From the second post-war period to today we have witnessed a very rapid demographic growth that has brought us up to almost eight billion people. The United Nations projections estimate a further growth of up to almost eleven billion by the end of the century, which however is increasingly slow and still diversified between countries: this has political, social and economic consequences.
Things are much more complex than this and the problem of the growth and decrease of the world population is now present in many areas, from the environmental to the social and economic sphere. However, to understand the role that the number of people on the planet has in the different planetary contexts, it is first of all necessary to understand the numbers of the past, the present and the estimates for the future of world demographics.
In 2019, there were approximately 7.7 billion people on Earth. Population growth, as is known, has been very slow since the appearance of Homo sapiens and began to accelerate with the industrial revolution, experiencing a surge after the Second World War. Suffice it to say that in 1950 we were still around 2.5 billion. Among the main causes of population growth there has been rapid scientific and technological progress that has allowed the improvement of public health and welfare systems, therefore economic and social. As can be seen in the following map, however, the population has not grown uniformly throughout the world; in fact, today the greatest population density is concentrated in Europe, on the eastern coast of the United States, in sub-Saharan Africa, and much in India and China.
Overall, therefore, it can be said that the growth of the world population is no longer exponential for several years, having reached a sort of “inflection point” indicatively at the turn of the millennium, luster plus luster less. However, before we reach a plateau that would fluctuate around the turn of the century, we should first go from 8.5 billion in 2030, to 9.7 billion in 2050 and finally to 10.9 billion in 2100.