In Focus: Population Eight Billion: Still a Question of Growth?
| Author | Benjamin D. Hennig |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20419058221127467 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
20POLITICAL INSIGHT•SEPTEMBER 2022
In Focus
Population Eight Billion:
Still a Question of Growth?
Fifteenth November 2022 marks
the next population milestone
in the history of humanity. This
is the day the United Nations
expects the global population to reach eight
billion – eleven years after the seven billion
threshold was crossed.
Such days are obviously heavily
symbolic. They are announced by the
United Nations and are often accompanied
by a debate about global demographic
trends and a wide range of related issues.
During the COVID pandemic debates
about major global challenges that have
direct or indirect links to world population
trends stalled. Issues such as climate change,
access to resources and other inequalities all
slipped down the news agenda.
The pandemic itself had an impact on
world population changes, including a fall
in global life expectancy from 72.8 in 2019
to 71.0 years in 2021. Yet the overarching
The challenge of declining global populations poses just as much
potential for future conflicts and crises as the exponential growth of
the 20th century. Benjamin D. Hennig examines the data.
trends and projections remain similar to
what could be observed before COVID.
The growth of the world’s population
on a planet with nite resources has been
part of a wider global debate, not least
since the Club of Rome’s 1972 book
The
Limits to Growth
, written when the world’s
population was about to cross the four
billion milestone. Some see population
growth as one of the root causes of the
challenges that the world faces, whether
it is climate change, pollution, depletion
of resources, the global food crisis or other
bleak scenarios.
Regardless, the world’s population
will continue to grow for some time. Yet
Political Insight September 2022 BU.indd 20Political Insight September 2022 BU.indd 2009/08/2022 12:5809/08/2022 12:58
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