Highs and Lows
Train crossing in the suburbs of Calcutta, India, 2010
Credit: UN Photo / Kibae Park / CC BY NC ND
Summary
Despite a drop in the birthrate, the increase in world population continues at a steady pace, reconfiguring ancient demographic balances. The regions which, both now and in the decades to come, experience the highest rises, are those that are poorest, whose societies are the most fragile and most exposed to environmental, economic, social and health risks.
In the early sixteenth century, the human population numbered 500 million; by the early nineteenth century it was 1 billion, 1.5 billion by the early twentieth century, and 7.6 billion in 2017. According to the 2017Revision of the United Nations’ World Population Prospects, this upward trend will continue and is expected to reach 8.6 billion by 2030, 9.8 billion by 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100.
Population of states and territories, 2017
Comment: This map shows the total population of states in 2017. Only China and India exceed a billion inhabitants. The next most populated countries are the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. These demographic weights much depend on the size of the country and its population density. Most of the heavyweights have a very large surface area as well, but Pakistan, Bangladesh and Japan are not continent-states. And densities are very unequally distributed within each country, which is not shown on the map.
How many people?
The progress made in civil registry services, the aid programs for carrying out and synchronizing census data in countries of the South, the systematization of information in revised databases, and increasingly powerful means of calculation now enable us to make relatively accurate demographic projections for the next twenty to thirty years. Beyond that, debates around the universality of the demographic transition model, uncertainty about the combined effects of ageing, epidemics, conflicts and environmental degradation are making forecasts more uncertain.
The continued growth of the world population is a challenge that does not affect all world societies in the same way. There are countless possible and evolving combinations between natural increase and net migration, and they interact with all other social and economic factors. Over the last half-century, the very contrasting demographic development of the world’s largest regions has had a long-term impact on world population balances.
Change in population, 1950-2050
Comment: The two graphs show how the population of continents evolved between 1950 and 2015, and the projections until 2050. The curves on the left reflect the changes: Africa shows the strongest growth over the whole period, and Europe the lowest. The histograms on the right indicate each continent’s share of the global population: the share of Europe and North America continues to fall, while Asia has reached its maximum and is now dropping. Only the population of Africa has grown over the entire period.
Africa, Latin America (except for Argentina and Chile) and Asia (except for China) are experiencing continued growth, whereas growth is low in North America, Europe and Australia, has slowed in China, and is even declining in Russia and Eastern Europe.
China, with 1.4 billion inhabitants or 19% of world population, and India, with 1.3 billion inhabitants or 18 %, remain the two most highly populated countries, but by around 2024 the population of India is expected to overtake that of China, where growth has been slowed by the consequences of more than thirty years of the one-child policy, as well as by an ageing population.
It is therefore the poorest populations in societies already in crisis that will grow the fastest, and will aggravate poverty and the challenges for development. Whereas the population of Europe as a whole is set to decline between now and 2050 (from 742 to 716 million), Africa will experience the strongest growth, with a doubling of the population during the same period (from 1,256 to 2,528 million).
Demographic growth and its sustainability can therefore not be considered independently of social, societal, economic, political, civil, and environmental conditions.
Population centers
State divisions form the basis of population censuses and enable comparisons, but they do not account for the diversity of situations within states, since the global population is often coastal and increasingly urban. Asia (with 60 % of the world’s population) is extremely urbanized and has very high rural densities, which encourage a seasonal or permanent exodus toward cities, fueled by the growing wealth gap.
Population density, 2015
Comment: This map of global population densities has been compiled from a 20x20 km grid. This differs from the traditional representations by country, which iron out differences over the whole of each country’s territory. The map therefore shows just how unequally the population is spread over an area, ranging from vast empty spaces to great concentrations, generally along the coastlines except in the eastern part of China, Europe, and the valleys of the Nile and the Ganges.
