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The world population exceeds 8,000 million people this November 15, according to the official estimate of the United Nations. It is “an important milestone in human development” but also a reminder, in the midst of COP27, of “our shared responsibility to care for our planet”. In Latin America, the fertility rate is well below the global fertility rate.
This Tuesday, according to the United Nations estimate, the world population will exceed 8,000 million people. For the organization, “this unprecedented growth” – there were 2,500 million inhabitants in 1950 – is the result “of a progressive increase in life span thanks to advances in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine”. .
Earth had fewer than 1 billion people in the 19th century, but it only took 12 years for it to grow from 7 to 8 billion. And it would take about 15 years to reach 9 billion, in 2037, a sign of its demographic slowdown. The UN projects a “peak” of 10.4 billion in the 2080s and stagnation until the end of the century.
Situation in Latin America
In Latin America, the situation is different, Sabrina Juran, regional technical advisor for Population and Development at the Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA): “In our region, the current fertility rate is already well below the global fertility rate. We are at about 1.85 births per woman. To give an idea, 2.1 births per woman is maintenance fertility. We are already much, much below, which means that 29 of the 50 Latin American countries are below replacement fertility”.
Regarding the reliability of the projections, the expert comments that “we are quite sure for the next three decades that the projections are reliable. Obviously, there are changes in the fertility of each couple, of each individual person, and then the uncertainty of those projections increase.” Decisions that “depend on the conditions, the services, the freedoms that we create for couples, for women.”
“Regarding growth, what we are seeing is that the peak in the region will be around the year 2050. From then on, the population steadily decreases, until at least in our region it reaches a level of around 649 in 2100” , details.
Population and poverty
The planet exceeds 8,000 million inhabitants in the midst of the world climate conference, COP27, in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh. The high-level meeting once again shows the difficulty of the rich countries, most responsible for global warming, and the poor, who ask for help to face it, to agree to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a more ambitious way derived from human activity.
“Although population growth amplifies the environmental impact of economic development,” recalls the UN, “countries where per capita consumption of material resources and greenhouse gas emissions are highest are generally those where per capita income is the highest and not where the population is increasing rapidly.
It is in countries that already have a high concentration of poverty where population growth poses great challenges. “The persistent high levels of fertility, which drive rapid population growth, is both a symptom and a cause of slow development progress,” the UN writes.
The global figures hide an immense demographic diversity. Thus, more than half of the population growth by 2050 will come from eight countries according to the UN: Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania. And by the end of the century, the three most populous cities in the world will be African: Lagos (Nigeria), Kinshasa (DRC) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania).
with the AFP
