On January 11, 1960 the hard-hitting cover of Time Magazine carried the banner “That population explosion.” The center of the cover image was filled with sad women in traditional costumes, holding naked or swaddled children. To one side, two young Western women – one brunette, the other blonde – smile happily, and the latter has two young children and a full shopping cart. The allegory could not be clearer: what was then called the Third World was collapsing under the number of children, which contributed to the misery of its population and also presented a danger for sensible people who were happy with few children, like the two Western women pushed to the edges.

At the time, the situation was indeed alarming. The global population – which had reached 2.5 billion ten years previously – had just reached 3 billion. Even more worryingly, the growth rate was increasing. In 1955, it was 1.75 percent per year. Five years later, it was in excess of 1.9 percent. It had doubled in 36 years. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s best seller, The Population Bomb, described the dire consequences of this rampant population growth. But the growth rate continued to accelerate. In 1970, it reached 2.1 percent (a doubling time of 33 years) and the global population increased to 3.7 billion. Two years later, the famous Club of Rome report [1] appeared and the oil crisis burst onto the scene. But peak population growth had already been passed.

Since then, the growth rate has slowly declined and is now at 1.1 percent per year. Global population growth has started to slow down. In 2018, the number of humans on the planet rose to 7.6 billion. If growth since 1970 had continued at a rate of 2.1 percent per year, the global population would now stand at 10 billion. The current state of play is therefore not entirely discouraging. True, 3.9 billion humans have been added since 1970, but 2.4 billion have been “avoided.”

The future global population

A special department of the United Nations, the Population Division, regularly produces projections of the global population. These are not, strictly speaking, forecasts, but they are generally taken as such, as no alternative exists. These projections are, moreover, adopted by all major international organizations including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Health Organization (WHO). […]

OUTLINE

• The future global population
• A global drop in fertility
• A decrease in mortality rates?
• Areas of growth
• Future migration
• Climate migrants
• Fertility and political crisis

Hervé Le Bras is a demographer and a historian, Director of Research Emeritus at INED and Director of Studies at EHESS. He is the author of numerous books, including Le Mystère français (with Emmanuel Todd, Seuil 2013), Atlas des inégalités (Autrement, 2014) and Le Pari du FN (Autrement, 2015).