They fear an “underpopulation bomb” with a very long fuse. Population worriers see an aging world of empty cradles, sapped of innovation and youthful energy, one where “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” as Elon Musk - who, with eight children and counting, seems to be doing his best to turn the problem around single-handedly - tweeted last year. That would put our species on a path we’ve never walked before, outside of temporary dips from war, disease, or famine. Should global fertility fall more than expected, that decline could begin sooner and appear sharper. Even if global population does reach 10.4 billion by 2100 or earlier, the UN projects it could actually begin to decline after. It also includes China, where the nation that enforced the coercive one-child policy out of fears of overpopulation is now in a desperate struggle to turn around its rock-bottom fertility rates. That includes the US, where fertility has generally been below replacement level since 1971 and where population in 2021 grew at its slowest rate since the nation’s founding. Two-thirds of humanity lives in an area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 children per woman, the rough level a population requires to replace itself through births alone. In virtually every corner of the globe, people are having fewer babies than their parents and grandparents did. They pay less attention to the seeming enormity of 8 billion, and more to the slowing pace of population growth, which is still increasing, but at less than 1 percent a year - its slowest rate since at least 1950. The carrying capacity of the Earth is not and never has been fixedīut another group sees that 10.4 billion and fears we’ll never actually get there. It’s the animating idea behind one of the most influential modern treatises on the topic: the 1968 book The Population Bomb. He has thus far been proven wrong - even with a global population more than 7 billion people larger today than in Malthus’s time, life is a whole lot better and longer on average - but his influence can still be felt in certain corners of environmentalism. It’s an old fear that dates back to the grim prophecies of the 18th-century English cleric and economist Thomas Malthus, who wrote that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” What that number means - and whether you even believe it - says a lot about what you think about the future of the planet, about the global power structure decades from now, and even about the purpose of being human.įor those who see every additional human being as one more consuming, carbon-emitting unit on a hot and crowded planet that is already well past its carrying capacity, the idea of 8 billion people - let alone 10.4 billion - is the last mile marker on the road to a climate and environmental catastrophe.
The best guess we have - the medium scenario, according to UN demographers - is that by 2100, global population will have leveled off at around 10.4 billion. Estimated global population in 2000 stood at 6.09 billion, which would have been a surprise to the UN demographers of 1973, who projected that it would be almost 410 million larger by the turn of the millennium - an overestimate bigger than the current population of the United States. How many other human beings will be there with him to see the calendar turn to 2100? If you think it’s tricky to count the number of people alive today, accurately projecting global population nearly 80 years into the future is near impossible, requiring countless estimates about birth rates, death rates, and movement - “sex, death, and migration,” in the words of the demographer Jennifer Sciubba. With an average life expectancy in India of just under 70 years today and rising, our hypothetical Baby 8 Billion stands a decent chance of being alive to witness the dawn of the 22nd century. And he stands a better than even chance of being a he, since boys naturally outnumber girls at birth by a rate of about 105 to 100 in India, due to a mix of cultural preference for boys and access to sex-selective abortion, that rate is closer to 108 to 100. He or she is most likely to be born in India, which had more than 23 million births in 2021, and which is projected to pass China as the world’s most populous country by mid-2023, according to data released by the UN on Wednesday. But someone is or will be Baby 8 Billion. That 8 billion mark is an estimate - there is no real-time census of everyone alive on Earth at every given moment, which means there’s a margin of error. On November 15, 2022, according to the demographers at the United Nations Population Division, the 8 billionth person on the planet was born.
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