The World's Population 2022

THE UNITED NATIONS DECLARES NOVEMBER 15, 2022 THE DAY OF EIGHT BILLION

     " In Just 12 Years We Have Added 1 Billion People To The World's Population, Where Are We Going To Be In 2050."

November 15, 2022, 6:05 A.M. ET By Yesica Ramirez-Alzate: Englebrook Independent News, Sources: United Nations Population Division & United Nations Department Of Economics & Social Affairs,

CALI, COL.- Ever since the beginning of mankind, it took just around 300,000 Years before one billion people populated the world. That was around the year 1804, when Richard Trevithick ran the first steam engine locomotive on rails, Lewis & Clark set out on their exploration of The Missouri River, and Theodore Burr built the first truss bridge across the Hudson River in Waterford, New York. 

     Since the first term of the United States President Barack Obama, we have added one billion people. Just a mere dozen years after reaching the seven billion mark. The World will most likely pass the eight billion mark in mid-November this year. The United Nations estimates are based on their demographic projections.

     The projections however are uncertain, and in parts of the world, the census data is decades old. During the Covid-19 Pandemic it was impossible for some nations to record every death. Even some computer models are possibly off by a year or more. 

     But Today, The United Nations is declaring November 15, 2022, as The Day of Eight Billion. There is no doubting this, as people are living longer, which is due to health care, cleaner water, and better standards in sanitation worldwide, all of which have reduced disease. Irrigation and fertilizer has been able to boost crop production, in turn has reduced famine worldwide. Today more children are being born, and fewer people are dying due to improved medical care. 

     Today, the challenges we face as the world's population continues to increase are substantial. Pollution and the overfishing are destroying many areas of the oceans. Wildlife continues to vanish at an accelerated rate, as people worldwide cut down forests and fill in wetlands for development, farming, and products made from trees. Further, as a changing climate which is driven by a global energy system that is vastly powered by fossil fuels is now becoming the greatest threat to our ecosystem, our food security and to our water for drinking and farming. 

     The risks and opportunities of our population boom and parallel resource crisis depend mostly on decisions that we have not made. Which will control our future, with the billions of mouths we have to feed, or the billions we need to employ.

     In the meantime, our overall population growth calls into question different types of demographic change taking shape around the world, and the world's top demographers do not agree where are population is going from here.

     Population changes vary dramatically. The world is now facing the prospect of a huge population explosion and at the same time a collapse. The most significant just happens to be on opposite sides of the world.

     Today in 2022, for the first time in history, China will no longer be the world's largest populated nation, as India finally surpasses China. Even before China's one-birth policy, which went into effect in 1980,  births in China have been declining continuously. In the 1970s, the birth rate dropped by half. With increasing opportunities for better education and job careers, many more women are delaying childbirth, resulting in women being out of the childbearing age. 

     Even with one of the longest life expectancies in the world, at 85-years, China's population of 1.4 billion has started to decline. The workforce in China has been shrinking for the past decade. Today there are barely two workers supporting every retiree or child. During the next 25-years, China will come to see 300 million people over the age of sixty, which will put a substantial strain on government resources. According to a report, health care costs are expected to double over those next 25-years.

     On the other hand, in Africa, trends are moving quickly in the other direction. Across the Sahel, the population is expanding rapidly. In Nigeria the median age is just 17, less than half that of China. Birth rates are falling, too, but remain 20 times higher than China. Food security is already a concern. More than one third of the country's population lives in extreme poverty, a number greater than any country, including India, which is six times larger. A third of all households include one adult that skips meals at a time for the family to survive. 

     The country's current population stands at 216 million, and the country's population by some estimates could quadruple by the end of the century. By then it could have more people than China, which has ten times more land. But this all depends on childbirth rates. These predictions are driven by assumptions, and the fact is the reality could be much different. 

     The biggest factor in falling birthrates is education, especially for girls. A decade ago, researchers determined that the increasing access to education could slow the world's population growth by one billion by mid-century. How much and quickly we expand those educational opportunities over the next few decades are among the unanswered questions that will determine how many of us will be living in the world as we approach 2100. 

     The United Nations, a group of researchers at The University of Washington, and other experts in Europe mostly agree on what to expect in the next 25-years. Based on past events, at least a few expect another deadly world pandemic quite soon. Despite crises like the current war in Ukraine, neither do demographers yet foresee worldwide mass migration by 2050. most experts see the population increasing to over nine billion by then.

     Following that, projections vary greatly. A few years ago, The United Nations estimated that by the year 2100, the world's population could explode to eleven billion. In the beginning of this year, The United Nations revised those estimates downward, to about 10.4 billion, thanks to progress in reducing the average number of children born per family. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, in Vienna, in 2018, researchers projected the world population could rise to 9.7 billion in 2070 and then fall back to approximately 9 billion the end of the century. They used different assumptions, mainly by asking world experts to weigh in.

     Meanwhile at Seattle's Institute for Health Metrics, researchers see population peaking worldwide at roughly 9.7 billion in 2064, but dropping down to 8.8 billion or possibly less, by the end of the century. Populations could decrease by half across nearly two dozen countries, including Spain, and Bulgaria. The difference is based on a complex method that researchers use to estimate future birth rates.

    In addition to the differences between models, all the researchers agree that efforts so far to include climate change into future population estimates so far have been inadequate. In part because the potential effect largely depends on how quickly the world reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Part of the difficulty lies in assessing climate impacts.

     Extreme heat could make parts of the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and India uninhabitable. Storms could also create food insecurities. Many researchers are contemplating how people will respond to sea-level rise in heavily populated coastal regions.

     Aside from world population estimates, climate change and politics also will likely influence migration between countries. The population in The United States and Western Europe has been largely sustained by immigration, but this has become a political hot bed. Some countries with declining populations, such as Japan, have been very reluctant to welcome immigrants. 

     Still the unbalanced trends, between growing and declining populations, exacerbated by climate change, will almost certainly increase migration, and vastly increased in The United States and Western Europe Countries over the past two years.

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