More Urban and More Aged: Demographic Pressures to Global Water Resources by 2050

Abstract

Population growth has largely been considered as the ultimate driver for the sustainability challenges of our planet’s development. Whereas this assumption is not totally wrong, the demographic pressure on this planet is a far more complex issue than mere growth and has many important facets. It is, for instance, very interesting to look at populations that do not grow but instead stay constant or even decline. On the world scale, the population is still growing, but the growth occurs only in certain geographical regions. In other regions, the primary demographic processes are the aging of the population and urbanisation.