UN: The world’s population has now surpassed 8 billion

The world population has now surpassed 8 billionaccording to the official estimates of the UN, which considers that it is “an important milestone in human development” and a reminder “of our shared responsibility to care for our planet”.

For the UN “this unprecedented development” –in 1950 there were 2.5 billion people on Earth– is the result of “a progressive increase in life expectancy thanks to advances in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine”.

But population growth also poses major challenges for the poorest countries, where the greatest population growth is also observed.
While the Earth had less than a billion inhabitants by the 1800s, it took only 12 years for the population to grow from 7 to 8 billion.

Indication of demographic slowdown, it will take about 15 years for the population to reach 9 billion in 2037.

The UN predicts that the population will reach 10.4 billion in the 2080sbefore stabilizing by the end of the century.

“Behaviors”

The 8 billion mark was crossed at the time of the UN Climate Conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in which the weakness of the richest countries, which are mainly responsible for global warming, becomes clear once again , and the poor, who are most affected and need help to cope, to agree to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But, as the UN reminds us, “although demographics exacerbate the effects of economic growth on the environment”, “countries where consumption of natural resources and emissions of greenhouse gases are higher per capita are generally those where income per capita is higher and not those in which rapid population growth is observed’.

“Our impact on the planet is determined more by our behavior than by our numbers,” explained Jennifer Sciuba, a researcher at the Wilson Center.

India and China

The population explosion causes greater problems in countries where there is already great poverty.

“The ever-increasing birth rate, which causes rapid demographic growth, is both a symptom and a cause of slow progress in development,” says the UN.

India, a country with 1.4 billion inhabitants which will become the world’s most populous in 2023, surpassing China, will experience a rapid rise in its urban population in the coming decades, at a time when its megacities are already overcrowded and face shortages in basic infrastructure.

In Mumbai about 40% of the population lives in slumsovercrowded areas where people live in makeshift shelters and often have no running water, electricity or sanitation.

Global indicators hide a huge demographic diversity. More than half of the world’s population growth by 2050 will come from just 8 countries, according to the UN: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania.

At the end of the century the three most populous cities in the world will be in Africa: Lagos in Nigeria, Kinshasa in DR Congo and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

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