November 15, 2022, is the date that the United Nations says the world will reach a population of eight billion people. India will surpass China as Earth's most populous nation. The projection is from the UN's World Population Prospects 2022.
The projections further suggest the world population reach 8.5 billion by 2030 and 9.7 billion in 20250 before peaking at 10.4 billion souls by 2080. The population growth will remain at that level to at least 2100.
In 2011 the world reached seven billion.
Sustainability, urbanization, inequality, poverty, health, and global warming will further complicate the impacts of a rising population.
However, the annual World Population Prospect report, released on Monday to coincide with World Population Day, also notes that the global population is growing at its slowest rate since 1950, having fallen to less that one per cent in 2020.
Fertility, the report declares, has fallen markedly in recent decades for many countries: today, two-thirds of the global population lives in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 births per woman, roughly the level required for zero growth in the long run, for a population with low mortality.
In 61 countries or areas, the population is expected to decrease by at least one per cent over the next three decades, as a result of sustained low levels of fertility and, in some cases, elevated rates of emigration.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an effect on population change: global life expectancy at birth fell to 71 years in 2021 (down from 72.9 in 2019) and, in some countries, successive waves of the pandemic may have produced short-term reductions in numbers of pregnancies and births.
“Further actions by Governments aimed at reducing fertility would have little impact on the pace of population growth between now and mid-century, because of the youthful age structure of today’s global population,” said John Wilmoth, Director of the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).
Deceleration of growth will not occur until later in this century. Half of the population increase will occur in these eight countries; the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the United Republic of Tanzania.
By 2050 those over 65 years of age will be two times the number of children under the age of five.
From the Union of Concerned Scientists on the role of swelling human populations and the changing climate.
Here are the facts: climate change is caused by the heat-trapping emissions produced when we burn coal, oil, and gas, and cut down forests. Data show that these emissions are most closely connected to carbon-intensive production and consumption patterns, predominantly the carbon-intensive lifestyles of the relatively wealthy, both here in the United States and around the world. Fossil fuel companies, utilities, and their trade groups also bear significant responsibility: they have used their power, money and deceptive tactics to lock in carbon-intensive infrastructure and constrain choices individuals can make about their energy supply.
A misplaced focus on population growth as a key driver of past, present, and future climate change conflates a rise in emissions with an increase in people, rather than the real source of those emissions: an increase in cars, power plants, airplanes, industries, buildings, and other parts of our fossil fuel-dependent economy and lifestyles. Implicit in this faulty framing is the notion that all people contribute significantly to heat-trapping emissions. In fact, data show (PDF) that the richest 10 percent of the world’s population contributes 50 percent of annual global warming emissions.
A supremely unjust reality is that the impacts of climate change are falling disproportionately on the very populations that have contributed the least to the problem in the first place.
The correlation between the rise in global heat-trapping emissions and global population has also been misinterpreted and misused to advance discriminatory, racist, and xenophobic arguments for population control and against immigration. This has been particularly harmful to Black and Brown people, marginalized communities, and people who live in poverty—and it is specifically an attack on reproductive rights and the rights of women. “Population control” has even been used by terrorists and white supremacists as motivation for violent acts, such as the 2019 terrorist attacks in El Paso, TX and Christchurch, New Zealand.
The report does not mention the extreme damage that soaring population numbers will have on the world's biodiversity.