At a recent conference in London, an "expert speaker" posited that the growth of cities in the next ~18 years will eat up an additional area more than twice the size of Texas. Those who've been to Texas will agree that this is a "humongous" bunch of land, although some tend to overestimate how much land is there since there's almost nothing else (worth much note at all) there.
Cities worldwide are on track to expand by nearly 580,000 square miles – more than twice the size of Texas – in less than 20 years, according to experts at a major international science conference.
Yale University professor Karen Seto said the North American suburb had "gone global, and car-dependent urban developments are more and more the norm."
The world's population is expected to grow from the current 7 billion to about 9 billion by 2050, according to the United Nations.
Experts meeting at the Planet Under Pressure 2012 conference in London said in a statement released by the organizers Tuesday that unless changes were made, "humanity's urban footprint" would increase in size by 1.5 million square kilometers (nearly 580,000 square miles) by 2030.
This is significantly more than twice the size of Texas or, according to a "back-of-the-envelope calculation" by Seto, more than 43,000 football fields every day for the next 18 years.
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One of the suggestions offered was that we need "denser citizens" which bodes well for the Republican Party may have meant "people living in more densely compact cities."
Comments welcome on what anyone's doing about this.