Recent studies have shown that the overwhelming bulk of humanity is concentrated along or near coasts on just 10% of the earth’s land surface.
Take the example of China, the world’s most populous nation. Of China’s 1.2 billion people, close to 60% live in 12 coastal provinces, along the Yangtze River valley, and in two coastal municipalities — Shanghai and Tianjin. Along China’s 18,000 kilometers of continental coastline, population densities average between 110 and 1,600 per square kilometer. In some coastal cities such as Shanghai, China’s largest with 17 million inhabitants, population densities average over 2,000 per square kilometer.
In 1997, Japan’s total population amounted to 126 million. Of this, nearly 80% or 100 million, are considered coastal. But no one in Japan lives more than 120 kilometers from the sea. Furthermore, 77% of all Japanese live in urban areas along or near the coast. The dramatic shift has left much of the interior drained of workers. Nearly 47% of Japan’s land area, mostly in the interior, is now designated as “depopulated” and eligible for special funding.
In the United States, 55-60% of Americans now live in 772 counties adjacent to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Lakes. The Washington D.C.-based Population Reference Bureau reports that between 1960 and 1990 coastal population density in the United States increased from an average of 275 to nearly 400 people per square kilometer. In 1990, the most crowded coastline in the United States, stretching from Boston south through New York and Philadelphia to Baltimore and Washington D.C., had over 2,500 people per square kilometer. Another 101 coastal counties had population densities exceeding 1,250 per square kilometer. |
发表于 2014-11-18 22:00
| 
发表于 2014-11-18 22:05
|