Growth of the world's population.

From a very small population since the time of Christ, it has taken until about the year 1800 for our numbers to reach just 1 billion persons.

Since then, see what has happened and how the graph steepens so sharply.

In just my 70 plus years on Earth, the population has grown from about 2 billion to 6.7 billion, and it is estimated to grow in the next 50 years to over 9 billion.

Do you not find this alarming?

But it is not just our growing numbers but also our increasing affluence (consumption of resources) and the technology we use to exploit resources, which combine to exert an environmental impact on the planet.

It is useful to think of these different factors as comprising a theoretical equation:

Impact = Population  x  Affluence  x  Technology  or simply:  I = PAT

The importance of this formula is described on the next page.