Scientists have said the world’s population is likely to reach 11 billion by the end of the century, overturning the consensus that it would peak by 2050 at about 9 billion.
Research released on Thursday shows there is a 70 percent chance that the number of people on the planet is going to rise continuously from 7 billion today to 11 billion in 2100, which would pose grave challenges for food supplies, healthcare and social cohesion.
“The previous projections said this problem was going to go away so it took the focus off the population issue,” said Adrian Raftery, a professor at the University of Washington, who led the international research team. “There is now a strong argument that population should return to the top of the international agenda. Population is the driver of just about everything else and rapid population growth can exacerbate all kinds of challenges.”
Lack of healthcare, poverty, pollution and rising unrest and crime are all problems linked to booming populations, he added.
“Population policy has been abandoned in recent decades. It is barely mentioned in discussions on sustainability or development, such as the UN-led sustainable development goals,” said Simon Ross, chief executive of Population Matters, a think tank supported by naturalist Sir David Attenborough and scientist James Lovelock.
“The significance of the new work is that it provides greater certainty. Specifically, it is highly likely that, given current policies, the world population will be between 40 to 75 percent larger than today in the lifetime of many of today’s children and will still be growing at that point,” Ross said.
Many widely accepted analyses of global problems, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessment of global warming, assume a population peak by 2050.
Sub-Saharan Africa is set to be by far the fastest-growing region, with the population rocketing from 1 billion today to between 3.5 billion and 5 billion in 2100. Previously, the fall in fertility rates that began in the 1980s in many African countries was expected to continue, but the most recent data shows this has not happened.
In countries like Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation, the decline has stalled completely with the average woman bearing six children. Nigeria’s population is expected to soar from 200 million today to 900 million by 2100.
The cause of the fertility rate is two-fold, Raftery said: a failure to meet the need for contraception and a continued preference for large families.
“The unmet need for contraception — at 25 percent of women — has not changed for 20 years,” he said.
The preference for large families is linked to lack of female education, which limits women’s life choices, Raftery said.
In Nigeria, 28 percent of girls still do not complete primary education.
Another key factor included for the first time was new data on the HIV/AIDS epidemic showing it is not claiming as many lives as once anticipated.
“Twenty years ago the impact on population was absolutely gigantic,” Raftery said. “Now the accessibility of antiretroviral drugs is much greater and the epidemic appears to have passed its peak and was not quite as bad as was feared.”
The research, conducted by an international team, including UN experts, is published in the journal Science and for the first time uses advanced statistics to place convincing upper and lower limits on future population growth.
Previous estimates were based on judgments of future trends made by researchers, a “somewhat vague and subjective” approach, Raftery said.
This predicted the world’s population would range somewhere between 7 billion and 16 billion by 2100.
“This interval was so huge to be essentially meaningless and therefore it was ignored,” he said.
However, the new research narrows the future range to between 9.6 billion and 12.3 billion by 2100. This greatly increased certainty — 80 percent — allowed the researchers to be confident that global population is not going to peak any time during the 21st century.
Another population concern is the aging populations of Europe and Japan, which raise questions about how working populations are going to support large numbers of elderly people. The new research shows the same issue is set to affect countries whose populations are very young today.
Brazil, for example, currently has 8.6 people of working age for every person over 65, but that will fall to 1.5 by 2100, well below the current level in Japan. China and India are set to face the same issue as Brazil, Raftery said.
“The problem of aging societies will be on them, in population terms, before they know it and their governments should be making plans,” he added.
In separate work, published on Monday last week, Vienna Institute of Demography director Wolfgang Lutz highlighted education as crucial in not only reducing birth rates but also enabling people to prosper even while populations are growing fast.
In Ghana, for example, women without education have an average of 5.7 children, while women with secondary education have 3.2 and women with tertiary education only 1.5.
“[However], it is not primarily the number of people that’s important in population policy, it’s what they are capable of, their level of education, and their health,” Lutz said.
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