Recognising our diversities as a great strength of our species-being allows us to consider non-antagonistic development opportunities by rekindling empathy and solidarity in our relationships. We possess the means to afford all of humanity a quality of life that is freed from humiliation and despair, writes Rasigan Maharajh for the 21st Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.
The United Nations estimates that our combined human population will number approximately 8.2 billion people in 2024 (UN. 2024. World Population Prospects 2024: Summary of Results, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, New York). IT also suggests that global peak population will be reached in the next sixty years, in about 2084, at approximately 10.3 billion people.
Humanity is, however, neither unified nor evenly combined as we advance further into the second decade of the third millennium of our common era.
Whilst we, as a species-being, have evolved and adapted to occupy our entire home planet, our contemporary geographic distribution in our socially determined political and economic units reveals the strength of our collective progress yet also the uneven distribution of progressive development and the persistence of inequities.
In its recent analysis of our population prospects, the UN notes that our demographic transition reflects a “historic shift towards longer lives and smaller families”. Nonetheless, countries and regions are experiencing variable rates of population growth and shrinkage.
According to the UN estimates, Africa is currently home to approximately 1.52 billion people, constituting nearly 18% of the world's population. While the fertility rate across Africa was almost seven children per woman in 1970, it is currently estimated to be four and is projected to drop to less than three in 2050. It could approach just two by the end of the century. While recognising the population trajectories ahead of us, it is also critically important to recognise the current material conditions confronting those living in Africa.
Gross national income per capita in purchasing power parity terms was estimated to average $6,285 dollars, which belies a vast unequal distribution across the continent. Average incomes in North Africa are estimated to be $13,465; Central Africa is estimated at $3,584; West Africa is estimated to be $5,232; East Africa is estimated to be $3,218; and Southern Africa is estimated to be $14,513 as of 2023 (UN. 2024. World Population Prospects 2024: Summary of Results, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, New York). While this data provides a very coarse description of the continental division of labour, intra-country inequalities also contribute to expanding the disparities.
The demographic pyramid shows that 39% of Africans are aged below 14 years, and only 4% are over 64 years of age (UN. 2024). This reflects that massive potential labour force alive on the continent today. According to the World Bank, “Over the next three decades, the region will experience the fastest increase in the working age population of all regions, with a projected net increase of 740 million people by 2050. Up to 12 million youth will enter the labour market across the region every year in the coming decades, yet only about 3 million new formal wage jobs are currently created each year”.
African women can expect to live just 66 years and men, on average, die at 62 (UN. 2024). I have therefore maybe just seven years to look forward to, should we fail to transform the structures and systems which contribute to reproducing uneven yet combined development.
It is on the basis of these objective facts that we turn to suggesting alternative development pathways that explicitly seek to redress inequities, while sharing and widening inclusion within ecologically determined planetary boundaries.
According to the biologist Joseph Veech, habitat is a species-specific concept that has a long history in literature and can be traced back to the writings of Linnaeus about 250 years ago. The contemporary version of the concept recognises that the “daily survival of individuals and maintenance of the population and species came about to the extent that necessary habitat conditions and resources were met”. A more popular rendition of habitat is that produced by the National Geographic magazine, which simply says “A habitat is a place where an organism makes its home”.
In our long evolutionary history as a species-being, we have come to occupy our entire planet and have even launched our artefacts deep into the cosmos. The massive expansion of what humanity defines as home has resulted from revolutionary transformations in our innate capacities, capabilities, and competences to understand our natural environment and produce through our labour the means of sustaining and reproducing life. Our accelerated development drew upon our global knowledge commons and afforded us the possibility of thriving in a variety of ecological niches. This undoubted improved our evolutionary success and is manifest in the ways in which we have collectively terraformed the places we occupy to accommodate ourselves. As noted by Ellis, amongst others, we have modernised from hunting and gathering to our current mode of industrialisation, whereby and wherein the means to sustain our population of over 8 billion people is realised, albeit in an extremely unequal form.
While the scientific and technological base of our global knowledge commons has advanced significantly, our socially determined forms of organisation, structures, and systems lags our collective progress. Our current institutional architecture or socio-economic ecosystem remain bound to the trajectory established in the past two centuries and therefore persistently seeks continuities with the iniquities engendered in the establishment of contemporary world systems. Imperialism and colonialism reincarnated their unjust relations into the 21st Century through a range of institutional forms. Notwithstanding valiant and heroic struggles against extraction, oppression, and exploitation, real opportunities for advancing beyond subjugation are now clearly discernible and becoming more tangible.
