The world's population first reached one billion people in 1803, and reach eight billion in 2023, and will peak at almost 11 billion by the end of the century. Although it took thousands of years to reach one billion people, it did so at the beginning of a phenomenon known as the demographic transition; from this point onwards, population growth has skyrocketed, and since the 1960s the population has increased by one billion people every 12 to 15 years. The demographic transition sees a sharp drop in mortality due to factors such as vaccination, sanitation, and improved food supply; the population boom that follows is due to increased survival rates among children and higher life expectancy among the general population; and fertility then drops in response to this population growth. Regional differences The demographic transition is a global phenomenon, but it has taken place at different times across the world. The industrialized countries of Europe and North America were the first to go through this process, followed by some states in the Western Pacific. Latin America's population then began growing at the turn of the 20th century, but the most significant period of global population growth occurred as Asia progressed in the late-1900s. As of the early 21st century, almost two thirds of the world's population live in Asia, although this is set to change significantly in the coming decades. Future growth The growth of Africa's population, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, will have the largest impact on global demographics in this century. From 2000 to 2100, it is expected that Africa's population will have increased by a factor of almost five. It overtook Europe in size in the late 1990s, and overtook the Americas a decade later. In contrast to Africa, Europe's population is now in decline, as birth rates are consistently below death rates in many countries, especially in the south and east, resulting in natural population decline. Similarly, the population of the Americas and Asia are expected to go into decline in the second half of this century, and only Oceania's population will still be growing alongside Africa. By 2100, the world's population will have over three billion more than today, with the vast majority of this concentrated in Africa. Demographers predict that climate change is exacerbating many of the challenges that currently hinder progress in Africa, such as political and food instability; if Africa's transition is prolonged, then it may result in further population growth that would place a strain on the region's resources, however, curbing this growth earlier would alleviate some of the pressure created by climate change.

For decades, biogeographers have sought a better understanding of how organisms are distributed among islands. However, the island biogeography of humans remains largely unknown. Here, we investigate how human population size varies among 486 islands at two spatial scales. At a global scale, we tested whether population size increases with island area and declines with island elevation and nearest mainland, as is common in non-human species, or whether humans escape such biogeographic constraints. At a regional scale, we tested whether population sizes vary among islands within archipelagos according to the positioning of different cultural source pools. Results illustrate that on a global scale, human populations increased in size with island area, similar to non-human species, yet they did not decline in size with elevation and distance to nearest mainland. At a regional scale, human population size often varied among islands within archipelagos relative to the location of different cultural source pools. Despite broad-scale similarities in the geographical distribution of human and non-human species among islands, results from this study indicate that the island biogeography of humans may also be influenced by archipelago-specific social, political and historical circumstances.

Until the 1800s, population growth was incredibly slow on a global level. The global population was estimated to have been around 188 million people in the year 1CE, and did not reach one billion until around 1803. However, since the 1800s, a phenomenon known as the demographic transition has seen population growth skyrocket, reaching eight billion people in 2023, and this is expected to peak at over 10 billion in the 2080s.

World Population Data Set

The population explosion has been a serious topic for years and this data set helps us to analyze that on a granular level.

This dataset contains data about the population count and census data for each country in the world. The data set spans from 1950 to 2013. This data set is acquired from "data.world" website and all the credits go to them

Existing studies show how population growth and rising incomes will cause a massive increase in the future global demand for food. We add to the literature by estimating the potential effect of increases in human weight, caused by rising BMI and height, on future calorie requirements. Instead of using a market based approach, the estimations are solely based on human energy requirements for maintenance of weight. We develop four different scenarios to show the effect of increases in human height and BMI. In a world where the weight per age-sex group would stay stable, we project calorie requirements to increases by 61.05 percent between 2010 and 2100. Increases in BMI and height could add another 18.73 percentage points to this. This additional increase amounts to more than the combined calorie requirements of India and Nigeria in 2010. These increases would particularly affect Sub-Saharan African countries, which will already face massively rising calorie requirements due to the high population growth. The stark regional differences call for policies that increase food access in currently economically weak regions. Such policies should shift consumption away from energy dense foods that promote overweight and obesity, to avoid the direct burden associated with these conditions and reduce the increases in required calories. Supplying insufficient calories would not solve the problem but cause malnutrition in populations with weak access to food. As malnutrition is not reducing but promoting rises in BMI levels, this might even aggravate the situation.

Historical chart and dataset showing World population growth rate by year from 1961 to 2023.

