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By: The opinion Posted Mar 28, 2023, 20:59 pm EDT
Just late last year the world population exceeded 8 billion of people and a recent study predicts that reach 8,500 in the next 30 years.
A new analysis suggests that the world population could peak just below the 9 billion people in 2050 and then start to decline.
The new projection is significantly lower than several leading demographic estimates, including those from the United Nations. The researchers go further and say that if the world makes a “giant leap” in investment in economic development, education and health, the world population could peak at 8.5 billion people by mid-century.
For the new projections of the researchers of the Earth4All initiative for the Global Challenges Foundation, used a new system dynamics model, Earth4All, to explore two scenarios of this century.
In it First stage – Too little, too late – the world continues to develop economically in a similar way to the last 50 years. Many of the poorest countries rise out of extreme poverty. In this scenario, the researchers estimate that world population could peak at 8.6 billion in 2050, before falling to 7 billion in 2100.
In the second scenario, called the Giant Leap, the researchers calculate that the population peaks at 8.5 billion people around 2040 and declines to about 6 billion by the end of the century. This is achieved through unprecedented investment in poverty alleviation – particularly in education and health – along with an extraordinary shift in policies on food and energy security, inequality and gender equality. In this scenario, extreme poverty is eliminated within a generation (by 2060), with a marked impact on global demographic trends.
The authors argue that other prominent demographic projections often downplay rapid economic development.
“We know that the rapid economic development of low-income countries has a huge impact on fertility rates. Fertility rates fall as girls access education and women become economically empowered and have access to better healthcare,” says Per Espen Stoknes, Earth4All project manager and director of the Center for Sustainability at the Norwegian Business School.
High population does not destabilize the planet
The team also looked at the connection between population and the overreach of planetary boundaries, linked to Earth’s carrying capacity. Contrary to popular myths, the team discovered that population size is not the main driver of overcoming planetary boundaries, like climate change. Rather, it is the sky-high levels of material footprint among the world’s richest 10% that are destabilizing the planet.
“He The main problem of humanity is the luxury consumption of carbon and the biosphere, not the population. The places where populations are increasing the fastest have extremely small environmental footprints per person compared to places that peaked in population many decades ago,” said Jorgen Randers, one of Earth4All’s lead modelers and co-author of The Limits to Growth.
According to the team’s demographic projections, the entire population could achieve living conditions above the minimum level of the United Nationss without significant changes in current development trends, as long as resources were distributed equally.
Keep reading:
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• The richest 10% of the world population currently concentrates 52% of global wealth: UN
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