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A Few Worbs ON GLOBAL OVERPOPULATION J7]
Rome, or in the New World after the conquest of America by the Spaniards. The
next two cycles only needed 900 and 800 years, respectively. After that, growth
progressed by leaps and bounds, doubling in 150 years in the eighth cycle and in
100 years in the ninth. The pace of growth accelerated further, and in the latest
cycle 35 years were needed to double the population of the planet (from 2.5 billion
to 5 billion). These days, the pace of population growth has slightly decreased.
Owing to this and the large increment of 5 billion required for the next doubling,
the length of the next demographic cycle is predicted to increase a little. The figures
showing the rise of the global population over time are shocking, indicating an
incredible population growth accelerated by modernization. The 6 billion mark
was reached in 1999, the seven billion mark in 2011 (31 October, UN data).
However, the pace of population growth in the future cannot be predicted with
great certainty. Forecasts for periods of diverse length show a fairly large scatter.
The UN’s medium-term forecast in 1980 estimated 7 billion people for 2010 and
8.2 billion for 2025 (which, as seen above, proved wrong). This prediction was
proposed at a time when the population grew by over 80 million people a year (in
the second half of the 1980s by 85-87 million). The pace of growth slightly slowed
from the 1990s: the annual growth of 2022 is expected to be “only” 66-67 million.
It is good news that the estimated increments have to be adjusted downwards. The
UN report (Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2017) completed in 2017
predicted 8.6 billion for 2030 and 11.2 billion for 2100. The prediction of 2022
(UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2022) only estimated 8.5 billion
for 2030 and 9.6 billion people for 2050, and also projected that among the great
regions of the Earth not only Europe and North America, but also Latin America
and East and South-East Asia (!) have reached, or will reach their peak in the next
few years. Considerable population growth was only predicted for Africa (separately
for Sub-Saharan Africa from North Africa and the Near East) and South Asia.
This trend may be characterized by observing that the “seed” of the past decades
of decreasing fertility has borne “fruit” (Fig. 3). It is easy to see that the fertility
rate (right axis) began to decrease when the population increment (left axis) was
still close to the annual 2%. In our days, another contributory factor, in addition
to the decreasing fertility rate, is the smaller weight of generations of reproductive
age within a given population than in the 1990s, let alone the 1980s. This has
reversed the pace of the two indexes: today the fertility rate declines at a slower
pace than the growth rate.
There is no consensus on the endpoint of the process, as to when and with how
many people the global population will reach its peak. The most recent UN report
(adjusted downwards several times in the past years) estimates 10.4 billion people
for 2080 (and a plateau until 2100). Other estimates predict a turn at 9.6 — 9.7
billion people and set the date of the peak at between 2064 and 2070 (Adam
2021).