Aim: To show how recent declines in populations of long-distance migrant birds are associated with recent increases in human population growth and agricultural intensification on their tropical non-breeding grounds, except for synanthropic species, where we expect the reverse.

Location: Breeding populations throughout Europe and North America spending the non-breeding season throughout Africa, and Central and South America, respectively.

Methods: We mapped 50 species of long-distance migrant birds from published tagging studies of 126 breeding populations and identified their breeding population trends from 2000-2015 from published Country or State census data. We then matched individual bird non-breeding locations, from each population, to local human population change and crop yield data. We used GLMs to predict whether bird population decline was associated with human population change or crop yield and whether this was dependent on if a species was synanthropic or not, contro...

The evolutionary timing and spread of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC), one of the most successful groups of bacterial pathogens, remains largely unknown. Here, using mycobacterial tandem repeat sequences as genetic markers, we show that the MTBC consists of two independent clades, one composed exclusively of M. tuberculosis lineages from humans and the other composed of both animal and human isolates. The latter also likely derived from a human pathogenic lineage, supporting the hypothesis of an original human host. Using Bayesian statistics and experimental data on the variability of the mycobacterial markers in infected patients, we estimated the age of the MTBC at 40,000 years, coinciding with the expansion of “modern” human populations out of Africa. Furthermore, coalescence analysis revealed a strong and recent demographic expansion in almost all M. tuberculosis lineages, which coincides with the human population explosion over the last two centuries. These findings thus unveil the dynamic dimension of the association between human host and pathogen populations.

Urban rats are notorious invasive pests that thrive in cities by exploiting the resources accompanying high human population density. Identifying long-term trends in rat numbers and how they are shaped by environmental changes is critical for understanding their ecology, and projecting future vulnerabilities and mitigation needs. Here, we use trend analyses of public complaint and inspection data in 16 cities around the world to estimate trends in commensal rat populations. Eleven of 16 cities (69%) had significant increasing trends in rat numbers, including Washington D.C., New York, and Amsterdam. Just three cities experienced declines. Cities experiencing greater temperature increases over time saw larger increases in rat numbers. Cities with more dense human populations and more urbanization also saw larger increases in rats. Warming temperatures and more people living in cities may be expanding the seasonal activity periods and food resource availability for urban rats. Cities will..., , , # Increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to climate warming, urbanization and human population

https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3xsj3txrq

Description of the data and file structure

The dataset consists of an Excel file (with two sheets such as data and metadata).

Files and variables

File: Richardson_et_al_ScienceAdv_wild_rat_trend_analysis_data_19Apr24.xlsx

Description:Â Please see the "Metadata" sheet tab within this data file for more information on each variable, abbreviations, etc.Â

Code/Software

This is a basic spreadsheet file, viewable in Excel or Google Sheets. All subsequent analyses with these data were done in R.

Population figures for countries, regions (e.g. Asia) and the world. Data comes originally from World Bank and has been converted into standard CSV.

The data is sourced from this World Bank dataset which in turn lists as sources: (1) United Nations Population Division. World Population Prospects, (2) United Nations Statistical Division. Population and Vital Statistics Report (various years), (3) Census reports and other statistical publications from national statistical offices, (4) Eurostat: Demographic Statistics, (5) Secretariat of the Pacific Community: Statistics and Demography Program me, and (6) U.S. Census Bureau: International Database.

This statistic shows the 20 countries with the highest population growth rate in 2024. In SouthSudan, the population grew by about 4.65 percent compared to the previous year, making it the country with the highest population growth rate in 2024. The global population Today, the global population amounts to around 7 billion people, i.e. the total number of living humans on Earth. More than half of the global population is living in Asia, while one quarter of the global population resides in Africa. High fertility rates in Africa and Asia, a decline in the mortality rates and an increase in the median age of the world population all contribute to the global population growth. Statistics show that the global population is subject to increase by almost 4 billion people by 2100. The global population growth is a direct result of people living longer because of better living conditions and a healthier nutrition. Three out of five of the most populous countries in the world are located in Asia. Ultimately the highest population growth rate is also found there, the country with the highest population growth rate is Syria. This could be due to a low infant mortality rate in Syria or the ever -expanding tourism sector.

