views | Guthrum |
The biggest problems they're going to have are food and water.
Compared with regions like Europe and East Asia, Africa is quite sparsely endowed with really good quality agricultural land. A large part of the north is desert or semi-arid and the equatorial zone rainforest. Good land is limited in most other areas, too. This leads to the risk of over-intensive farming and the destruction of what good soils they have.
Water is obviously scarce in large parts of the north, but also in southern Africa.
Another issue is that the continent is far from a single unit, either in terms of politics or good internal communications. Unlike Europe, where Polish farmers are happy to sell their goods in British supermarkets and can easily transport them there, there isn't the same joined-up thinking in Africa. In addition, the distances are much greater.
Plus there is the still-ongoing problem of outside interference, competing for resources and influence, at the same time disrupting and creating barriers. |  |
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| The West African megalopolis on 11:42 - Oct 27 with 901 views | allezlesbleus |
When I lived in South Africa in the early 90's, the population was around 27 million. Last year it had climbed to 60 million. Totally unsustainable and scary if it continues........ |  | | |
| The West African megalopolis on 16:34 - Oct 27 with 756 views | bluelagos |
Cheers Stokie, lots of that hitting lots of memories, especially the go-slows which I used to sit in pretty much every day bar Sundays, when I'd jump on a motorbike and head to the beach :-)
Lagos will continue to pull people in from the regions and I don't see that changing any time soon. Only ever visited Accra, Elmina and Cape Coast in Ghana and they were a long, long way from Lagos levels of population size. Parts of the coast were stunning and the urbanisation of those parts doesn't sound like a positive thing in environmental terms, maybe in economic terms though.
The numbers of people are staggering, the only thing worth adding is that birth rates in most of the developed world has now dropped below 2 per couple. So most of Europe will need increased migration to sustain it's economy and to support a more elderly population.
So seems obvious to facilitate the movement of willing migrants from the region to areas in the world where there are labour shortages.
The other thing I'd point out is that populations grow fastest where people are poorest. If we wish to slow down the population growth in West Africa we need to look at development in the area. The figures quoted of 45Bn a year are around a tenth of what we spent on Covid. So if there's a will, we can play our part. |  |
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