According to a new United Nations report, the world’s population is expected to grow to an estimated 10.3 billion by the mid-2080s.
This is an increase from the current world population of 8.2 billion.
The UN report identified the following demographic trends:
- The estimated size of the world’s population at the end of this century (2100) is expected to be 6% smaller than estimated ten years ago.
- Across the world, one in four people live in a country whose population has already peaked.
- In 63 countries, the population size will peak by 2024. These countries include China, Germany, Japan and the Russian Federation.
World population is growing dramatically
The United Nations Population Fund announced that the world’s population surpassed 7 billion in 2011. Historically, it took hundreds of thousands of years to reach one billion, after which the population increased seven-fold in about two centuries, the UN said.
The recent dramatic increase is mainly due to more people surviving to reproductive age, increasing urbanization, and large-scale migration.
The Census Bureau said calculating future population numbers is not a perfect science because “there are many uncertainties in world population estimates.” The Census Bureau estimated that the world population had reached 8 billion last September, though the United Nations predicted the milestone almost a year ago.
The world’s population is ageing
According to a United Nations report, by 2080, the population of people aged 65 and over is expected to outnumber the population of children under 18. The elderly population is expected to reach 2.2 billion.
By the mid-2030s, there will be 265 million people aged 80 or over, outnumbering babies under one year old.
The most populous place in the United States
The current population of the United States is 341.8 million. While the UN report doesn’t specify how much the US population will grow, it is one of 126 countries projected to experience population growth through the 2050s.
According to the bureau, California is the most populous state in the country with approximately 39.1 million people, followed by Texas with approximately 30.5 million. New York City is the most populous city with more than 8.3 million residents.
Last year’s population gains were driven mostly by the South, the most populous region and the only one to have maintained population growth throughout the pandemic, according to the Census Bureau.
Texas will add more residents than any other state, welcoming more than 473,000 new residents, followed by Florida, which will welcome 365,000 new residents between 2022 and 2023.
Contributor: Mina Arshad, USA TODAY