Europe is intensely farmed, long since urbanized and industrialized, and organized around urban spaces with almost continuous production, trade and circulation – from London to Northern Italy with the Rhine axis in between. The population of the Americas is mainly coastal, and denser in the north than the south. For four centuries, the slave trade transported servile labor from Africa to the southern United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Then, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, the wholesale arrival of European migrants once again profoundly transformed these lands and societies. Westward expansion pushed back the settlement frontier and mapped out the main lines of present-day population density in the United States. In South America, the land was less deeply penetrated. There are very large built-up areas on the Brazilian coast, but the population only becomes dense in the axis of Rio de la Plata, and less so and more intermittently in the Andes. Africa, North Africa, the Nile valley, the Great Lakes region, and the Gulf of Guinea form chains of densely populated areas, while Nigeria is a demographic heavyweight (with 190 million inhabitants in 2017).
Empty spaces and pioneer frontiers
Empty spaces that are supposed to be virgin territory have, since the early twentieth century, been considered places where the demographic balance can be restored. More recently, they have also been annexed for agro-forestry and industry (Siberia, Central Asian deserts, the Amazon, the African forest, Indonesia) at the cost of heavy environmental, social, and cultural damage. As for the Sahara, considered empty in a traditional and deterministic view, represented by strips running west to east showing rainfall, it is in fact an area of historic North-South circulation involving traders, nomadic stockbreeders, warriors, and preachers, and nowadays armed groups and people, weapons, and drug smugglers as well.
- demographic transition > Demographic Transition
- Since the 18th century, humanity has moved from a demographics of high fertility balanced by high mortality to one of low fertility and low mortality. An initial period of economic growth and improved health brought mortality down while fertility remained high, leading to rapid population growth as there were more births than deaths. This was followed by a second period of declining birth rate, leading to generations not being replaced and populations tending to shrink unless bolstered by migration. This theoretical model, developed based on the observation of the evolution of the European and North American populations, indicates that all the world’s populations will develop in a similar way.
- environmental > Environment
- In broad terms, the environment is understood as the biosphere in which living species cohabit, while ecology studies the relations between these organisms and their environment. The environment encompasses very diverse natural areas from undisturbed virgin forests to artificialized environments planned and exploited by humans. In a more limited definition of the term, “environmental” issues are those relating to natural resources (their management, use and degradation) and biological biodiversity (fauna and flora). As a cross-cutting public concern, the environment encompasses issues of societal organization (production models, transport, infrastructure, etc.) and their impacts on the health of humans and ecosystems.
- natural increase > Natural population change
- {alias} Total fertility rate
- net migration > Natural population change
- {alias} Total fertility rate
- ageing > Ageing
- The growing proportion of old and very old individuals in the population of a country or region (initially in the countries of the North, now increasing in those of the South) can be explained by the growth in the number of older people (extension of life) and/or a reduction in the numbers of younger people (lower birth rate), combined with a low rate of migration (younger populations not arriving).
- poverty > Poverty
- Initially referring to a lack of economic resources, the notion of poverty has broadened in recent decades to include its different components, such as appalling sanitary conditions, a low level of education, social and gender inequalities, human rights violations, environmental damage, and increased vulnerability to so-called “natural” disasters. The Human Development Index (HDI) developed by the United Nations Development Program in the mid-1990s (and its gendered variant, Gender Development Index or GDI) and the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) devised by researchers at the University of Oxford in 2010, use Amartya Sen’s work on capabilities to identify the deprivation suffered by the poor in terms of health, education, and living standards.
- development > Development
- Definitions of development and its opposite – underdevelopment – have varied considerably according to the political objectives and ideological positions of those using these words. In the 1970s, Walt Whitman Rostow conceived of it as an almost mechanical process involving successive stages of economic growth and social improvement, whereas Samir Amin analyzed the relationships between center and peripheries, seeing the development of the former as founded on the exploitation of the latter. In Latin America, the dependency theory condemned the ethnocentrism of the universal view that the “periphery” of underdeveloped states could simply catch up through modernization. Talking of poor or developing “countries” masks the inequalities that also exist within societies (in both Northern and Southern hemispheres) and individuals’ connections to globalization processes.
