Population Facts from COUNTDOWN by Alan Weisman
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It only took twelve years for the population to go from 6 billion to 7 billion.
The human population has quadrupled over the past hundred years, while our
consumption of resources (as measured by combined gross domestic products
worldwide) has increased by a factor of seventeen.
In 1900, there were 1.6 billion people on Earth. During the twentieth century, the
population doubled, then doubled again.
In 1950, two-thirds of humans lived in rural areas. Today, more than half live in cities.
There are now nearly five hundred cities with a million or more people. Twenty-seven
cities have more than 10 million, and eight of those have more than 20 million.
Greater Tokyo is the largest city, with 35 million people.
The United Nations Population Division estimates that by midcentury, we will have
between 9 and 10 billion people on Earth.
In the United States, each child adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the
carbon legacy of the average female.
Food production for humans occupies 40 percent of the Earth’s nonfrozen terrestrial
surface.
It took nearly 200,000 years since Homo sapiens first appeared for our population to
reach 1 billion, around 1815. We now have seven times that.
In 1800, average life expectancy was forty years. In much of the world today it’s nearly
double.
In the next fifty years, we will need to produce enough food as has been consumed over
our entire human history.
Before 2025, India will surpass China as the world’s most populous nation.
World population will reach at least 10.9 billion people by 2100.
Uganda’s population doubled in just seventeen years.
There are now at least 150 Chinese cities with more than a million people. By 2025,
there will be 220.
In 2012, China was adding another million people about every seven weeks.
One out of every ten people on Earth lives in the Yangtze River basin.
By 2040, China will have over 100 million eighty year olds.
There are 100 million people living in the Philippines. While the rest of the planet’s
population quadrupled in a century, Filipinos have quintupled their numbers in half the
time.
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In Niger, every woman averages between seven and eight children—the highest rate on
Earth.
Pakistan contains 185 million people in a landmass not much bigger than Texas, which
has 26 million.
If Pakistan’s growth continues unabated, by 2030 it will contain 395 million people.
The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2040, there will be one Japanese centenarian
for every new Japanese baby.
Government projections now assume that 36 percent of the current generation of
young Japanese women will never have children.
Although sex-selective abortion is illegal in India, enforcement is so lax that by 2030,
India could have 20 percent more men than women.
A baby is born every two seconds in India, more than 43,000 a day and more than 15
million a year: nearly two New York Citys.
A billion of the world’s people are chronically malnourished and 16,000 children starve
to death daily.
In 1958, when there were fewer than 3 billion people, President Dwight Eisenhower
identified population growth as a strategic security matter.
Over half the world’s population is under twenty-seven years old; over half of those are
males.
We add 80 million people every year, about a million more every 4 1/2 days.
Without contraception in the developing world, we’d increase our numbers by a million
every 2 1/2 days. That’s seven more Beijings a year, instead of the four we’re currently
adding.
In the next twelve years, we’re going to add a billion more people. A billion seconds
equals 31.7 years, so at the rate we’re going, we could not even count them.
Access to contraception for all would prevent 26 million abortions worldwide every
year.
8.1 billion dollars a year—less than the amount spent on one month in Iraq and
Afghanistan by the USA between 2001 and 2011—would fully meet the needs for
contraception in the developing world.