World how many people

If you want to see the relative distribution across the world regions in more detail you can switch to the relative view.

The world region that saw the fastest population growth over last two centuries was North America. The population grew fold. Latin America saw the second largest increase fold. Over the same period the population Europe of increased 3-fold, in Africa fold, and in Asia 6-fold. The distribution of the world population is expected to change significantly over the 21st century. We discuss projections of population by region here.

Over the last century, the world has seen rapid population growth. But how are populations distributed across the world? Which countries have the most people? In the map, we see the estimated population of each country today.

By clicking on any country, you can also see how its population has evolved over this period. You can learn more about future population growth by country here. This series of maps shows the distribution of the world population over time. The first map — in the top-left corner — shows the world population in BC. Global population growth peaked in the early s. But how has population growth varied across the world? Migration flows are not counted.

Both of these measures of population growth across the world are shown in the two charts. You can use the slider underneath each map to look at this change since Clicking on any country will show a line chart of its change over time, with UN projections through to We see that there are some countries today where the natural population growth not including migration is slightly negative: the number of deaths exceed the number of births.

When we move the time slider underneath the map to past years, we see that this is a new phenomenon. Up until the s, there were no countries with a negative natural population growth.

Worldwide, population growth is slowing—you can press the play arrow at the bottom of the chart to see the change over time. Overall, growth rates in most countries have been going down since the s. Yet substantial differences exist across countries and regions. Moreover, in many cases there has been divergence in growth rates.

One of the big lessons from the demographic history of countries is that population explosions are temporary. For many countries the demographic transition has already ended, and as the global fertility rate has now halved we know that the world as a whole is approaching the end of rapid population growth. This visualization presents this big overview of the global demographic transition — with the very latest data from the UN Population Division.

As we explore at the beginning of the entry on population growth , the global population grew only very slowly up to — only 0. In the many millennia up to that point in history very high mortality of children counteracted high fertility. The world was in the first stage of the demographic transition. Once health improved and mortality declined things changed quickly.

Particularly over the course of the 20th century: Over the last years global population more than quadrupled. As we see in the chart, the rise of the global population got steeper and steeper and you have just lived through the steepest increase of that curve. This also means that your existence is a tiny part of the reason why that curve is so steep. To provide space, food, and resources for a large world population in a way that is sustainable into the distant future is without question one of the large, serious challenges for our generation.

We should not make the mistake of underestimating the task ahead of us. Yes, I expect new generations to contribute , but for now it is upon us to provide for them. Population growth is still fast: Every year million are born and 58 million die — the difference is the number of people that we add to the world population in a year: 82 million.

In red you see the annual population growth rate that is, the percentage change in population per year of the global population. It peaked around half a century ago. Peak population growth was reached in with an annual growth of 2.

This slowdown of population growth was not only predictable, but predicted. Just as expected by demographers here , the world as a whole is experiencing the closing of a massive demographic transition. This chart also shows how the United Nations envision the slow ending of the global demographic transition. As population growth continues to decline, the curve representing the world population is getting less and less steep. By the end of the century — when global population growth will have fallen to 0.

It is hard to know the population dynamics beyond ; it will depend upon the fertility rate and as we discuss in our entry on fertility rates here fertility is first falling with development — and then rising with development. The question will be whether it will rise above an average 2 children per woman. The world enters the last phase of the demographic transition and this means we will not repeat the past. The global population has quadrupled over the course of the 20th century, but it will not double anymore over the course of this century.

We are on the way to a new balance. The big global demographic transition that the world entered more than two centuries ago is then coming to an end: This new equilibrium is different from the one in the past when it was the very high mortality that kept population growth in check.

In the new balance it will be low fertility keeps population changes small. In there were 2. Now in , there are 7. By the end of the century the UN expects a global population of This visualization of the population pyramid makes it possible to understand this enormous global transformation.

Population pyramids visualize the demographic structure of a population. The width represents the size of the population of a given age; women on the right and men to the left. The bottom layer represents the number of newborns and above it you find the numbers of older cohorts.

