Here’s a question you may not have the direct answer to – when is world’s population expected to reach nine billion? It may be one of the harder human geography questions to answer, not simply because that it requires you to know the current world population, but also to have a pretty good rough estimate of population growth.
Population growth is hard to measure. For starters, even the number of citizens within a country is hard to measure. Do we know how many people there are within the United Kingdom are? Even the census makers cannot vouch for the accuracy of the statistics. Migration affects the population, and in some cases such as Brexit, one factor can be so alarming as to cause a mass exodus of citizens migrating to more favourable countries.
Population count is also affected by disasters, whether they are man-made or natural. Natural disasters unfortunately kill people and cause loss of life that we would not normally expect during times of peace; for example, earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons happen fairly frequently and have created casualties. This affects the population growth in a country. There are also other disasters such as famine which cannot be accounted for. Who predicts a famine in their GDP or GNP?
So when is the population of the world expected to reach nine billion? The current world population stands at roughly seven and a half billion, and is expected to reach nine billion sometime in the 2040s, possibly in the earlier half. If the current rate of growth continues, by the year 2100, there would be over eleven billion human beings on the planet! Eleven billion! How would the earth feed itself?
When we measure population growth and keep statistics in these things, it is because these statistics are important. Population growth is an indicator of economic competition. In other words, if the population rises, but jobs do not increase, then the only thing that is increasing is competition for jobs. Population growth, by another name, is an indicator for economic competition.
So what can we glean from all this? One is that we have to be better equipped with skills, and we have to accept that we may need to be more better equipped than necessary for jobs at lower levels. And the acceptance of this fact may simply save us from mental stress and over-thinking of such situations.