POPULATION

Population Growth

The total number of living humans on Earth is now greater than 7 billion. This large world population size is only a very recent development. Just around 200 years ago the world population was less than 1 billion. Due to poverty, high mortality rates and recurring crises the world population grew only very slowly in millennia before the onset of the Enlightenment. Since the 18th century, the world population has seen a rapid increase; between 1900 and 2000 the increase in world population was three times as great as the increase during the entire previous history of humankind – in just 100 years the world population increased from 1.5 to 6.1 billion.
But this development is now coming to an end, and we will not experience a similarly rapid increase in population growth over the course of this century. To see this, it is helpful to not look at the increasing total population but at the rate of growth. We already reached the maximum in 1964 when the growth rate of the world population was 2.1% per year.
World history can be divided into three periods of distinct trends in population growth. The first period (per-modernity) was a very long age of very slow population growth. The second period, beginning with the onset of modernity (with rising standards of living and improving health) and lasting until 1962, had an increasing rate of growth. Now that period is over, and the third part of the story has begun: the population growth rate is falling and will continue to fall, leading to an end of growth before the end of this century.

population growth