A gradual convergence process only began to take root in the final decades of the century, led by China and other Asian countries. The last century was also noted for the culmination of the so-called “Great Divergence” (Pomeranz 2000), where the bulk of material economic progress was concentrated in a small group of countries now considered developed meanwhile, the rest of the world grew, but much more slowly.
It was also the century in which we realised that we inhabit a closed ecosystem therefore, environmental limitations were no longer local problems but global ones.
The twentieth century was a decisive one in the history of humanity, marked by a demographic explosion and an unprecedented improvement in living standards of most of the world’s population. Each region faces a distinct future based on levels of economic development, demographics and geography. The main challenges posed by the end of demographic transition include a lack of resources to provide for the entire global population, the effects of climate change, contamination and population ageing. The demographic process that humanity is now undergoing is very different from any seen in the past, even in the 20th Century. Never has such fast population growth been seen before and it will have dramatic consequences, including posing a genuine threat to the survival of the human species. In just over 200 years the global population will have multiplied by 7. Before the current century is out that figure will rise to more than 10 billion. At the start of the 20th Century there were some 1.5 billion humans on the planet.
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