Australia’s Population Booms
Carolyn Moynihan | 30 Sep 2009 |Â
Last week, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced a 2 per cent leap (439,000 people) in the country’s population in the year to March, a huge dust storm blew in from the arid interior to blanket much of Eastern Australia. Are the two things connected?
Green groups would probably say, yes. Others, maybe. “Dust storms are a natural phenomenon, but they are influenced by human activities and are now just as serious as traffic and industrial air pollution,†says Laurence Barrie, chief researcher at the World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva, which is working with 40 countries to develop a dust storm warning system.
Most of the recent population increase — almost 300,000 people — was from immigration. But the birth rate is up, too, with 160,000 babies born during the year. On that basis Australia’s population could “balloon†form its present 21.8 million to 35 million over the next 40 years.









