We’re now eight billion!

We’re now officially eight billion human beings in the world! This means one billion people have been added to the global population in just 12 years!

Mainly, Asian countries account for a major part of the growth with nearly 700 million people being added since 2011. The two most populous regions currently are Eastern and South-Eastern Asia with 2.3 billion people and Central and Southern Asia with 2.1 billion.

Although the new number is too big to imagine, according to the United Nations, it is a milestone in human development and an occasion to celebrate as the growth is caused in part by declining levels of mortality thanks to increased levels of life expectancy resulting from the advances in modern medicine and reductions in global poverty.

Globally, life expectancy reached 72.8 years in 2019, an increase of almost nine years since 1990. Further fall in mortality is projected to result in average longevity of around 77.2 years globally.

The latest projections by the United Nations suggest that the world’s population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050. It is projected to reach a peak of around 10.4 billion people during the 2080s and to remain at that level until 2100.

However, these demographic changes come at a time when the entire world is struggling to address pressing global issues like climate change, food security, aging populations, and environmental destruction.

Despite its praise, the UN pointed out that the number will put enormous pressure on Earth’s resources and will need to find more sustainable ways of living.

According to António Guterres, UN Secretary-General “it is a reminder of our shared responsibility to care for our planet and reflect on where we still fall short of our commitments to one another”.

The fact is that billions of people continue to struggle with inequalities, famine, and internal conflicts in many other countries and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Equally important is that the human population is dependent on the Earth's ecosystems to survive. But the relationship between man and nature has been thrown out of balance. Having more people on Earth puts more pressure on nature, as people compete with wildlife for water, food, and space.

Rapid population growth combined with climate change is also likely to cause mass migration and conflict in the coming decades. There will be less to go around as the global population grows!

According to a report by the United Nations Population Fund, the first year in which more people lived in urban than rural areas was 2007, and by 2050 about 68 per cent of the world population will be living in cities.

These rising trends will have far-reaching implications as they will affect economic development, employment, income distribution, poverty, and social protections. They also impact efforts to ensure universal access to health care, education, housing, sanitation, water, food, and energy.

To address the needs of individuals more sustainably, policymakers need to understand how many people are living on the planet, where they are, how old they are, and how many people will come after them.

Of course, it is not simply the number of people that determines the impact of the planet. It is how much we consume and how much waste we produce. As experts point out, rapid population growth will make eradicating poverty, combating hunger and malnutrition, and increasing the coverage of health and education systems more difficult!