How fast is the world’s population growing?

According to estimates, more than 7 billion people live on our planet. Each day, some 200,000 new babies add to this figure, which works out to roughly 140 additional people per minute. Over an entire year, about 80 million humans are born—a number comparable to the combined populations of California, Texas and New York. Not every region of the world is witnessing this staggering rate of growth, however. In developed areas like Western Europe and Japan, the population has essentially stabilized, while in less developed countries fertility tends to be much higher. Even with this variation, experts predict that more than 9 billion people will jostle for space on Earth by 2050.

It wasn’t always this way. Population growth of such proportions is a relatively new phenomenon: Between 1900 and 2000, the number of people in the world quadrupled, and between 1700 and 2000 it climbed by a factor of 10. Indeed, for tens of thousands of years, the human populace expanded at tiny fractions of today’s 1.1-percent yearly rate. When our ancestors first turned to agriculture around 8000 B.C., an estimated 5 million people were scattered across the planet. By 1 A.D. that figure had climbed to roughly 200 million, increasing by only 0.05 percent each year. The population would continue to grow slowly but surely, although catastrophic scourges such as the Black Death—blamed for killing up to half of all Europeans during the 14th century—imposed periodic setbacks. When the Industrial Revolution took off in the mid-1700s, life expectancy trended upward as child mortality plummeted, resulting in a population explosion that brought the total number of humans to 1 billion by 1800.

history.com

5 Comments on "How fast is the world’s population growing?"

BillT on Thu, 20th Dec 2012 1:38 pm 



Blame Dr. Sulk … and Louis Pasteur.

Charlie Bucket on Thu, 20th Dec 2012 2:26 pm 



, and Earl Butz – Mr. fencerow to fencerow himself.

ken nohe on Thu, 20th Dec 2012 3:43 pm 



80 Million is unfortunately not the number of people being born every year but the increase after subtracting the number of people dying: quite different.

Kenz300 on Thu, 20th Dec 2012 4:22 pm 



Every country needs to develop a plan to balance its population with its resources, food, water, energy and jobs. THose that do not will be exporting their populations and their problems.

If you can not provide for yourself you can not provide for a child. It seems the poorest people in the world are having the most children dooming themselves and their children to a cycle of poverty, hunger and despair.

Access to family planning services needs to be available to all that want it.

BillT on Fri, 21st Dec 2012 12:33 am 



Kenz, it is way too late for any of your worn out ideas just as it is way too late to try to switch from fossil fuels to renewables. We blew it last century and now we live with those decisions.