Represented in this way the population structure of societies with high mortality rates resembled a pyramid — this is how this famous type of visualization got its name. In the darkest blue you see the pyramid that represents the structure of the world population in Two factors are responsible for the pyramid shape in An increasing number of births broadened the base layer of the population pyramid and a continuously high risk of death throughout life is evident by the pyramid narrowing towards the top.

There were many newborns relative to the number of people at older ages. The narrowing of the pyramid just above the base is testimony to the fact that more than 1-in-5 children born in died before they reached the age of five. Through shades of blue and green the same visualization shows the population structure over the last decades up to You see that in each subsequent decade the population pyramid was fatter than before — in each decade more people of all ages were added to the world population.

If you look at the green pyramid for you see that the narrowing above the base is much less strong than back in ; the child mortality rate fell from 1-in-5 in to fewer than 1-in today. In comparing and we see that the number of children born has increased — 97 million in to million today — and that the mortality of children decreased at the same time.

If you now compare the base of the pyramid in with the projection for you see that the coming decades will not resemble the past: According to the projections there will be fewer children born at the end of this century than today. The base of the future population structure is narrower. We are at a turning point in global population history. Between and today, it was a widening of the entire pyramid — an increase of the number of children — that was responsible for the increase of the world population.

As global health is improving and mortality is falling, the people alive today are expected to live longer than any generation before us. This is now happening at a global scale. For every child younger than 15 there were 1. Richer countries have benefited from this transition in the last decades and are now facing the demographic problem of an increasingly larger share of retired people that are not contributing to the labor market.

In the coming decades it will be the poorer countries that can benefit from this demographic dividend. The change from to today and the projections to show a world population that is becoming healthier. When the top of the pyramid becomes wider and looks less like a pyramid and instead becomes more box-shaped, the population lives through younger ages with very low risk of death and dies at an old age.

The demographic structure of a healthy population at the final stage of the demographic transition is the box shape that we see for the entire world for The world population has grown rapidly , particularly over the past century: in there were fewer than 2 billion people on the planet; today there are 7. The change in the world population is determined by two metrics: the number of babies born, and the number of people dying. The line chart shows the same data, but also includes the UN projection until the end of the century.

It is possible to switch this chart to any other country or world region in the world. In around 55 million people died. The world population therefore increased by 84 million in that year that is an increase of 1. Again it is possible to switch this chart to any other country or world region in the world. How do we expect this to change in the coming decades? What does this mean for population growth?

Population projections show that the yearly number of births will remain at around million per year over the coming decades. It is then expected to slowly decline in the second-half of the century. As the world population ages , the annual number of deaths is expected to continue to increase in the coming decades until it reaches a similar annual number as global births towards the end of the century. As the number of births is expected to slowly fall and the number of deaths to rise the global population growth rate will continue to fall.

This is when the world population will stop to increase in the future. Population growth is determined by births and deaths and every country has seen very substantial changes in both: In our overview on how health has changed over the long run you find the data on the dramatic decline of child mortality that has been achieved in all parts of the world.

And in our coverage of fertility you find the data and research on how modern socio-economic changes — most importantly structural changes to the economy and a rise of the status and opportunities for women — contributed to a very substantial reduction of the number of children that couples have.

But declining mortality rates and declining fertility rates alone would not explain why the population increases. If they happened at the same time the growth rate of the population would not change in this transition. What is crucial here is the timing at which mortality and fertility changes. It is shown in the schematic figure. It is a beautifully simple model that describes the observed pattern in countries around the world and is one of the great insights of demography. If fertility fell in lockstep with mortality we would not have seen an increase in the population at all.

The demographic transition works through the asynchronous timing of the two fundamental demographic changes: The decline of the death rate is followed by the decline of birth rates. This decline of the death rate followed by a decline of the birth rate is something we observe with great regularity and independent of the culture or religion of the population. The chart presents the empirical evidence for the demographic transition for five very different countries in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

In all countries we observed the pattern of the demographic transition, first a decline of mortality that starts the population boom and then a decline of fertility which brings the population boom to an end. The population boom is a temporary event. In the past the size of the population was stagnant because of high mortality, now country after country is moving into a world in which the population is stagnant because of low fertility.

