How fast is global population growing

Sierra Leone. Hong Kong. El Salvador. State of Palestine. Costa Rica. Central African Republic. New Zealand. Bosnia and Herzegovina. Puerto Rico. North Macedonia. Equatorial Guinea.

Trinidad and Tobago. Solomon Islands. Western Sahara. Cabo Verde. French Guiana. New Caledonia. French Polynesia.

Saint Lucia. Channel Islands. Virgin Islands. Antigua and Barbuda. Isle of Man. Cayman Islands. Marshall Islands. Northern Mariana Islands. American Samoa. Faeroe Islands. Sint Maarten. Turks and Caicos. One way to understand the distribution of people across the world is to reform the world map, not based on area but according to population. This is shown here in a population cartogram : a geographical presentation of the world where the size of the countries are not drawn according to the distribution of land, but according to the distribution of people.

The cartogram shows where in the world the global population was at home in The Small countries with a high population density increase in size in this cartogram relative to the world maps we are used to — look at Bangladesh, Taiwan, or the Netherlands.

Large countries with a small population shrink in size look for Canada, Mongolia, Australia, or Russia. Our understanding of the world is often shaped by geographical maps.

But this tells us nothing about where in the world people live. To understand this, we need to look at population density. Globally the average population density is 25 people per km 2 , but there are very large differences across countries. If we want to understand how people are distributed across the world, another useful tool is the population cartogram : a geographical presentation of the world where the size of the countries are not drawn according to the distribution of land, but according to the distribution of people.

Here we show how the world looks in this way. When we see a standard map we tend to focus on the largest countries by area. But these are not always where the greatest number of people live. The chart shows the increasing number of people living on our planet over the last 12, years. A mind-boggling change: The world population today that is 1,times the size of what it was 12 millennia ago when the world population was around 4 million — half of the current population of London.

What is striking about this chart is of course that almost all of this growth happened just very recently. Historical demographers estimate that around the year the world population was only around 1 billion people. This implies that on average the population grew very slowly over this long time from 10, BCE to by 0. After this changed fundamentally: The world population was around 1 billion in the year and increased 7-fold since then.

Around billion people have ever lived on our planet. For the long period from the appearance of modern Homo sapiens up to the starting point of this chart in 10, BCE it is estimated that the total world population was often well under one million.

In this period our species was often seriously threatened by extinction. The interactive visualization is here. And you can also download the annual world population data produced by Our World in Data. A number of researchers have published estimates for the total world population over the long run, we have brought these estimates together and you can explore these various sources here.

In terms of recent developments, the data from the UN Population Division provides consistent and comparable estimates and projections within and across countries and time, over the last century. This data starts from estimates for , and is updated periodically to reflect changes in fertility, mortality and international migration.

In the section above we looked at the absolute change in the global population over time. But what about the rate of population growth? The global population growth rate peaked long ago. The chart shows that global population growth reached a peak in and with an annual growth rate of 2. For the last half-century we have lived in a world in which the population growth rate has been declining.

The UN projects that this decline will continue in the coming decades. The answer is no. For population growth to be exponential, the growth rate would have be the same over time e. In absolute terms, this would result in an exponential increase in the number of people. But, as we see in this chart, since the s the growth rate has been falling.

This means the world population is not growing exponentially — for decades now, growth has been more similar to a linear trend. The previous section looked at the growth rate. This visualization here shows the annual global population increase from to today and the projection until the end of this century. The absolute increase of the population per year has peaked in the late s at over 90 million additional people each year. But it stayed high until recently.

From now on the UN expects the annual increase to decline by around 1 million every year. There are other ways of visually representing the change in rate of world population growth. Two examples of this are shown in the charts below. The visualization shows how strongly the growth rate of the world population changed over time.

In the past the population grew slowly: it took nearly seven centuries for the population to double from 0. As the growth rate slowly climbed, the population doubling time fell but remained in the order of centuries into the first half of the 20th century. Things sped up considerably in the middle of the 20th century.

