Environment

Tuesday, April 24 2012

Urban areas.- In the next twenty years, the urban areas around the world will experience an increment of around 1.5 million square kilometres. In other words, the urban areas will grow a land area equivalent to the surface of France, Germany and Spain together.

These conclusions have been exposed in the course of the conference in urban landscape celebrated last week in the capital of Britain, London, under the title of “Planet under Pressure”.

At the same time, the United Nations estimates that the world population will increase in around 2000 million people, reaching the figure of 9000 million of inhabitants by the year 2050 with the urban areas supporting the highest increment in population due to migration from rural regions.

Around one hundred years ago, only around 20 cities in the world had one million or more inhabitants while, at the moment, the number of cities that reach this population are more than 450.