People are leaving villages. Forecasts for 2050 leave no illusions

People currently live in urban and rural areas. A new United Nations report predicts that the population will increasingly live in cities. The population of smaller towns will decline.

The United Nations report states that the human population is expected to increasingly settle in urban areas. This will cause the countryside to become depopulated. The share of larger towns in 2050 is expected to be as much as 68.4 percent. That gives us almost 7 out of 10 people living in cities.

For comparison In 1950 we had the opposite situation. At that time, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas, and the remaining 30 percent came from cities. So where did the change and the increasing urbanization come from? Of course, there are many factors, but here we can outline two main areas.

The first reason is the so-called “push factor“, which is related to climate change and the increasingly frequent natural disasters that go hand in hand with it. This causes people to “flee” from rural areas.

Then we have “pull factor“, i.e. the area responsible for the growing interest in living in urban areas. This is of course a set of many reasons, including those related to employment opportunities and lifestyle conditions.

It’s worth mentioning that the greatest depopulation of the countryside is to occur in China.From estimates UN it turns out that by 2050, only a few thousand people will remain in the rural areas of the Middle Kingdom less than 12 percent of the population this country.

In China, by 2025, nearly 70% of the population is expected to live in urban areas, and in 25 years this percentage will increase to 80%. This is mainly due to the development of the economy and workplaces located in the cities there.

It is worth adding that China will not be among the most urbanized (in percentage terms) countries in the world in 2050 (although in terms of total population it will be unrivaled). The UN assumes that more than 90 percent of people are expected to live in urban areas in the UK, Japan and Brazil. In the United States, it is expected to be slightly less, at 89.2 percent of the population.

Source: geekweek.interia.pl