- urbanized > Urbanization
- A process by which populations and activities become concentrated in limited spaces characterized by the density and diversity of social activities. The long history of urbanization across the world suddenly accelerated in the second half of the 20th century, as towns and cities (large and small, notably in the new post-colonial countries) increased in both number and size (in number of inhabitants and surface area). The largest are becoming vast conurbations. The rate of growth is very uneven across the world and is fastest (due to rural exodus and population growth) in the poorest countries where public urban policy is least effective. The environmental cost of lengthy daily commuting (air and water pollution, waste management, supply of goods to the inhabitants, gradual loss of agricultural land, etc.) must now be balanced against the advantages offered by urban density in terms of the concentration of innovation, skills and exchanges of all kinds.
- spaces > Space
- A term with multiple meanings and uses and a category given far less consideration by philosophers than the concept of time. Space as a concept has long been a theoretical difficulty (lack of consensus) for geographers – for whom it should be the primary object of study. Contrary to the common representation of space as a natural expanse filled by societies, space is a social product that is constantly reconstructed by social interactions. It constitutes one of the dimensions of our social life, at once material and cultural. To speak of social space does not in itself tell us what form this space takes – whether it is territorial, or networked, or both at once.
- circulation > Circulation
- People, merchandise, services, capital, information, ideas, values, and models are being transferred and exchanged in ever-increasing numbers. The expansion, diversification, and acceleration of movement typify the ongoing process of globalization. Circulation connects economic and social spaces through networks which, depending on their density, fluidity, output, and hierarchy, can differentiate them considerably. Of all types of circulation, information in the broadest sense is experiencing the most rapid growth, whereas the circulation of people is the one encountering most obstacles.
- slave trade > Slave Trade
- In the 7th century Muslim Arab merchants began trading African slaves across the Sahara and into the Arabian Peninsula. The Europeans established the third major market in slaves between Africa and the Americas from the mid-16th century. In this triangular trade, slaves were exchanged with African traffickers in return for weapons, manufactured items, textiles, etc. Those who survived the voyage were taken to the American colonies (from northern Brazil to the southern United States), and the ships returned to Europe with tropical products. Criticized by the French Encyclopedists in the second half of the 18th century, then by abolitionist societies in France and Britain, the trade and then slavery were not ended in the Americas until the second half of the 19th century.
- migrants > Migration
- Movement of people leaving their country of origin permanently (emigration) to relocate to another country (immigration), which might be voluntary or forced (war, poverty, unemployment, human rights violations, climate factors, etc.), and which often involves temporary stays of varying duration in several transit countries. Migratory flows, which are an integral component of humanity’s history, give rise to a range of public policy measures linked to specific political, economic and cultural contexts and understandings of nationality. Host states seek to organize immigration, sometimes to attract it (need for labor, exploitation of specific territories, naturalizations, etc.), and most often to restrict it (border controls, quotas, residence permits, etc.). In most cases the states of origin seek to maintain relations with their nationals and diaspora communities living abroad.
- North-South > North and South
- Relatively recent spatial metaphors which, like other labels around underdevelopment or low development levels, tend to focus on the homogeneity of each of these worlds, the oppositions between them, and the fracture lines – running the risk of overlooking the fact that flows and exchanges (economic, demographic, cultural and political) connect them and that social and political fractures are evident within both of these categories, too.
- nomadic > Nomad
- Nomadic pastoralism, a way of life in which “territory” is a journey from place to place, is declining in the face of state-imposed restrictions (border controls, social controls, allocation of territories and water points, route closures), political crises and conflicts, inappropriate development policies and climate and ecological crises. Sedentarization in precarious urban environments is leading to the disappearance of nomadic groups – or their rebellion (the Tuareg). Nomadism is also used to describe worldwide contemporary mobility (physical and virtual). Metropolization, residential mobility, international tourism, company relocations, migrations, and the development of information technologies are modifying our behaviors and the ways we relate to place.