The increase in the number of inhabitants on the planet has accelerated at high speed since the 1800s and has only taken twelve years to go from seven to eight billion.
Article written by
Published
Update
Reading time : 1 min.
A symbolic threshold exceeded. The world population exceeds, Tuesday, November 15, the eight billion inhabitants, according to the official estimate of the United Nations. For the UN, “this unprecedented growth” is the result “of a progressive increase in the length of life thanks to the progress made in terms of public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine”.
While the Earth had less than a billion inhabitants until the 1800s, it took only twelve years to grow from seven to eight billion. A sign of its demographic slowdown, it will take about fifteen years to reach nine billion in 2037. The UN projects a “peak” to 10.4 billion in the 2080s and stagnation until the end of the century.
But the UN also sees a reminder, in the midst of COP27, of “our shared responsibility to take care of our planet”. “While population growth amplifies the environmental impact of economic development”, “the countries with the highest consumption of material resources and greenhouse gas emissions per capita are generally those where per capita income is the higher and not those where the population is increasing rapidly”, remind the United Nations.
In addition, Population growth also poses formidable challenges to the poorest countries, where it is most concentrated. “The persistence of high levels of fertility, driving rapid population growth, is both a symptom and a cause of slow development progress”, writes the UN. Thus, India, a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants, which will become the most populous in the world in 2023, surpassing China, should experience an explosion in its urban population in the coming decades with megacities already overpopulated and in lack of essential infrastructure.