Today, earth is inhabited by some 7 billion people. In any case, it exceeds by far the average growth rate of the human species (homo sapiens sapiens) that arose in Africa some 200.000 years ago. This contribution will discuss the more realistic scenarios for the future.Įven the rather modest Belgian demographic growth rate around the turn of this century (0.46%) is not sustainable in the long term. Nobody expects such a growth to actually occur. The demographic growth rate of the Philippines around the turn of the century (2% a year) has already created enormous challenges and is clearly unsustainable in the long term: such growth implies a doubling of the population every 35 years as a consequence of which there would be 152 million people by 2035, 304 million by 2070, and so on. The population of the Philippines on the other hand will continue to grow to a staggering 127 million citizens by 2050, according to the demographic projections of the United Nations (UN 2013). The population of Belgium has since then exceeded 11 million citizens, but it is unlikely that this number will rise to 12 million by the year 2050. By the year 2000, the population of the Western European monarchy had grown to 10 million citizens, while the South East Asian republic at the turn of the century already counted 76 million citizens. In the year 1900, Belgium and the Philippines had more or less the same population, around 7 million people. Key words: Fertility, family planning, world population, population growth, demographic transition, urbanization, population momentum, population projections. Finally, the paper outlines the debate about the consequences of the population explosion, involving poverty and food security, the impact on the natural environment, and migration flows. But in all scenarios, world population will continue to grow for some time due to population momentum. Improvements in education, reproductive health and child survival will be needed to speed up the decline of total fertility, particularly in Africa. Crucial for the long term trend will be the rate of decline of the number of births per woman, called total fertility. Next, the mechanisms behind unprecedented population growth are explained and plausible scenarios for future developments are discussed. This paper first charts the differences in population growth between the world regions. Total world population reached 7 billion just after 2010 and is expected to count 9 billion by 2045. Since then, growth rates have been increasing exponentially, reaching staggeringly high peaks in the 20th century and slowing down a bit thereafter. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the total world population crossed the threshold of 1 billion people for the first time in the history of the homo sapiens sapiens.
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