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Airdate: Don’t Panic: The Truth About Population

In this doco, Sweden's Hans Rosling actually challenges conventions that the future is bleak.

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2014-12-07_1823SBS airs a documentary featuring Sweden’s Hans Rosling who actully challenges conventions that the future is bleak, Don’t Panic: The Truth About Population.

With the world’s population at seven billion and still growing we often look at the future with dread. In this documentary, world famous Swedish statistical showman Hans Rosling presents a different view and paints a vivid picture of a world that has changed in ways we barely understand – often for the better.

We face huge challenges in terms of food, resources and climate change but at the heart of Professor
Rosling’s entertaining and exuberant statistical tour-de-force is the message that the world of tomorrow is a much better place than we might imagine.

Rosling reveals that the global challenge of rapid population growth, the so-called population explosion, has already been overcome. In just fifty years the average number of children born per woman has plummeted from 5 to just 2.5 and is still falling fast. Projections for a few generations’ time show world population growth levelling off completely. Yet in what Rosling calls his ‘Great British Ignorance Survey’ he discovers that people’s perceptions of the world are often decades out of date.

In Bangladesh – a country once famously described as a ‘basket-case’ – families of two children are now the norm. We meet Taslima Khan who travels through rural villages dispensing contraceptives and advice on how to deal with difficult husbands. Deep in rural Mozambique – one of the poorest countries in the world – we meet subsistence farmers Andre and Olivia who’ve been saving for two years to buy a piece of life transforming technology – a bicycle. Now everything depends on their sesame harvest. Will they manage to pedal their way out of poverty once-and- for-all?

Globally, the proportion of people in extreme poverty is the lowest ever, and now the UN is setting itself the goal of eradicating extreme poverty completely within the next twenty years.

Sunday, 21 December at 9.30pm on SBS ONE

2 Responses

  1. Rosling does innovative work in the visualisation of stats. This is what the UN has been printing in reports for a couple of decades.

    We won’t kill the planet, it has survived hundreds of millions of years a giant snowball, but if we aren’t smart we may have to develop a taste for Soylent Grey.

  2. I actually watched this on a plane on the way home from Singapore earlier in the year. I still think humanity will populate to the point where we kill the planet, but it’s definitely worth a look for a different perspective.

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