Enabling our collective resilience requires radical transformations of our built environment, our social organisation, our mobility, and these inevitably demand that we break free of iniquitous relations of subjugation. Progressive transformations are already emerging and thanks to our improved information and communications technologies, becoming more widespread as well. It is, however, imperative that high-quality infrastructures be distributed in sufficient quantity to all our habitats as rapidly as possible. It remains concerning that with all the hype associated with digitalisation and the apparent benefits from the internet of things, that a recent World Bank report found that there were 10 million more people living without electricity in 2022 compared to 2021, when 685 million people lacked access. As noted by Akrofi, “this priority must integrate the principles of a just transition — we must ensure that the transition from fossil fuels to renewable, low-carbon energy sources, meets current and future energy needs in an economically viable, socially inclusive, and environmentally responsible manner”.
Recognising our diversities as a great strength of our species-being allows us to consider non-antagonistic development opportunities by rekindling empathy and solidarity in our relationships. We possess the means to afford all of humanity a quality of life that is freed from humiliation and despair. Defending and expanding the global knowledge commons is critical for the redistribution of productive capacities and capabilities. As climate change continues, we will have to advance beyond simple mitigation and embrace adaptation to our new environmental norms. This would demand increased scientific and technological development that largely arise from our collaborative and cooperative research and development agendas.
In a collective statement to the 37th African Union Summit in February 2024, the African Movement Building Space brought together a multitude of civil society organisations from throughout the continent to argue “… that the magnitude of the crises we face demands systemic change that results in the creation of sustainable societies and new relations between human beings and nature, based on equality and reciprocity”. Our increased ecological precarity, which is a further consequence of our unequal incorporation into world systems combined with the refusal of the group of seven advanced and mature capitalist economies to afford reparations for the environmental and other polycrises accumulated in their development, provides fertile ground to utilise the changed geopolitical situation and the ascendence of the BRICS+ association to redress the legacies of the past and forge a shared and common human habitat that works for all.
Bottom-up solutions that are regionally centric and locally accountable hold the potential to upend the hierarchies and power determinations of the past. As acknowledged by Oleg Barabanov and colleagues, “The key point is that there is no going back, and what lies ahead will look nothing like a recapitulation of the past”. As we learn from the Eurasian architecture and in thinking ahead, lets in thoughts and deeds ensure that we free ourselves from the mental slavery that allows the continuation of iniquitous development advantaging a minority of the world’s population whilst the majority pays for the costs and subsidises their own underdevelopment through the continuation of unequal exchanges in world systems.
It will reach a peak of around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s in comparison with 8.3 billion in 2024. One in four people globally lives in a country whose population has already peaked in size. You can find out the UN's predictions on the development of these trends in our infographic.
References
African Movement Building Space. 2024. ‘We Demand’: A Collective Statement to African Union, Power Shift Africa, Nairobi.
Akrofi, M.M. 2024. Affordable and Clean Energy in Focus: Progress, Challenges, and the Road Ahead, United Nations Africa Renewal Magazine (12 September).
Barabanov, O.; Bordachev, T.; Lukyanov, F.; Sushentsov, A.; and Timofeev, I. 2024. The World from the Bottom Up, or the Masterpieces of Eurasian Architecture, Annual Report of the Valdai Discussion Club, Moscow.
Ellis, E.C. 2021. Land Use and Ecological Change: A 12,000-Year History. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 46: 1-33.
Engels, F. 1876. The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Progress Publishers, Moscow [1934], Marxist Internet Archive.
Gorz, A. 1980. Ecology as Politics, South End Press, Boston.
Gupta, J. et al. 2024. A Just World on a Safe Planet: a Lancet Planetary Health-Earth Commission Report on Earth-system Boundaries, Translations, and Transformations, Lancet Planetary Health 8(10): e813-e873.
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IEA, IRENA, UNSD, World Bank, WHO. 2024. Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report, World Bank, Washington DC.
Maharajh, R. 2024a. Ecological Constraints and Sustainable Development: Contemporary Challenges for BRICS+ and the Global Majority, Regional Cooperation within BRICS: Modern Environmental and Nature Management Issues, Karelian Research Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences, Petrozavodsk.
Maharajh, R. 2024b. The Global Polycrisis and Rise of Green Extractivism, From Green Extractivism to Just Transition from Below Symposium, Johannesburg.
National Geographic. 2024. Habitats, Encyclopaedic Entry, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C.
Ritchie, H.; Rodés-Guirao, L. 2024 Peak Global Population and other Key Findings from the 2024 UN World Population Prospects, OurWorldinData.org, Online.
UN. 2024. World Population Prospects 2024: Summary of Results, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, New York.
Valdai Discussion Club. 2024. World’s Population in 21st Century, Infographic, Moscow.
Veech, J.A. 2021. Habitat Ecology and Analysis, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
WB. 2024. Transforming Education for Inclusive Growth, Africa’s Pulse 30, World Bank, Washington, DC.
