![]() The total fertility rate is the average number of births per woman over a lifetime. Explained: Fertility and Replacement Rates To understand that, we need to first untangle fertility rates, and why they’re falling. What does that mean for modern nation states conditioned to expect a constant influx of new citizens and labor to power their economies? And how can those changing economies adapt to a shrinking population? However, the UN forecasts that rapid growth will slow down-and may even stop entirely by 2100-because of falling fertility rates. This continuous climb in global population has been possible thanks to advancements in healthcare and nutrition. Over the next 220 years, the number grew to eight times that, or the 8 billion people who live on the planet today, with half of the growth occurring since 1975. ![]() Visualizing the World’s Plummeting Fertility RateĪt the dawn of the 19th century, the world population hit a big milestone: 1 billion people. Organizations like the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) have a different perspective, and they have recently modeled that the global population will top out at 9.7 billion people by the year 2064.Īs we climb to surpass the 8 billion mark in the coming months, it will be interesting to see what path humanity ends up following. That said, there isn’t a consensus around this peak. Population projections by groups like the United Nations see the global population peaking at around 10.9 billion people in 2100. #6: The Present and Future of Population Growth Since 1973, Asia has doubled its population from 2.3 billion to 4.6 billion people.Ĭomparatively, over the same time frame, Europe has gone from 670 million to 748 million, equal to just an 11% increase. #5: The Regional BreakdownĪlthough the rate of population growth is expected to slow down, there are still parts of the world that are adding new people fast, as you can see on this interactive regional breakdown: Population growth is leveling out, and it may even go negative at some point in the future. So why then, are future billion people additions projected to take longer and longer to achieve? #4: The Growth Rate is Shrinkingīecause of demographics and falling fertility rates, the growth rate of the global population has actually been on a downward trend for some time.Īs this growth rate gets closer to zero, the population curve has become less exponential like we saw in the first graphs. More recent billions have come every dozen or so. The next billion took 124 years, and the next 33 years. It took all of human history until 1803 to reach the first billion in population. The data and projections in this chart are a few years old, but the concept remains the same: Soon these discoveries spread around the world, enabling population booms everywhere. This is when new technologies and farming conventions took root, making it possible to grow the food supply at an unprecedented pace. #2: The Hockey Stick Curveįor even more context, let’s zoom way out by using a timeline that goes back to when woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth:įrom this 10,000-foot view, it’s clear that human population growth started going exponential around the time of the Second Agricultural Revolution, which started in the 17th century in Britain. It’s no coincidence that that agriculture was independently discovered in many of these same places during the Neolithic Revolution. The human population has always moved around, seeking out new opportunity and freedoms.Īs of 3,000 BC, humans could be mainly found in Central America, the Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent, and parts of India, Japan, and China. In fact, for long parts of the history of civilization, it was unusual to find humans congregating in many of the present-day city locations we now think of as population centers. New York, São Paulo, and Jakarta were not always bustling metropolises. ![]() ![]() #1: Mapping the Population Over 5,000 Years ![]() In this series of six charts from Our World in Data, we’ll break down how the global population got to its current point, as well as some big picture trends behind the data. How did we get here, and what has global population growth looked like historically? Incredibly, each new billion people has come faster than the previous-it was roughly only a decade ago that we crossed the 7 billion threshold. Today, the global population is estimated to sit at 7.91 billion people.īy the end of 2022 or within the first months of 2023, that number is expected to officially cross the 8 billion mark. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |