Creating safe places
people need space to live, work, and play, and animals need space too. Sometimes it is difficult to find space for both people and animals.
To begin with, just think about the changes in the number of people on the Earth. In the year 1100 there were 320 million people on the planet. In the next eight hundred years the number of people slowly grew to 1,500 million (1.5 billion). But since 1900 the number of people has grown more quickly: 2.5 billion in 1950, 5 billion in 1987, and 6.6 billion in 2008. By 2050 how many people will there be?
Every year there are more and more people on the Earth. They cut down trees and take land for their cattle, sheep and other animals, or to grow food, or to build houses and cities. That means less space for the wild animals of the forest and open land. What happens when people and animals try to live next to one another?