According to the United Nations, a baby born somewhere on Tuesday will be the world’s eighth billionth individual.
“The milestone is an opportunity to celebrate diversity and progress while reflecting on humanity’s shared duty for the planet,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a statement.
The United Nations credits the increase to human development, with people living longer lives as a result of advancements in public health, nutrition, personal cleanliness, and medicine.
It is also the outcome of rising fertility rates, especially in the world’s poorest nations, the majority of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa, which jeopardizes their development aspirations.
Population increase has exacerbated the environmental consequences of economic progress.
While some fear that eight billion people are too numerous for the world, most experts believe the larger issue is the wealthy’s overconsumption of resources.
“Some express worry that our globe is overpopulated,” said Natalia Kanem, head of the United Nations Population Fund. “I am here to state unequivocally that the sheer number of human lives is not reason for concern.”
According to Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Populations, there are two sides to the question of how many people the Earth can support: natural limits and human choices.
Humans consume far more biological resources, such as forests and land, than the planet can regenerate each year as a result of our choices.
Overconsumption of fossil fuels, for example, increases carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to global warming.
“We are foolish. We lack foresight. We are greedy. We do not use the information we have. That is where the choices and issues reside,” Cohen explained.
However, he opposes the notion that humans are a plague on the world, arguing that people should be given more options.
The present world population is more than three times that of 1950, when there were 2.5 billion people.
However, following a peak in the early 1960s, the world’s population growth rate has slowed dramatically, according to Rachel Snow of the UN Population Fund.
Annual growth has declined from a peak of 2.1 percent between 1962 and 1965 to less than one percent in 2020.
According to the United Nations, this might shrink to roughly 0.5 percent by 2050 if fertility rates continue to plummet.
The UN predicts that the world’s population will reach 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, and 10.4 billion in the 2080s.
Other groups, however, arrived to different conclusions.
In a 2020 study, the US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) predicted that the global population would peak by 2064, never reaching 10 billion, and then decline to 8.8 billion by 2100.
Since the first humans appeared in Africa over two million years ago, the world’s population has exploded, with only brief respites from the rising number of people sharing Earth.
To retain their nomadic lifestyle, our forefathers were hunter-gatherers who had fewer children than later established tribes.
Around 10,000 BC, agriculture was introduced, resulting in the first recorded big population surge.
Agriculture brought with it sedentarization and the capacity to stockpile food, which caused birth rates to skyrocket.
According to the French Institute for Demographic Studies, the global population increased from around six million in 10,000 BC to 100 million in 2,000 BC and then to 250 million in the first century AD.
Between 1300 and 1400, the human population fell from 429 to 374 million as a result of the Black Death.
Other calamities, such as the Justinian Plague, which ravaged the Mediterranean for two centuries from 541 to 767, and the battles of the early Middle Ages in western Europe, also caused brief drops in the number of humans on Earth.
The population began to explode in the nineteenth century, owing largely to the development of modern medicine and agricultural industrialization, which increased global food supplies.
The world’s population has increased eightfold since 1800, from an estimated one billion to eight billion.