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By:
Usman Ali
Special Correspondent Pride News
Global population continue to rise despite, pandemic covid-19, global wars, deaths
Population growth is the increase in the number of humans on Earth. For most of human history our population size was relatively stable. But with innovation and industrialization, energy, food, water, and medical care became more available and reliable. Consequently, global human population rapidly increased, and continues to do so, with dramatic impacts on global climate and ecosystems. We will need technological and social innovation to help us support the world’s population as we adapt to and mitigate climate and environmental changes.
When it comes to the party that is planet Earth, we might need to plan for a few extra guests, according to scientists. A new statistical projection concludes that the world population is unlikely to level off during the 21st century, leaving the planet to deal with as many as 13 billion human inhabitants—4 billion of those in Africa—by 2100. The analysis, formulated by U.N. and University of Washington (UW), Seattle, researchers, is the first of its kind to use modern statistical methods rather than expert opinions to estimate future birth rates, one of the determining factors in population forecasts. “The U.N. in the past has been criticized for not doing complete statistics on their data and now they’ve done it exactly right,” says demography researcher John Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council in New York City, who was not involved in the new work. Through the early 2000s, most researchers thought that the world population—which
today hovers around 7 billion—would reach 9 billion by midcentury and then stop
growing. But the projection assumed that birth rates in Africa—the highest in the world—
would steadily drop as access to contraceptives and women’s education improved.
Instead, birth rates in most African countries have remained stagnant or declined only
slightly. This can be explained partially by smaller jumps in contraception and education
than predicted, though most scientists don’t fully know why the rates have stalled so
much.
Africa’s situation is only part of what’s led to the new numbers. Every few years in recent
history, the United Nations has recalculated its population projections after consulting
with individual demography and statistics experts who provide best-guess estimates of
future fertility (birth rates) and mortality (death rates). But not all experts agree on the
trends these numbers will take. And the United Nations couldn’t run advanced statistics
on the forecasts, because there were no quantifiable levels of uncertainty associated with
the projections.
“Experts are pretty good at knowing where things generally stand with these rates,” says
statistician Adrian Raftery of UW, a senior author on the new paper. “But what they don’t
seem to be good at is integrating the newest data into future estimates in the right way.”
Rather than rely on expert opinions for the newest population projections, the United
Nations teamed up with Raftery and his colleagues, who developed statistical equations
—based on historical and real-time data—that describe how the fertility rate is changing over time in different places around the world. This let them crunch the numbers in a new
way, and—in addition to calculating a single estimate—determine the statistical
probability of different events, such as the population leveling off.
The combination of a new method that’s not based on assumption but is based directly on
data, and also the new data on Africa, have combined to make quite a big change to the
overall population projections,” Raftery says.
To wit, there’s a 95% chance the world population will be between 9 billion and 13.2
billion by the year 2100, the team concludes online today in Science. Much of that growth,
it found, will likely take place in Africa, whose population is estimated to rise from 1 billion
to 4 billion by the end of the century. And, unlike projections from last decade, the new
graphs show a steady increase through 2100 rather than a midcentury leveling off.
The new numbers will be used in models created by economists, environmentalists, and
governments who use population estimates to predict pollution and global warming
levels; prepare for epidemics; determine road, school, and other infrastructure
requirements; and forecast worldwide economic trends. All of these plans need to be
altered if the population is going to grow an extra few billion. “There’s a need to put
population back on the world agenda as a major issue,” Raftery says. Determining what’s
caused Africa’s birth rates to stagnate could be a step toward dealing with this
skyrocketing population, he says.
But there’s no guarantee that the world’s population is going to continue to rise at its
current rate, points out economist and population researcher David Lam of the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “We’re still talking about much slower population growth than we
just came through,” he says. “The world population doubled between 1960 and 1999 and
we’re never going to do that again. The population is leveling off and it’s going to
eventually level off under any of these scenarios, whether that’s before 2100 or after.” And of course, the numbers are just projections, Bongaarts says. “It could very well be that we could have epidemics, or wars, or unrest that creates massive mortality. But to be honest, it would require something of a huge magnitude to alter this trajectory.”
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 pressure 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.
The ramifications and responses have already begun to appear, especially in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work opportunities for women) and negative (persistent gender inequality and high living costs).
The 20th century presented a very different challenge. The global population saw its greatest increase in known history, from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000, as life spans lengthened and infant mortality declined. In some countries — representing about a third of the world’s people — those growth dynamics are still in play. By the end of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in population; across sub-Saharan Africa, families are still having four or five children. While these are model predictions they are helpful in seeing what the future generation may have to grapple with. Children being born today will likely see the year 2100 and thus will have to manage and adjust to a potential global population decline and the changes that brings with it
