How many people

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The global population hit 3 billion in , 4 billion in , 5 billion in and 6 billion in , according to the United Nations. There were an estimated 7 billion people in the world as of Oct. The U. In , a report published by the United Nations predicted that the global population annual growth rate would fall to less than 0.

Related: Why global population growth will grind to a halt by Over the last 50 years, the composition of the world population, or the number of people in various demographic categories such as nationality, ethnicity and age, has changed because the nature of population growth isn't uniform across the regions of the world.

Populations in certain areas are growing more quickly than others due to differences in fertility and mortality rates, as well as differing patterns of migration. In general, demographers have identified four demographic "mega-trends" that can help explain these changes in the composition of the global population: overall population growth, aging, increasing international migration and urbanization. These are overarching themes that broadly point to how and why the global population will change in the coming years.

For the vast majority of human history, the global population grew relatively slowly. Historical demographers have estimated that about 4 million people lived on Earth in 10, B. That number grew to about million people at the dawn of the first millennia, at A. The average annual population growth rate was 0. By , there were approximately 1 billion people living in the world, per the same source.

The Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century spurred an acceleration in the global population growth rate that lasted for the next years, leading up to the world's two-billionth human being born in By the middle of the century, advances in public health, especially the discovery of antibiotics, increased the average life expectancy, and the number of people on the planet surged. Thirty-three years after the global population hit 2 billion, in , the global population hit 3 billion.

The growth rate during the last half of the s hit an all-time peak, averaging 2. Population growth exploded in the later half of the 20th century due to a number of reasons, including a widespread decline in mortality, especially among children, said Sara Hertog, a demographer with the United Nations.

By the s, the popularization of contraception helped slow population growth once again. But because so many humans were already on the planet, a so-called "population explosion" was beginning to take place, and the global population reached 4 billion in Several media outlets are already crunching the data and drawing such conclusions.

Some statisticians argue that, as the first wave of the pandemic recedes in many places, comparisons can — and should — be made between government policies to see how they might have affected mortality. The process can be skewed by the random way that some early outbreaks spread and others fizzle out, making analysis complicated until the pandemic has run its course, says Jennifer Dowd, a demographer and epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

When deaths began creeping up in Europe, Lasse Vestergaard was one of the first to notice. Infections were slipping under the radar because of a lack of testing, and because different countries counted deaths in different ways — excluding deaths occurring in care homes, for instance. It was nearly impossible to get a true sense of how countries were faring. Mourners attend a burial in Manaus, Brazil.

So researchers, journalists and politicians turned to calculations of excess deaths. Rather than getting bogged down by cause, the metric compares all deaths in a given week or month with the deaths that statisticians predict would have happened in the absence of the pandemic, usually as an average over the previous five years.

More-sophisticated versions model how a population is ageing, or how it is changing as a result of immigration and emigration, although these additions can make it tricky to compare countries. Some analyses of excess deaths, such as a 30 July report released by the UK Office for National Statistics, standardize their mortality rates to control for differences in the age structure of populations between different countries see go.

Because officials can register the occurrence of a death relatively quickly if they are not logging the cause at the same time, these statistics can be compiled much faster than can cause-specific data. Nature gathered figures from several databases maintained by demographers, as well as from trackers run by The Financial Times and The Economist , two of the most comprehensive data sets on excess deaths.

Although the coverage is not universal — it lists 32 countries largely in Europe and 4 major world cities — it includes many nations with major outbreaks and comprises about two-thirds of the official COVID death toll up to the end of July.

And some countries, such as Bulgaria, have even experienced negative excess deaths during the pandemic so far — meaning that, despite the virus, fewer people have died this year than expected. The blunt tool of excess mortality is the best one to use during the pandemic, say most demographers. Direct deaths feature on pandemic trackers showing numbers of cases and deaths, which are generally updated daily by local and national health authorities. How the pandemic might play out in and beyond.

It can be challenging to differentiate between people who died of COVID and those who were infected but died from unrelated causes. Such a system would mean waiting for cause-of-death data, which take around a year to compile in full. Researchers are already looking back at the first six months of the pandemic and adding in those deaths that were misclassified at the time. Our own estimate based on UN data shows the world's population surpassing 7.

China is the most populous country in the world with a population exceeding 1. It is one of just two countries with a population of more than 1 billion, with India being the second.

As of , India has a population of over 1. By the year , the country of India is expected to become the most populous country in the world. The next 11 countries that are the most populous in the world each have populations exceeding million. Of these nations, all are expected to continue to grow except Russia and Japan, which will see their populations drop by before falling again significantly by Many other nations have populations of at least one million, while there are also countries that have just thousands.

The smallest population in the world can be found in Vatican City , where only people reside. Every five years since the s, the population growth rate has continued to fall.

By , the population will exceed 8 billion. In , this number will grow to more than 9 billion. The current annual population growth estimates from the United Nations are in the millions - estimating that over 80 million new lives are added each year. This population growth will be significantly impacted by nine specific countries which are situated to contribute to the population growth more quickly than other nations.

Particularly of interest, India is on track to overtake China's position as the most populous country by the year Additionally, multiple nations within Africa are expected to double their populations before fertility rates begin to slow entirely. Global life expectancy has also improved in recent years, increasing the overall population life expectancy at birth to just over 70 years of age. The projected global life expectancy is only expected to continue to improve - reaching nearly 77 years of age by the year Population aging has a massive impact on the ability of the population to maintain what is called a support ratio.

One key finding from is that the majority of the world is going to face considerable growth in the 60 plus age bracket. This will put enormous strain on the younger age groups as the elderly population is becoming so vast without the number of births to maintain a healthy support ratio.