Slate CC12: The Thorny Issue of Population Growth

The latest alarming news about climate change is that huge swaths of densely inhabited land will be underwater by 2050, with their cities “erased.” These reports – which appeared in The New York Times and many other media outlets – are based on a good research paper by scientists at Climate Central, but they get the story wrong.

This is part of a damaging pattern. Climate change is a man-made problem that we need to tackle, but many of the news stories about its purported effects are scaring us without justification and misleading us about how to act.

Over the past decades, the Accra Metropolitan Area has witnessed major development, but this growth has given rise to risks of its own. Rapid urbanization has caused an unplanned expansion of built-up areas like roads, parking lots and other structures with impervious surfaces, which has led to perennial flooding. Inadequacies of drainage systems and poor solid waste management add to this threat that is only bound to intensify in the future as climate change poses further challenges on cities and nations.

The prognosis for people living with HIV/AIDS has been transformed through anti-retroviral therapy (ART), which is the use of medicines to treat HIV infection, and it is recommended for everyone who has HIV. ART helps people with HIV live longer, healthier lives and reduces the risk of transmission to others.