[We’ve added a billion people in just 12 years. The implications
for the planet—and our own welfare—hinge on how we tackle climate
change. ]
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EARTH NOW HAS 8 BILLION PEOPLE—AND COUNTING. WHERE DO WE GO FROM
HERE?  
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Craig Welch
November 14, 2022
National Geographic
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_ We’ve added a billion people in just 12 years. The implications
for the planet—and our own welfare—hinge on how we tackle climate
change. _

India's Kumbh Festival is celebrated in the northern city of
Haridwar. As soon as this year, India will become the world's most
populous country, replacing China, which has held the top spot for two
millennia. , reuters.com

 

From the emergence of _Homo sapiens_, it took roughly 300,000 years
before one billion of us populated the Earth. That was around 1804,
the year morphine was discovered, when Haiti declared independence
from France, and when Beethoven first performed his Third Symphony in
Vienna.

We’ve added our most recent one billion more just since the first
term of U.S. President Barack Obama. A mere dozen years after reaching
seven billion, the planet most likely will surpass eight billion
people sometime around mid-November, the United Nations estimates
based on its best demographic projections.

The actual timing, however, is uncertain. In parts of the world,
census data is decades old. During COVID-19 it was virtually
impossible for some countries to record every death. Even
sophisticated computer models may be off by a year or more. It’s not
as if anyone has done a global person-by-person head count.

But the UN is declaring November 15 as the “Day of Eight Billion”
because there is no mistaking the import of this moment. Humans
everywhere are living longer, thanks to better health care, cleaner
water, and improvements in sanitation, all of which have reduced the
prevalence of disease. Fertilizers and irrigation have boosted crop
yields and improved nutrition. In many countries, more children are
being born, and far fewer are dying.

Of course, the challenges we face as the world’s population
continues to rise also are significant. Pollution and overfishing are
degrading many areas of the oceans. Wildlife is disappearing at an
alarming clip, as humans wipe out forests and other wildlands for
development, agriculture, and commercial products made from trees. A
changing climate driven by a global energy system that is still
overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels is fast becoming the greatest
threat in history to biodiversity, food security, and access to water
for drinking and farming. And that’s with the number of people we
already have.

The risks and opportunities of our population boom and parallel
resource crisis depend largely on decisions we’ve not yet made.
Which will control our future more—the billions of mouths we’ll
have to feed, or the billions more brains we could employ to do so?

“The exact impacts on future human life, I think, are still somewhat
yet to be determined,” says Patrick Gerland, who oversees population
estimates for the United Nations' Department of Economic and Social
Affairs.

“So far, the overall experience is that the world has been
successful in adapting and finding solutions to our problems,”
Gerland says. “I think we need to be somewhat optimistic.”

But he quickly concedes that climate change is a powerful threat.
“Simply maintaining the status quo and doing nothing is not an
option,” he says. “Whether we like it or not changes will be
happening, and the situation will not improve by itself. There is a
need for current and future interventions.”

In the meantime, our overall population explosion belies vastly
different types of demographic change taking shape around the globe.
And the world’s top demographers don’t agree on just where our
population is headed from here.

TOP: In Lagos, Nigeria, Emmanuel and Nwakaego Ewenike have lived in a
single room with their four children for 11 years. They have no
running water and intermittent electricity, a situation Emmanuel calls
"very bad." More than one-third of Nigeria's people live in extreme
poverty, the highest rate in the world. PHOTOGRAPH BY YAGAZIE EMEZI,
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

BOTTOM: China's birth rate has continued to slide. As opportunities
for education and careers increase, women are choosing to have less
children. Although its people live longer, on average, than those in
most countries, China’s population of 1.4 billion may already have
started to decline.  PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN JIN, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Population changes vary dramatically 

The world is facing the likelihood of huge population explosions and
collapses at the same time. The most significant just happen to be on
opposite sides of the planet.

Perhaps as soon as this year, for the first time in two millennia,
China will no longer be Earth’s most populous country, as India
finally surpasses it. Even before China’s one-child policy, which
went into effect in 1980, “births in China have been declining
almost continuously,” Gerland says. In the 1970s alone, the birth
rate dropped by half. With increasing opportunities for better
education and careers, more women are delaying childbirth, and there
already are fewer of childbearing age.

