- Thursday, March 06, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
The population of Planet Earth reached eight billion on Tuesday (15), a report by the United Nations said. India has been the largest contributor to the milestone, adding 177 million people, while China, the most populous nation at the moment, was second by contributing 73 million.
Interestingly, the next billion people are projected to come from only eight nations, all located in Africa and Asia. They are: Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania.
The population projection has been revealed in the UN’s World Population Prospects 2022 report, which also shows that India is now on track to go past China to become the world’s most populous nation in 2023.
Another Bloomberg report has said meanwhile that half of the world’s population still lives in only seven countries — China, India, US, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil.
Calling the eight-billion mark as a “historic milestone for humanity”, the world body said, “This unprecedented growth is due to the gradual increase in human lifespan owing to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine.”
It also said that while there was a big surge in population in the later half of the 20th century, the growth of population may now start to slow down. While the global life expectancy in 2019 was 72.8 years, almost nine years more than that in 1990, current projections suggest that life expectancy in 2050 could be 77.2 years.
While it could take 15 years from now for the world’s population to reach nine billion, the UN doesn’t expect it to touch 10 billion until 2080, which indicates that the overall growth rate of the global population is slowing.
It said that the population decline at the global level is driven by low and plummeting fertility levels.
The report noted that global population growth is more centralised in some of the poorer countries, like those in sub-Saharan Africa. It added that countries that tend to have a higher income per capita may not necessarily have a rapidly rising population.
Speaking about the population growth on World Population Day on July 11, UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said, “This year’s World Population Day falls during a milestone year when we anticipate the birth of the earth’s eight billionth inhabitant. This is an occasion to celebrate our diversity, recognise our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates.”
