The world we live in now, despite approaching a population of nearly 8 billion, looks almost nothing like the one doomsayers were anticipating. Looking for a quick way to keep up with the never-ending news cycle? Host Sean Rameswaram will guide you through the most important stories at the end of each day. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Ove r cast , or wherever you listen to podcasts. Called the demographic transition, it is one of the most important phenomena for understanding trends in global development.
Researchers disagree on whether global populations are currently on track to start declining by midcentury. All around the world, birthrates are declining rapidly. Global population growth has been slowing since the s, and global population will almost certainly start to decline. The world is absolutely not, as is sometimes claimed , on track to have 14 billion people by Our projections around population are used to make global health and development policy. Fears of overpopulation sometimes turn into hostility to immigrants, those who choose to have large families, and countries in an earlier stage of their population transition.
There are about 7. To understand why, you just have to think about the US census. The federal government is mandated by the Constitution to conduct a count of its population every 10 years. It is a big, industrialized country with modern technology and lots of resources. In , it is estimated that our count of our nation of million - plus was off by only about 36, people — or only 0. But that decent overall count masks some bigger errors: The same analysis estimates the black population was undercounted by 2 percent.
In many parts of the world, population data is much less reliable. Countries can have incentives both to overcount in regions vying to demonstrate increased need for aid, say and undercount their populations perhaps to disfavor a disliked minority group. If estimating populations is hard, estimating population trends is much harder.
The demographers who estimated a ruinous, extremely fast growth trajectory were wrong, but how could they have known that the trend they were observing was about to reverse?
But some organizations and institutions have done surprisingly well. These reports have turned out to be surprisingly accurate. Since the UN has been making population projections since , and since it publishes revisions and corrections to those projections over time, we can compare its initial estimates to the revisions and corrections. Researcher Nico Keilman did that, and found that the UN has an impressively accurate track record at population predictions.
Their estimates of world population by , published in , were off by about 12 percent. They quickly got better: By , those estimates were off by only about 2 percent. Since then, the UN has pegged global population growth rates pretty precisely. So up to the present day, the UN has been highly reliable in predicting global population trends. Its prediction now is that the world population will continue to increase until , when it will peak at Nonetheless, they have their critics.
These models expect fertility in low-income countries to fall faster than the UN projects it will. Some of the differences are simply methodological. How the fastest-growing countries in the world are modeled has a huge impact on how global population models come out overall, so small differences in expectations in those countries can significantly shift overall results.
But much of the difference in projections may be rooted in disagreement over another question: how many people the world can handle. But technology — including green and sustainable technology — has been rapidly improving for a long time. The year is more than 80 years from now, and almost all the technology that we have today to make civilization sustainable sounded like wild science fiction 80 years ago.
Every day we add , more people to the planet — and the UN predicts that human population will surpass 11 billion by the end of the century. As the world's population grows, so do its demands for water, land, trees and fossil fuels — all of which come at a steep price for already endangered plants and animals.
Current world population:. Unsustainable population growth and lack of access to reproductive health care also puts pressure on human communities, exacerbating food and water shortages, reducing resilience in the face of climate change, and making it harder for the most vulnerable communities to rise out of intergenerational poverty.
We can reduce our own population and consumption to an ecologically sustainable level in ways that promote human rights; decrease poverty and overcrowding; raise our standard of living; and allow plants, animals and ecosystems to thrive. Endangered Species Condoms offer a fun, unique way to break through the taboo and get people talking about the link between human population growth and the wildlife extinction crisis. Most biologists agree we're in the midst of the Earth's sixth mass extinction event; species are disappearing at the fastest rate since dinosaurs roamed the planet.
This time, though, it isn't because of geologic or cosmic forces — it's because of our unsustainable human population growth and overconsumption. As our growing human population reaches farther and farther into remote areas in search of room to build cities, housing developments, golf courses and new farms, we're squeezing wildlife into ever smaller habitat refuges, often leaving endangered species nowhere else to go.
The Center has been working to address the connection between rampant human population growth and the extinction crisis since A UN survey showed that the more educated respondents were, the more likely they were to believe that there is a climate emergency. This means that higher levels of education lead to the election of politicians with stronger environmental policy agendas.
Escaping poverty is not just a fundamental human right but a vital way to bring birth rates down. The solutions above all help to decrease poverty. In addition, lower child mortality through improved access to health care and better economic opportunities lead to smaller family size also.
International aid, fair trade and global justice are all tools to help bring global population back to sustainable levels. A more equal distribution of resources and transitioning away from our damaging growth-dependent economic systems are key to a better future for people and planet.
In the developed world, most of us have the power to choose the size of our families — although we may also face pressures of all kinds over the size of the families we choose to have. When making choices about that, it's important to remember that people in the rich parts of the world have a disproportionate impact on the global environment through our high level of consumption and greenhouse gas emissions — in the UK, for instance, each individual produces 70 times more carbon dioxide emissions than someone from Niger.
Want to support our work towards a healthier, happier planet with a sustainable human population size that respects the limits of Earth's carrying capacity? Skip to main content. A little less makes a lot of difference The United Nations makes a range of projections for future population growth, based on assumptions about how long people will live, what the fertility rate will be in different countries and how many people of childbearing age there will be.
We can bring birth rates down Many countries have had success in reducing their birth rates. Learn more about women's empowerment.
Learn more about global justice. Learn more about choosing a small family. Join Us.
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