The Perils of Projecting Population

The UN Population Division recently estimated that our planet will grow to 9.15 billion people by 2050. Yet this medium-variant projection is just one of several possible scenarios released in this latest round of number crunching. The low- and high-variant projections--7.96 billion and 10.5 billion, respectively--could instead become reality, given slight shifts in global fertility rates. In the May/June 2009 issue of World Watch magazine - http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6067, Sean Peoples of ECSP and Elizabeth Leahy of Population Action International compare three of the leading population forecasts and find that tiny variations in assumptions can generate significant differences. [more] -
http://newsecuritybeat.blogspot.com/2009/05/projecting-population-risky-...