The BBC News website has today posted a great little tool for contextualising the world's population growth. Based on UN Population figures, being born in 1977 I was the 4,251,107,985th (4.2 billionth) person alive at the time. As you'll have seen in the news this week, the population has very recently reached seven billion. This is troubling.
It's a controversial and complicated subject but I'm firmly of the opinion that we're in big trouble unless we quickly stem this level of growth (through education and healthcare initiatives, for example). Nine billion is already an inevitability. This is surely the biggest single factor in the battle for environmental sustainability, yet few seem willing to discuss it.
If you've not seen it, Hans Rosling's TED talk on the subject is well worth watching.