ABSTRACT
We all learned at school that population growth would be the ultimate threat to the planet as well as the driver for its development. But while it is true that the world's population has grown, future projections are coming down relatively rapidly. In 1992, the United Nations Population Bureau predicted that the world's population in 2050 would be slightly more than 10 billion, but 10 years later the projection had dropped to 8.9 billion. This means that mankind has more time to deal with the problems that emerge from population growth: in the 1992 UN projection, the figure of 8.9 billion was expected to be reached before 2030, while the more recent estimate is that the population will not be at that level until 2050. This is a big change indeed.
