Video: Six Billion and Beyond
Six Billion and Beyond explores the issues of reproductive health, population, and environment in six nations: Mexico, Kenya, India, China, Italy and the United States. Through visual images and stories of young people in these countries, the documentary explores what young people are deciding about families and their future. Viewers will meet young people dealing with a very basic issue of life--reproduction and its implications in their lives-- view the differences between the developed and developing nations and hear their realities.
Background
In October of 1999 the United Nations marked the Day of Six Billion. It took several million years of human history for world population to reach its first billion. Now it takes a dozen years to add the next billion. How many people can the Earth support? Will our numbers double again in 50 years?
Nearly three billion people--half the world's population--are under age 25. The decisions they make about how many children to have and when to have them will be critical in shaping life on Earth in the next 50 years.
Rapidly growing populations may present challenges to nations and to the global environment:
· increased need for jobs
· growing needs for health care and education
· greater scarcity of fresh water, food and fuel
· disappearing habitat and loss of biodiversity
· heightened climatic changes due to global warming
In 1994, at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, 179 nations came to an extraordinary consensus. They agreed that slowing rapid population growth improves the quality of life for individuals, nations and the global environment. The Cairo Program of Action declared that this goal could best be achieved by meeting the reproductive health needs of individuals. In doing so, human rights and freedom must always be respected in family planning policies. Also affirmed was the need for educating young people to avoid unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, such as HIV/AIDS.
Just as 98% of population growth is being added in the developing world, many industrialized western nations are worried about populations that are aging and beginning to shrink.
Why might Americans care?
This program invites Americans to reflect on how we live. A child born in the U.S. has an extraordinary impact on the environment: over a lifetime, he or she may consume 30 times the energy and materials of a child born in the developing world. With only four percent of the world's population, Americans consume nearly one-quarter of the world's resources.
What individuals consume may matter more to the environment than sheer human numbers. If everyone lived like the average American, experts say, two more planets would be needed to support them.
Young People Hold the Future
The world may have nearly two billion fewer people by the middle of the next century if young people delay their marriage by one to five years and space their births at least two years apart. The keys to our future lie in the hands of a billion young people ages 15-24--those just reaching reproductive age. How will we all join together to build a sustainable future on our finite planet?
Key concepts
· Population growth affects people in the United States and is not just an issue in the developing world.
· High levels of consumption in the developed world may cause damage to the environment than population growth in developing nations.
· Rapidly growing populations affect how humans interact with the environment and use its resources.
· Although death rates have fallen in much of the world, sheer numbers are still growing rapidly because so many of the world's people are young and bearing children. This is called population momentum.
· Family planning is an important element in efforts to stabilize population growth.
· Where women have education and access to job opportunities, they tend to have fewer and healthier children.
· Rapid population growth is correlated with high unemployment and poverty.
· Our choices and actions today will have a profound effect on the future of people 50 years from now and the sustainability of Planet Earth.