These trends accelerated during the pandemic. There were 45 percent
fewer children born in 2020 than in 2015. China’s birth rate is now
far lower than that of the United States.

Even with one of the longest life expectancies of any country, at 85
years, China’s population of 1.4 billion is expected soon to begin
declining—in fact that decline may already have started. The
workforce has been shrinking for a decade. As it is, there are barely
two workers supporting every retiree or child. In the next quarter
century, the country will likely see 300 million people over the age
of 60, straining government resources, according to a report
in _Nature_
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Health care costs are expected to double.

In Africa, on the other hand, trends are moving rapidly in the other
direction. Across the Sahel, population is expanding rapidly.
Nigeria’s median age is just 17, less than half that of China. Birth
rates there are falling, too, but remain 20 times higher than in
China.

Food security is already a concern. More than one-third of the country
lives in extreme poverty, a greater number than any other country,
including India, which is six times larger. A third of all households
include one adult who must skip meals at times for the family to
survive.

Currently at 216 million, the country’s population by some estimates
could quadruple by the end of the century. By then it could have more
people than China, which has 10 times more land. But that all depends
on childbirth rates. All these projections are driven by assumptions,
and the reality could be much different.

The biggest driver of falling birth rates is education, especially for
girls. A decade ago, researchers determined that increasing access to
education [[link removed]] could
slow global population growth by one billion by mid-century. How much
and how fast we expand those educational opportunities over the next
several decades are among the important unanswered questions that will
determine how many of us will be living on Earth as we approach 2100.

Predicting the world’s population is complex

Gauging population in the near-term isn’t terribly controversial.
“The majority of the people that will be alive in 2050 are already
alive today,” Gerland says.

The UN, a group of researchers at the University of Washington in
Seattle, and other experts in Vienna, Austria, tend mostly to agree on
what the next quarter century holds. Based on past events, at least,
few expect another deadly global pandemic quite so soon. Despite
crises like the war in Ukraine, neither do demographers yet foresee
planet-wide mass migration by mid-century. Most experts see the
population topping nine billion roughly by then.

After that, projections vary greatly. A few years ago, the UN
estimated that by 2100, the globe’s population could balloon to 11
billion. Earlier this year, it revised those estimates downward, to
about 10.4 billion
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thanks to progress in reducing the average number of children born per
family. At the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis,
in Vienna, researchers in 2018 projected the population
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rise to 9.7 billion in 2070
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then fall back to around 9 billion by century’s end. They used
different assumptions, largely by asking global experts to weigh in.
“The main story is not just about fertility but about progress in
fighting child and infant mortality,” says Anne Goujon, population
program director for IIASA.

Meanwhile Seattle’s Institute for Health Metrics sees population
peaking at roughly 9.7 billion in 2064, but dropping down to 8.8
billion
[[link removed](20)30677-2/fulltext],
possibly less, by century’s end. Populations could fall by half
across nearly two dozen countries, including Bulgaria and Spain. A lot
of the difference is based on a complex method the researchers use to
estimate future birth rates.

In addition to the differences between models, all of the researchers
agree that efforts so far to incorporate climate change into future
population projections have been inadequate. In part that’s because
the potential effect largely depends on how quickly the world reduces
greenhouse gas emissions. But part of the difficulty also lies in
assessing climate impacts. Extreme heat could make parts of the Middle
East, sub-Saharan Africa, and India uninhabitable. Storms could worsen
food security. How will people respond to sea-level rise in heavily
populated coastal regions?

“No one is doing this in the right way at the moment,” says Stein
Emil Vollset, who oversees IHME’s population estimates.

And aside from global population estimates, climate change and
politics also will likely greatly influence migration between
countries. Population in the U.S. and Western Europe has been largely
sustained by immigration, but it has become a political hot button.
Other countries with declining populations, such as Japan, have been
even more reluctant to welcome immigrants.

Yet the lopsided trends, between booming and declining populations,
exacerbated by climate change, will almost certainly increase
migration pressure almost everywhere.

“The only way we can get out of this demographic imbalance,”
Vollset says, “is well-managed international collaboration.”

* world population
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* Climate Change
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* poverty
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* food
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