According to the United Nations (UN), the eight billion threshold was crossed on November 15; the UN made the announcement.
According to population experts, it may have taken more than 200,000 years for humans to reach the one-billion threshold, which was reached sometime around 1804. However, the shift from a world population of seven to eight billion people only took twelve years.
The UN predicts that it will take around 15 years, or until 2037, for the world population to surpass nine billion due to a slowing in population growth.
Patrick Gerland, who oversees the demographic work at the UN Population Division in New York City, claimed that the estimate was “a rough guess that is more of a symbolic result.” At this point, humanity is approaching the eight billion mark; however, it may have passed or be a bit later.
The UN says that by the end of the next year, India will have more people than China.
Rapid global population growth is slowing.
The UN’s long-term population growth forecast was modified by its most recent demographic report, which was published earlier this year. The UN thinks that by 2030, the world’s population will be over 8.5 billion, and by 2050, it will be over 9.7 billion.
According to the UN, the world population will have peaked at around 10.4 billion people by the turn of the 22nd century. According to prior projections, there will be 11 billion people on the planet by the year 2100.
The UN’s assessment that population growth is quickly slowing down is supported by the reduced population increase. Globally significant declines in fertility are to blame, according to analyses of demographic trends, for this sluggish population increase. With a population increase of less than 1% by 2020, the world’s population is now expanding at its slowest rate since 1950.
Population growth models are impacted by fertility rates, which may either help or complicate them.
Predictions by the UN are based on current fertility rates and how those rates are anticipated to evolve.
The UN’s earlier population projection model, which predicted a higher world population by the year 2100, was based on different assumptions about fertility rates. The Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic of 2020 and the increase in immunizations that damage fertility have now overturned these preexisting assumptions.
Tomas Sobotka, an expert on population at the Vienna Institute of Demography in Austria, says, “If you make even very small changes in these fertility-rate trajectories, it adds up, and all of a sudden a big country can have 100 million more people in 80 years.”
Humanitarian crises and conflicts, like those in Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, as well as government-mandated population control measures, like China’s old one-child policy, which was finally lifted in 2015, can all have an impact on fertility rates.
Data shows that more than two-thirds of the world’s people live in places where the lifetime fertility rate is lower than the 2.1 births per woman needed to stop long-term population growth in places where death rates are low.
By 2050, more than half of the expected growth in the world’s population is expected to come from just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania. These countries have higher fertility rates than the rest of the world.