Worldwatch Institute: Population Growth Steady in Recent Years

[GliderGuider]

A bit of third-party support for my position that all is not sanguine on the population front:

Population Growth Steady in Recent Years

The world's population surpassed 6.8 billion in early 2009, with no significant slowing in the pace of growth in recent years. Estimates by the United Nations Population Division indicate that humanity has been consistently gaining more than 79 million people-a population almost the size of Germany's-each year since 1999.2 During the 1990s, annual additions fell from nearly 90 million people to less than 80 million, feeding optimism that world population might peak not long after the middle of this century.3 But the recent stability of annual population increments adds to the uncertainty and when-and how-world population growth will end.

The recent leveling out of annual population growth increments, which no demographer had predicted, helps illustrate that there is no way to be sure that population is "likely" or "expected" to peak at roughly 9 billion people at mid-century, or indeed at any particular time in the future.

Regionally, more than 95 percent of world population growth is occurring in developing countries, especially in Africa and Asia, regions that account for more than three quarters of the world's current population.9 Despite perceptions that population growth has stopped or reversed in most of the wealthier countries, however, growth continues in the industrial world as a whole and is likely to keep going, though at modest levels, for some time. Although the populations of Japan, Germany, Russia, and some other East European countries are already declining, U.N. demographers in their median projection do not indicate a population peak among industrial countries as a group until 2036.10 In the same projection, by mid-century Africa will be adding 21 million people a year to world population and Asia, 5 million.



Much longer article at the link.

[Massacure]

1. Ideally it would be negative.

Earth would be better off with 3-4 billion people rather than closing in on 7 billion.

[joshcryer]

2. Won't drop signfiicantly until we hit around 10.

Once the developing world decides that it doesn't need to have a fertility rate above 2.

[Nihil]

3. In that case ...

... let's hope that "the developing world" never discovers the
likes of the Quiverfull movement ...
:banghead:

[joshcryer]

6. When you have a life expectancy below 50 and whn your child mortality rate is high...

...you're going to make kids. It's not really their fault that they make 'em at the rate that they do, it's the fault of westernized nations who 1) feed them when they otherwise couldn't eat and 2) take their resources thus keeping them in a relative state of poverty.

www.gapminder.com shows that it is changing, though. For the better.

[HamdenRice]

4. That's not how I interpret the article

It seems to be saying that they've revised the plateau downward once again (wasn't it 12 billion just a year or two ago?) and is warning that the donor countries have cut back funding on the techniques that obviously are working.

That seems to be the takeaway -- don't reduce funding now, don't become complacent, because if you stop now the figures could be revised upward.

[GliderGuider]

5. We each see what our filters let us see.

You and I are little different in that regard.

Can you provide a pointer to a UN medium fertility variant projection (or a similarly authoritative projection) of 12 billion from a couple of years ago? The UN medium fertility projection has been around 9 billion as far back as 1999. See this report (PDF).