There are more and more of us on the planet every day. The United Nations (UN) has just published its new report on the evolution of the world population: by November 15, the bar of 8 billion Earthlings will be exceeded, i.e. 1 billion more humans than in 2010. However, these figures should not hide the fact that “population growth has been continuously decelerating for 70 years”explains Gilles Pison, professor at the National Museum of Natural History and scientific adviser to the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED).
franceinfo: There will be 8 billion human beings by November… Is there room for everyone?
Gilles Pison: We were already asking ourselves the question when we were only a billion on the planet. It was two centuries ago, it is a recurring question. The observation is that we are more and more numerous. But population growth has been decelerating for 70 years. The population is growing at the rate of 1% per year and the rate is expected to continue to decline in the coming decades. The UN predicts a stabilization of 10.5 billion people on Earth in the 2080s. This is because humans have chosen to have few children. And this is true everywhere, in more and more places on the planet. The main consequence is a stabilization, a zero growth in the long term of the population, perhaps even a reduction.
“In two-thirds of the countries in the world, couples now have fewer than two children on average.”
Gilles Pison, demographerat franceinfo
The UN has also counted that the Covid-19 had caused an excess mortality of 14.9 million people. Will this induce demographic changes in the future?
No None. This does not change the trends in any way, it represents a 12% increase in deaths for the years 2020 and 2021 alone. The assumption is that the Covid-19 had a temporary effect and that from 2022, life expectancy is returning to pre-pandemic levels and trends. This is often what we observe and therefore it will have changed very little of the figures announced for the next few decades.
The Indians will soon outnumber the Chinese. Is it a source of upheaval?
There too, it was announced. Even if the revision of the figures by the UN means that the date of overtaking China by India has been advanced. We knew it would take place before 2030, but now we know it will be the case next year. And it’s not so much from India’s faster growth, which follows its evolutions. This is because the figures for China have been seriously revised downwards because of the observation that the Chinese men and women are having fewer and fewer children, much fewer than we imagined. This despite the pronatalist policy of the Chinese government which wishes to support the birthrate. This is one of the major lessons of these projections: China will see its population decline in the coming decades. The country is at its peak and it could lose almost half of its population in numbers by 2100.