The fastest doubling of the world population happened between and a doubling from 2. This period was marked by a peak population growth of 2. Since then, population growth has been slowing, and along with it the doubling time.

In this visualisation we have used the UN projections to show how the doubling time is projected to change until the end of this century. By , it will once again have taken approximately years for the population to double to a predicted This visualization provides an additional perspective on population growth: the number of years it took to add one billion to the global population.

This visualisation shows again how the population growth rate has changed dramatically through time. By the third billion, this period had reduced to 33 years, reduced further to 15 years to reach four. The period of fastest growth occurred through to , taking only 12 years to increase by one billion for the 5th, 6th and 7th. The world has now surpassed this peak rate of growth, and the period between each billion is expected to continue to rise.

Two hundred years ago the world population was just over one billion. Since then the number of people on the planet grew more than 7-fold to 7.

How is the world population distributed across regions and how did it change over this period of rapid global growth? In this visualization we see historical population estimates by region from through to today. If you want to see the relative distribution across the world regions in more detail you can switch to the relative view. The world region that saw the fastest population growth over last two centuries was North America. The population grew fold.

Latin America saw the second largest increase fold. Over the same period the population Europe of increased 3-fold, in Africa fold, and in Asia 6-fold. The distribution of the world population is expected to change significantly over the 21st century. We discuss projections of population by region here. Over the last century, the world has seen rapid population growth. But how are populations distributed across the world? Which countries have the most people? In the map, we see the estimated population of each country today.

By clicking on any country, you can also see how its population has evolved over this period. You can learn more about future population growth by country here. This series of maps shows the distribution of the world population over time.

The first map — in the top-left corner — shows the world population in BC. Global population growth peaked in the early s. But how has population growth varied across the world? Migration flows are not counted. Both of these measures of population growth across the world are shown in the two charts. You can use the slider underneath each map to look at this change since Clicking on any country will show a line chart of its change over time, with UN projections through to We see that there are some countries today where the natural population growth not including migration is slightly negative: the number of deaths exceed the number of births.

When we move the time slider underneath the map to past years, we see that this is a new phenomenon. Up until the s, there were no countries with a negative natural population growth. Worldwide, population growth is slowing—you can press the play arrow at the bottom of the chart to see the change over time.

Overall, growth rates in most countries have been going down since the s. Yet substantial differences exist across countries and regions. Moreover, in many cases there has been divergence in growth rates. One of the big lessons from the demographic history of countries is that population explosions are temporary. For many countries the demographic transition has already ended, and as the global fertility rate has now halved we know that the world as a whole is approaching the end of rapid population growth.

This visualization presents this big overview of the global demographic transition — with the very latest data from the UN Population Division. As we explore at the beginning of the entry on population growth , the global population grew only very slowly up to — only 0. In the many millennia up to that point in history very high mortality of children counteracted high fertility. The world was in the first stage of the demographic transition. Once health improved and mortality declined things changed quickly.

Particularly over the course of the 20th century: Over the last years global population more than quadrupled. As we see in the chart, the rise of the global population got steeper and steeper and you have just lived through the steepest increase of that curve. This also means that your existence is a tiny part of the reason why that curve is so steep. To provide space, food, and resources for a large world population in a way that is sustainable into the distant future is without question one of the large, serious challenges for our generation.

We should not make the mistake of underestimating the task ahead of us. Yes, I expect new generations to contribute , but for now it is upon us to provide for them.

Population growth is still fast: Every year million are born and 58 million die — the difference is the number of people that we add to the world population in a year: 82 million. In red you see the annual population growth rate that is, the percentage change in population per year of the global population. It peaked around half a century ago. Peak population growth was reached in with an annual growth of 2.

This slowdown of population growth was not only predictable, but predicted. Just as expected by demographers here , the world as a whole is experiencing the closing of a massive demographic transition. This chart also shows how the United Nations envision the slow ending of the global demographic transition.

