Nowhere to run

As if having a global population of more than 7 billion weren’t cause enough for concern, a new United Nations report indicates that the world’s population is likely to reach nearly 11 billion people by the end of this century—800 million more than previously forecast.

The revised prediction is largely due to birth rates in Africa, which are not falling as quickly as researchers had thought, according to the UK’s Daily Mail.

“The current African population is about 1.1 billion and it is now expected to reach 4.2 billion … by 2100,” said the Mail.

“The fertility decline in Africa has slowed down or stalled to a larger extent than we previously predicted,” Adrian Raftery, a professor at the University of Washington, was quoted as saying.