Background
Between October 24 and October 27, 1993, an international "scientist's top summit" was held in New Delhi, India, with representatives from academies of sciences from all over the world. This grew out of two previous meetings, one joint meeting by the Royal Society of London and the United States National Academy of Sciences, and one international meeting organised by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The scientists discussed the environmental and social welfare problems for the world population, and found them closely linked to the population expansion.
In the year 1950, there were approximately 2.5 billion (2,500 million) humans alive in this world. By 1960, the number had reached 3 billion, and by 1975 was at 4 billion. The 5 billion mark was reached around 1987, and in 1993, at the New Delhi meeting, academics estimated the population to be 5.5 billion. For some time, world food production had been able to roughly match population growth, meaning that starvation was a regional and distributional problem, rather than one based on a total shortage of food. The scientists noted that increased food production on land and on sea in the previous decade was less than the population increase over the same period. Moreover, by increased food production and otherwise, the population growth was contributing to a loss of biodiversity, deforestation and loss of topsoil, and shortages of water and fuel. The academics noted that the complex relationships between population size and various environmental effects were not fully understood, but that "there is no doubt that the threat to the ecosystem is linked to population size and resource use". They were aware of the problems with increasing greenhouse emissions and other environmental threats, and found these linked to the population growth.
The scientists decided to adopt a resolution on the problems and on the means to solve them, and that this resolution should be put to vote by the respective national academies of science. In 1993, they also established the InterAcademy Panel, in order to coordinate this and future similar consensus resolutions on important global issues.
Read more about this topic: IAP Statement On Population Growth
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)