As population growth continues to decline, the curve representing the world population is getting less and less steep. By the end of the century — when global population growth will have fallen to 0. It is hard to know the population dynamics beyond ; it will depend upon the fertility rate and as we discuss in our entry on fertility rates here fertility is first falling with development — and then rising with development.

The question will be whether it will rise above an average 2 children per woman. The world enters the last phase of the demographic transition and this means we will not repeat the past. How fertility rates and population numbers will change in the longer term, over several decades or more, is more difficult to predict.

And this is where the serious controversy starts. For decades, the UN Population Division had the field largely to itself, and churned out routine updates every couple of years. Its most recent report, published in , forecasts that global population will continue to rise from its current 7. Its next biennial update was due this year but has been postponed to It said that world population is most likely to peak at 9. Some 23 countries could see their current population halved by the end of the century, the study said, including Japan, Thailand, Italy and Spain.

The different outcomes reflect the uncertainty in making projections over such a long time period, says Leontine Alkema, a statistical modeller at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The assumptions there are where people get it wrong. Changes in fertility rates with anticipated economic development are key, and the three models account for this process in different ways. The UN modellers divide the way that fertility tends to slow, decline and then recover into several phases.

The UN then takes the median of these projections and presents it as the most likely scenario. Instead of relying on data and past trends to forecast future falls in fertility due to development, the IIASA group turned to expert judgement.

They asked some researchers, including economists, demographers and sociologists, to predict fertility rates for individual countries in and , on the basis of what they expected to happen to several social, health and economic factors. Some of these estimates varied considerably. Forecasts of fertility rates in India ranged from 1. For example, the researchers estimate that fertility for every country in sub-Saharan Africa will be below the replacement level of 2.

The UN forecasts that only one-third of countries in the region will fall below this level. The IHME team did things quite differently. Instead of basing its model on fertility rates, and how they would change, the group used a variable called completed cohort fertility at 50 years CC This counts the number of children each woman has had by the time she reaches It is subtly different from overall fertility rate because it is less sensitive to the age at which women have their children, and it does not show the same rebound effect when fertility drops to low levels.

And instead of assuming a figure for this CC50 at specific time points in the future, the IHME model used real-world data to work out the relationship between CC50 and its two main drivers: educational attainment and unmet contraceptive need. This meant they could plug national data on education and contraception — and how they expected them to change — into the model instead of simple estimates of future fertility.

COVID vaccines to reach poorest countries in — despite recent pledges. Christopher Murray, who leads the IHME team, says this approach makes the IHME forecast more reliable and more valuable because it can test the impact of changes and assumptions.

The model could forecast what happens to population when policies encourage more girls to spend longer in school, or when health infrastructure improves to secure more reliable access to contraception. Plenty of demographers disagree. The critics say this is highly unlikely.

The letter has not yet been published. Kaneda says that the IHME group that produced the paper has little background in demography. Instead, it based its population forecast on methods it developed to calculate a regular set of health statistics called the Global Burden of Disease.

In , for example, the UN projected that the global population in would be 5. In , the estimated global population was 7 billion, compared with projections in previous UN reports that ranged from 6. The organization is also using new and better sources of data about populations in specific countries to upgrade its historical records, Gerland says. This will make the modelling more accurate, he adds, and should allow for more regular updates — although the current update is taking longer than expected and has delayed the latest global population report.

Some demographers stay on the sidelines. COVID boosters for wealthy nations spark outrage. In those cases, governments tend to assume a linear annual increase to estimate current numbers. But that could be wildly inaccurate.

A analysis 6 by researchers at the University of Antwerp in Belgium found that national population estimates used by the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo ranged from 77 million to million. To produce better data, researchers are testing ways to count people without actually counting them. One technique is to monitor mobile-phone traffic. By tracing calls to the phone towers that send and receive them, researchers can use call density around the towers to estimate the local population.

In one high-profile application of this technique, researchers from Sweden and South Korea tracked the displacement of people after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti in The research showed that the population of the capital, Port-au-Prince, shrunk by almost one-quarter within three weeks of the quake 7.