According to United Nations statistics, as of the 15th, the world's population reached 8 billion. So how did the UN get to this staggering number? How reliable is this data?
Does the earth support 10 billion people?
The following report attempts to answer the above question based on two reports from two French newspapers.
According to Le Parisien, the United Nations chose to present the situation because the international organization seeks to raise awareness of issues related to human reproduction on Earth. But the newspaper pointed out that the errors in these data are very large.
Gail Lombard, a writer for the newspaper, said that to come up with the data, the organization collected the results of 1,758 national censuses, births and deaths registered in civil records, conducted between 1950 and 2022. population, and information extracted from 2890 representative surveys.
But the authors said the data, involving 237 countries or regions around the world, should cover the global population, but its reliability could not be verified.
On this point, the authors say the most reliable source of data is national censuses. But these censuses have to be updated, which cannot be verified. In particular, the official World Population Prospects 2022, released by the United Nations this summer, literally states, “Most countries conduct annual censuses approximately every ten years”. So according to the authors, 36 percent of the data used in this latest report dates back to before 2015.
In addition, the new crown epidemic has further complicated this matter, because the epidemic has led to the cancellation of the 2020 census in India and the cancellation of the census in France.
The author quoted Gerard Francois Dumont, a French geography expert and professor at the Sorbonne University, as saying, “Sometimes the head of state deliberately increases the population of the country in order to obtain higher international subsidies. It means that reliable censuses include all countries in the world, which is impossible."
The U.N. also draws information from civil records, but this too varies by country and is far from complete, the authors said.
The United Nations also uses statistical models to estimate fertility rates, mortality rates or migration flows.
The authors also claim that in this case, linking November 15, 2022 to the threshold of the world population reaching 8 billion is very arbitrary and does not have any scientific value. Especially since it was determined in June, this data has not changed. But during that time, some people died in unaccounted for accidents, such as the war in Ukraine and the floods in Pakistan.
Approximate global population (NASA)
Can this planet take it?
If more and more young people are reluctant to have children in order to save the planet, the United Nations estimates that the world population will reach 10 billion by 2080. At that time, can the earth bear it?
This is discussed in a report by Le Figaro writer Mary Levine Michalik. At the beginning of the report, she stated that the world population has doubled eight times in the past 200 years.
Citing a geography expert, Michalik said nearly 60 percent of the world's population lives in countries where today's fertility rate is below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. In fact, even this fertility rate no longer exceeds one child per woman.
But the world's population growth is projected to come mostly from 10 countries, namely the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania.
This means that population growth will mainly occur in poor countries. If these countries continue to follow Western consumption patterns as they do now, this will lead to serious social and security imbalances that could have implications for global balances.
The authors note that experts believe the problem is not population growth but flawed consumption patterns. They should reduce meat consumption and waste, and get their energy from clean sources. Otherwise, social and security imbalances could hit some countries and affect the global balance.
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