While there were only about 1 billion people on the planet around 1800, there counted 7 billion people by the end of 2011. Currently, the human population is growing by 78 million per year.
If the birth rate remains the same, there will be about 27 billion people on our planet in 2100. However, the current assumption is that there will be “only” 10 billion inhabitants.
Future developments will be geographically divergent: while the population of Africa, with many young people, will triple by 2100, the number of European inhabitants will fall at the same time as life expectancy increases. A population decline is also expected in China after 2030. Even today, the distribution across the continents is striking: 60% of all people live in Asia, 15% in Africa, 13.5% in America and 10.5% in Europe.
Over the last 50,000 years, more than 106 billion people have probably inhabited our planet. Until the last century, people lived in a resource-efficient balance with the natural world. By 1980, humanity was already consuming more resources than the earth could regenerate. According to calculations by ecologists, by 2050 the surface area of about 2.7 Earths would be needed to supply humanity with food and energy.
