The world's population growth...

...is expected to level off at around 9 billion by 2100

One of the potential problem’s with the world’s plunging poverty levels, exponential economic growth and increasing life expectancy (all broadly speaking ‘good things’) is that more developed nations use greater resources, and create more pollution per capita than less developed ones. This, combined with the rapidly increasing world population, leads many to believe we are heading towards an unavoidable resource crunch. Whether it be food, water or greenhouse gases - a growing, developing population cannot last forever.

You probably remember a graph like this from Geography lessons at school:

Source

This is quite a terrifying graph in many ways, and our extrapolating minds can’t help but see a near future of a simply untenable number of people on the planet.

But you probably didn’t see the graph at the top of this post in your Geography class. It shows the predicted future population, based on the most accurate forecasts from population experts. In short it predicts that population growth will decrease rapidly in the coming decades, with the global population peaking at around 10 billion and reducing to a roughly static 9 billion.

Why is this?

It’s actually pretty simple - as countries develop (and particularly as child mortality drops), families have fewer babies. When you don’t have to worry about a significant fraction of your children dying, you don’t need to over-compensate by having extra babies. So most families end up having an average of around 2 babies, roughly keeping the population steady.

Of course, 10 billion people is still a lot. We’re going to need to find ways to feed everyone (meat consumption also increases as countries develop, and as meat requires a relatively large amount of land per calorie, this is a problem), and to keep greenhouse gas production low despite a growing, developing population. These are big, complex issues, and we will need to work hard to solve them. But they are not intractable, and the potential of a long term future for the human race with a stable population, and a stable environment, is not unthinkable.

That’s something I didn’t know a month ago, and it makes me very cheerful!