World Bank Press: Half World's People To Live In Cities By 2007 According to the UN

Half World's People To Live In Cities By 2007: UN

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Wednesday presented a report by the UN Commission on Population to the UN Economic and Social Council, which stated that half the world's population will live in cities in two years, a huge jump from the 30 percent residing in urban areas in 1950, Reuters reports.

The commission’s report states that some 3.2 billion of the world's 6.5 billion people live in cities today, and the number will climb to 5 billion - an estimated 61 percent of the global population - by 2030. The number of very large urban areas was also rising, the commission said. Twenty cities now have 10 million or more inhabitants, compared with just four - Tokyo, New York-Newark, Shanghai and Mexico City - in 1975 and just two - New York-Newark and Tokyo - in 1950.

The five biggest cities today in population are Tokyo, with 35.3 million people, Mexico City (19.2 million), New York-Newark (18.5 million), Bombay (18.3 million) and Sao Paulo (18.3 million). The next 15 largest are Delhi, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, Jakarta, Shanghai, Dhaka, Los Angeles, Karachi, Rio de Janeiro, Osaka-Kobe, Cairo, Lagos, Beijing, metropolitan Manila and Moscow. By 2015, the five largest cities will be Tokyo, with 36.2 million residents, Bombay with 22.6 million, Delhi with 20.9 million, Mexico City with 20.6 million and Sao Paulo with 20 million, it said.

Despite the growing number of vast urban agglomerations, about half of all city dwellers live in far smaller urban areas of fewer than 500,000 inhabitants. Urban residence patterns vary depending on an area's development status, the commission found. About three-quarters of people in more developed regions lived in cities, while just 43 percent lived in them in less developed areas.

Dow Jones adds the United States is the most highly urbanized area of the world with 87 percent of its population living in cities. Latin America and the Caribbean followed, with 78 percent of the population living in urban areas, the report said. Forty percent of the people of Africa and Asia live in cities. The report also predicted that in less developed regions, the number of urban dwellers will equal the number of rural dwellers by 2017.

The Associated Press further notes the report said that the number of elderly people is rising rapidly, prompting a need for economic and social changes. The biggest problem for developing countries was high mortality rates, while wealthy countries faced falling birth rates and the decline in the working-age population.

Annan said the population of all countries will continue to age substantially, but the increase will be faster in developing countries and social security systems that depend on workers to pay for those who are retired will be affected. "Such rapid growth will require far-reaching economic and social adjustments in most countries," he said.

The report highlighted there were 600 million people over the age of 60 in 2000, three times the number in 1950, and that figure was expected to triple again over the next 50 years to around 2 billion elderly. The average number of children a woman gives birth to, meanwhile, declined from five around thirty years ago to three by the beginning of this century, the report said. Mortality declined sharply during the 20th century, except in Africa, which has been hard hit by the AIDS epidemic. Overall, the world's population reached 6.5 billion in 2005 and could stabilize at 9 billion just after 2050, Annan said.