Figure 1: the current world population structure
Will the world’s population ever exceed 11 billion?
T
he number of people living in the world is a topical and important issue with the world’s population at the highest it has ever been and still growing. This has led many to suggest that the world’s population may be growing exponentially. If the population of the world does continue to increase in this way then that increases the strain on the Earth’s resources. This is called overpopulation. Many geographers have given their opinion on the impacts and severity of overpopulation with some, such as Paul R Ehrlich and Thomas Malthus, fearing the worst for humanity and the environment and others, like Ester Boserup, saying that the advances of technology will increase the amount of people that can live on earth. However, there is another viewpoint that can be taken, and that is the view that the population
Joel of the earth is not a problem and will naturally start to decrease without the doomsday situation that some people fear. One of the people to have this viewpoint is Hans Rosling. Rosling thinks that the population of the world will never exceed 11 billion due to one thing: age structure. Rosling breaks down the structure of the world’s population into age groups and rounds the number of each group into billions, with each block representing one billion people in that age group. He describes what will happen in the next 15 years. The old die, the rest grow 15 years older and two billion new children will be born because the birth rate is likely to stay roughly at replacement level. This happens again after another 15 years. This will fill-up the population structure with an extra three billion adults and leave the earth’s population at 10 billion
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people. Rosling describes this increase as “inevitable”. This is where Rosling’s point that the population will never exceed 11 billion is shown. He says that from 2045 for 15 years the top two billion will die and everyone will age by 15 years, with another two billion children being born. The final step is that by this time (around 2100) the average life expectancy of the world will increase and so this adds an extra one billion people on the top, in the oldest age group. This is the end of population growth and the population will not exceed 11 billion. This view is backed up by statistics that show that, despite the population of the world increasing, the rate of this increase is falling and has been since 1962 when it was 2.2%. The rate is now just 1.05% which shows the rapid decline in rate of growth.