GO categories enriched in genes associated with the selected SNPs. (XLSX 18 kb)

In 2022, India overtook China as the world's most populous country and now has almost 1.46 billion people. China now has the second-largest population in the world, still with just over 1.4 billion inhabitants, however, its population went into decline in 2023. Global population As of 2025, the world's population stands at almost 8.2 billion people and is expected to reach around 10.3 billion people in the 2080s, when it will then go into decline. Due to improved healthcare, sanitation, and general living conditions, the global population continues to increase; mortality rates (particularly among infants and children) are decreasing and the median age of the world population has steadily increased for decades. As for the average life expectancy in industrial and developing countries, the gap has narrowed significantly since the mid-20th century. Asia is the most populous continent on Earth; 11 of the 20 largest countries are located there. It leads the ranking of the global population by continent by far, reporting four times as many inhabitants as Africa. The Demographic Transition The population explosion over the past two centuries is part of a phenomenon known as the demographic transition. Simply put, this transition results from a drastic reduction in mortality, which then leads to a reduction in fertility, and increase in life expectancy; this interim period where death rates are low and birth rates are high is where this population explosion occurs, and population growth can remain high as the population ages. In today's most-developed countries, the transition generally began with industrialization in the 1800s, and growth has now stabilized as birth and mortality rates have re-balanced. Across less-developed countries, the stage of this transition varies; for example, China is at a later stage than India, which accounts for the change in which country is more populous - understanding the demographic transition can help understand the reason why China's population is now going into decline. The least-developed region is Sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates remain close to pre-industrial levels in some countries. As these countries transition, they will undergo significant rates of population growth

The Arabian Peninsula, a pivotal Africa-Eurasia land bridge, is crucial for understanding the human evolution and global dispersal. Orbital-scale increases in monsoonal precipitation periodically transformed the peninsula into widespread savannahs—termed “Green Arabian” periods (GAPs), which facilitated recurrent human occupation. GAPs fundamentally modulated Pleistocene population connectivity and demography between continents. Despite analysis of extensive archaeological remains from the Arabian Peninsula over the last decade, the regional environmental context of human dispersals remains poorly understood due to the absence of continuous paleoenvironmental records from hominin habitats, especially for the Pleistocene. Fortunately, an alternative to terrestrial sediments is marine dust record emanated from the Arabian Peninsula, since they are continuous and well-dated and have the potential to trace the aridity shifts. Here we present multi-proxy and high-resolution Arabian dust records from the western equatorial Indian Ocean spanning the last 500 kyr, to assess orbital-scale hydrological variations as regulators of human populations in Arabia.

Describing the drivers of species loss and of community change are important goals in both conservation and ecology. However, it is difficult to determine whether exploited species decline due to direct effects of harvesting or due to other environmental perturbations brought about by proximity to human populations. Here we quantify differences in species richness of coral reef fish communities along a human population gradient in Papua New Guinea to understand the relative impacts of fishing and environmental perturbation. Using data from published species lists we categorize the reef fishes as either fished or non-fished based on their body size and reports from the published literature. Species diversity for both fished and non-fished groups decreases as the size of the local human population increases, and this relationship is stronger in species that are fished. Additionally, comparison of modern and museum collections show that modern reef communities have proportionally fewer fished species relative to 19th century ones. Together these findings show that the reef fish communities of Papua New Guinea experience multiple anthropogenic stressors and that even at low human population levels targeted species experience population declines across both time and space.

Human population growth and concomitant increases in demand for natural resources pose threats to many wildlife populations. The landscapes used by the endangered snow leopard (Panthera uncia) and their prey is increasingly subject to major changes in land use. We aimed to assess the influence of 1) key human activities, as indicated by the presence of mining and livestock herding, and 2) the presence of a key prey species, the blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur), on probability of snow leopard site use across the landscape. In Gansu Province, China, we conducted sign surveys in 49 grid cells, each of 16 km2 in size, within a larger area of 3392 km2. We analysed the data using likelihood-based habitat occupancy models that explicitly account for imperfect detection and spatial auto-correlation between survey transect segments. The model-averaged estimate of snow leopard occupancy was high [0.75 (SE 0.10)], but only marginally higher than the naïve estimate (0.67). Snow leopard segment-level probability of detection, given occupancy on a 500 m spatial replicate, was also high [0.68 (SE 0.08)]. Prey presence was the main determinant of snow leopard site use, while human disturbances, in the form of mining and herding, had low predictive power. These findings suggest that snow leopards continue to use areas very close to such disturbances, as long as there is sufficient prey. Improved knowledge about the effect of human activity on large carnivores, which require large areas and intact prey populations, is urgently needed for conservation planning at the local and global levels. We highlight a number of methodological considerations that should guide the design of such research.

