In all likelihood the world in 2050 will be a much more confusing place than the neat picture you paint.
Daniel Franklin, co-editor of Megachange: The World in 2050 and business affairs editor at the Economist, told the Today programme's Sarah Montague that "the Armageddon industry makes a lot of noise... but underestimates our ability to adapt and be inventive".
One of the key events of the day is the Young Leaders Forum, a group of young business students and scientists debating on the theme 'The world in 2050: our expectations from the life sciences, chemistry, industry and governments to build a better world by 2050'.
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The increase in world population by 2050 will be around 30%, less than in the 40 years to 2010, when it rose by over 80%.
But that would only reduce the growth in the world's numbers from 9.2 billion in 2050 to, say, 8.5 billion.
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You can calculate with a high degree of confidence what the world population will be in 2050 because you know a lot of things.
That is why the IMF forecasts that the world will have nearly 3 billion cars in 2050, compared with around 700m cars today.
The world population can balance out at 9 billion in 2050 and oil will be finished.
Even normally cautious bodies like the International Energy Agency and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development are sounding the alarm, with the latter recently releasing a comprehensive report forecasting a world in 2050 that will be defined by resource constraint and its economic impacts.
By 2050, the employed community in the developing world, not including China with its one-child policy, is projected to increase by 50 percent.
The urban population of the world is forecast to grow to 6.3 billion people in 2050 from 3.4 billion in 2009, representing both population growth and net migration from countryside to city.
"In 2050, most of the nine billion people in the world will live in cities, " said Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner.
The world population is set to grow to 9 billion by 2050 from 7 billion in 2011.
By 2050, two emerging market economies will be among the 3 largest in the world, while two-thirds of the thirty largest economies will come from EM-denominated nations.
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The Washington, DC-based nonprofit Population Reference Bureau projects that, by 2050, 70 percent of the world will inhabit cities, with most of this growth occurring in underdeveloped countries whose limited resources may exacerbate an already difficult situation.
The forecast rise in world's population, from just under 7 billion at the start of 2011 to just over 9 billion in 2050, is the equivalent of two extra Indias.
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