Perhaps the longest available view of the demographic transition comes from data for England and Wales. In , Anthony Wrigley and Roger Schofield 11 published a major research project analyzing English parish registers—a unique source that allowed them to trace demographic changes for the three centuries prior to state records.

As far as we know, there is no comparable data for any other country up until the mid-eighteenth century see the following section for Sweden , where recordkeeping began in The chart shows the birth and death rates in England and Wales over the span of nearly years. Even if we take only animals and disregard all other forms of life plants, bacteria, fungi etc.

PWC: The World in Spread the message. Make a donation. Or update your wardrobe with clothes from our modest but growing selection of sustainably sourced and crafted clothes. The World Counts. Shop Support. All Challenges. Get a Counter. Now In This month This week Today. Put this counter on your website.

Shop Thousands of Verified Sustainable Products. Visit the Arbor Marketplace. Shop Products. Find ethical companies when you are browsing. See more here. The World Population is growing by over , people a day The population of the world today is about , people larger than yesterday. Accelerating population growth Around , the world population reached 1 billion people. An expanding world economy For all of recorded history, a growing population has been accompanied by economic growth - and usually per capita growth as well.

The future: A much bigger world economy In , the UN estimated that the global economy will grow between 10 and a massive 26 times during the 21st century. And we are already overusing at percent… Ecological Footprint of the human population The human population is dependent on the Earth's ecosystems to survive.

See more. A new industrial revolution There is a need for a new industrial revolution where economic wealth goes hand-in-hand with environmental and social sustainability. They arrive at these regional estimates by taking into account a variety of factors, including fertility rate, or the average number of children that a woman has in her lifetime, and mortality rate, or a person's life expectancy, given the social and economic conditions of the region.

The world's population has grown rapidly in the last two centuries, driven largely by an increase in the number of people surviving to reproductive age as quality of life and healthcare have improved in almost every country around the world over this time. However, ever since peaking in the 's, the global population growth rate has slowed, according to a report published in the journal Population Today. The world's population reached 1 billion a little more than years ago, in , according to Our World in Data , an open-source database and charity based in England and Wales.

The rate of growth quickly accelerated in the years that followed. The next billion came a little over one century later, in The global population hit 3 billion in , 4 billion in , 5 billion in and 6 billion in , according to the United Nations. There were an estimated 7 billion people in the world as of Oct. The U. In , a report published by the United Nations predicted that the global population annual growth rate would fall to less than 0. Related: Why global population growth will grind to a halt by Over the last 50 years, the composition of the world population, or the number of people in various demographic categories such as nationality, ethnicity and age, has changed because the nature of population growth isn't uniform across the regions of the world.

Populations in certain areas are growing more quickly than others due to differences in fertility and mortality rates, as well as differing patterns of migration. In general, demographers have identified four demographic "mega-trends" that can help explain these changes in the composition of the global population: overall population growth, aging, increasing international migration and urbanization.

These are overarching themes that broadly point to how and why the global population will change in the coming years. For the vast majority of human history, the global population grew relatively slowly. Historical demographers have estimated that about 4 million people lived on Earth in 10, B. That number grew to about million people at the dawn of the first millennia, at A.

The average annual population growth rate was 0. By , there were approximately 1 billion people living in the world, per the same source. The Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century spurred an acceleration in the global population growth rate that lasted for the next years, leading up to the world's two-billionth human being born in By the middle of the century, advances in public health, especially the discovery of antibiotics, increased the average life expectancy, and the number of people on the planet surged.

Thirty-three years after the global population hit 2 billion, in , the global population hit 3 billion. The growth rate during the last half of the s hit an all-time peak, averaging 2. Population growth exploded in the later half of the 20th century due to a number of reasons, including a widespread decline in mortality, especially among children, said Sara Hertog, a demographer with the United Nations.

By the s, the popularization of contraception helped slow population growth once again. But because so many humans were already on the planet, a so-called "population explosion" was beginning to take place, and the global population reached 4 billion in In , just 13 years later, there were 5 billion people. And just 12 years after that, in , there were 6 billion.