European countries are experiencing population decline and the tacit assumption in most analyses is that the decline may have detrimental welfare effects. In this paper we use a survey among the population in the Netherlands to discover whether population decline is always met with fear. A number of results stand out: population size preferences differ by geographic proximity: at a global level the majority of respondents favors a (global) population decline, but closer to home one supports a stationary population. Population decline is clearly not always met with fear: 31 percent would like the population to decline at the national level and they generally perceive decline to be accompanied by immaterial welfare gains (improvement environment) as well as material welfare losses (tax increases, economic stagnation). In addition to these driving forces it appears that the attitude towards immigrants is a very strong determinant at all geographical levels: immigrants seem to be a stronger fear factor than population decline.

Glioma is the most common form of primary brain tumor. Demographically, the risk of occurrence increases until old age. Here we present a novel computational model to reproduce the probability of glioma incidence across the lifespan. Previous mathematical models explaining glioma incidence are framed in a rather abstract way, and do not directly relate to empirical findings. To decrease this gap between theory and experimental observations, we incorporate recent data on cellular and molecular factors underlying gliomagenesis. Since evidence implicates the adult neural stem cell as the likely cell-of-origin of glioma, we have incorporated empirically-determined estimates of neural stem cell number, cell division rate, mutation rate and oncogenic potential into our model. We demonstrate that our model yields results which match actual demographic data in the human population. In particular, this model accounts for the observed peak incidence of glioma at approximately 80 years of age, without the need to assert differential susceptibility throughout the population. Overall, our model supports the hypothesis that glioma is caused by randomly-occurring oncogenic mutations within the neural stem cell population. Based on this model, we assess the influence of the (experimentally indicated) decrease in the number of neural stem cells and increase of cell division rate during aging. Our model provides multiple testable predictions, and suggests that different temporal sequences of oncogenic mutations can lead to tumorigenesis. Finally, we conclude that four or five oncogenic mutations are sufficient for the formation of glioma.

This data set contains the information necessary to reproduce our article "Depenbusch L, Klasen S. The effect of bigger human bodies on the future global calorie requirements. PLoS ONE. 2019. Forthcoming" Abstract: Existing studies show how population growth and rising incomes will cause a massive increase in the future global demand for food. We add to the literature by estimating the potential effect of increases in human weight, caused by rising BMI and height, on future calorie requirements. Instead of using a market based approach, the estimations are solely based on human energy requirements for maintenance of weight. We develop four different scenarios to show the effect of increases in human height and BMI. In a world where the weight per age-sex group would stay stable, we project calorie requirements to increases by 61.05 percent between 2010 and 2100. Increases in BMI and height could add another 18.73 percentage points to this. This additional increase amounts to more than the combined calorie requirements of India and Nigeria in 2010. These increases would particularly affect Sub-Saharan African countries, which will already face massively rising calorie requirements due to the high population growth. The stark regional differences call for policies that increase food access in currently economically weak regions. Such policies should shift consumption away from energy dense foods that promote overweight and obesity, to avoid the direct burden associated with these conditions and reduce the increases in required calories. Supplying insufficient calories would not solve the problem but cause malnutrition in populations with weak access to food. As malnutrition is not reducing but promoting rises in BMI levels, this might even aggravate the situation. An earlier version appeared as GlobalFood Discussion Papers, No. 109. The data is stored as Stata Version 13 .dta file, and in Excel .xlsx format. In the Excel file the first row contains variable names, the second row contains variable labels. Age specifications in the label of the type "<=x" describe that the variable aggregates from the next smaller age group over all ages up to age "x".

Lakes are often described as sentinels of global change. Phenomena like lake eutrophication, algal blooms, or reorganization in community composition belong to the most studied ecosystem regime shifts. But, although regime shifts have been well documented in several lakes, a global assessment of the prevalence of regime shifts is still missing, and, more in general, of the factors altering stability in lake status, is missing. Here, we provide a first global assessment of regime shifts and stability in the productivity of 1,015 lakes worldwide using trophic state index (TSI) time series derived from satellite imagery. We find that 12.8% of the lakes studied show regime shifts whose signatures are compatible with tipping points, while the number of detected regime shifts from low to high TSI has increased over time. Although our results suggest an overall stable picture for global lake dynamics, the limited instability signatures do not mean that lakes are insensitive to global change. Modeling the interaction between lake climatic, geophysical, and socioeconomic features and their stability properties, we find that the probability of a lake experiencing a tipping point increases with human population density in its catchment, while it decreases as the gross domestic product of that population increases. Our results show how quantifying lake productivity dynamics at a global scale highlights socioeconomic inequalities in conserving natural environments.