Worldwide funding for family planning and women’s health has fallen billions of dollars below targeted levels even as the world’s population climbs toward 6 billion, the U.N. said yesterday. The U.N. will mark the birth of the planet’s 6 billionth citizen on October 12. The number of people in the world has doubled since 1960, and half of the world’s citizens are now under the age of 25. Although global fertility rates have declined faster than expected, contributing to a slowdown in the rate of population growth to 1.3 percent per year, down from 2.4 percent in 1969, the U.N. still expects the world’s population to reach about 8.9 billion by 2050.
