We are now 8 billion people – the most important images for this “milestone”

According to UN estimates, the world’s population today exceeds the eight billion mark. Little Damian from the Dominican Republic was chosen as number 8’000’000’000 as the first recorded baby born in the Dominican Republic on November 15, 2022.

This means that there are three times as many people on our planet today as there were in 1950. UN Secretary-General António Guterres nevertheless spoke of a “milestone”. The birth of the eight billionth human being is an opportunity to “celebrate diversity and progress, bearing in mind humanity’s shared responsibility for the planet.”

But soon we will be back with less. According to the UN, population growth has slowed significantly since the 1960s. Therefore, the increase can be expected to end within a few decades: the UN predicts a growth to 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and a peak of around 10.4 billion around 2086. show the evolution of the world’s population why this is so and what happens next.

About 75,000 years ago, modern humans suffered the most imminent decline in their population when, following the eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Sumatra, only 1,000 to 10,000 people worldwide were able to fend for themselves. Since then, people have spread across all continents and the world’s population began to increase, slowly at first.

According to the UN, there were already 200 million people on Earth around the year 0. From the year 1000, the world population started to grow at a faster pace. However, epidemics such as the plague and smallpox and wars repeatedly caused slumps.

After the year 1700, a rapid population growth began. For the first time in human history, the doubling time was on the order of centuries and finally decades. By the year 1803, the world’s population was over a billion people. About 200 years later it was already 6 billion and today the 8 billion mark has already been exceeded.

The world’s population has not yet passed its peak. What is certain is that it will continue to increase for the next 30 years – almost all demographers agree on this. What happens next depends on how the fertility rate develops. This is the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime. If it is 2.1, the population remains stable (assuming net migration is zero); if the rate drops below this limit, the population gradually decreases.

Fertility rates have fallen in almost all countries over the past thirty years – with all the differences. In Switzerland it was 1.46 in 2020. In at least 96 other countries, where about two-thirds of all people live, it has already fallen below the self-preservation value of 2.1. The world average is also approaching this magical limit – in 1964 it was still 5.1.

Based on the expected fertility rate for the coming years, the UN has developed three scenarios for how the world population could develop until the year 2100. With an average projection, the year 2086 with a maximum population of 10.431 billion will be the turning point. Previous UN projections were higher – six years ago, the organization projected a peak of 11.2 billion years in 2100.

Other demographics, such as those at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, came in with significantly lower numbers as early as 2020. According to a study published in The Lancet, the world population will peak at 9.7 billion by 2064. By the end of the century, that will drop to 8.8 billion. The main reasons for this are better education for girls and women and better access to contraceptives.

So by the end of the century we will be fewer. For some countries – including Poland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Japan and Thailand – the researchers predict a really drastic population decline, where the population will shrink by more than half. And China’s gargantuan population will shrink from 1.4 billion to an estimated 723 million in the next century.

On the one hand, the population decline has positive consequences, for example the burden on the environment and the pressure on scarce resources will decrease. However, the negative consequences of a shrinking population should not be underestimated, because shrinkage goes hand in hand with an aging society.

According to these figures, by the year 2100 there will be 2.49 billion people over the age of 65, while the number of people in work (aged 25 to 64) will only increase slightly to just under 5 billion. This means that fewer and fewer employees will have to finance the pensions of more and more older people in the future.

In practice: in the future every adult will have to take care of themselves, a child and half a pensioner. A financial burden that will be difficult to bear. In addition, the productivity of the already shrinking working population continues to fall, as the population itself is getting older on average. Experience shows that productivity declines steadily from the age of 50.

Affluent regions can offset population decline, at least for now, with increased immigration, but according to the UN, it will also decline in the future. A solution could be to involve the ‘young older people’ for longer in the economic process when life expectancy increases, thus reducing the workload.

However, the increasing burden of the rise in the population of retirement age is likely to have an impact on the fertility rate as well. When the economic situation is difficult, children are an economic burden that fewer and fewer people are predicted to want to carry. In addition, increased workload is likely to have negative reproductive effects.

Women in industrialized countries today are often faced with the choice of continuing their careers or having children. In many cases, raising a family is already postponed or even omitted altogether because of the financial burden. This phenomenon is likely to intensify further as society ages. The UN predicts that by 2086 more people will die than are born worldwide.

As a result of this development, consistent population policies are already being advocated in many countries to halt or at least slow down population decline. “For countries with high income and low birth rates, the best solutions for preserving current populations, economic growth and geopolitical security are open immigration rules and social policies that support families to have the number of children they want,” said IHME director. Christopher Murray for this reason.

So far, however, such a policy has only been implemented consistently in a few countries. Conservative governments try to control and limit migration as much as possible, and having children is still seen as a private matter in most industrialized countries.