World Population Growth

The UN calculates that there are more than 7 billion living humans on Earth, yet 200 years ago we numbered less than 1 billion.1 Recent estimates suggest that 6.5 percent of all people ever born are alive right now.2 This is the most conspicuous fact about world population growth: for thousands of years, population grew only slowly, but in recent centuries it has jumped dramatically. Between 1900 and 2000 the increase in world population was three times greater than the entire previous history of humanity– an increase from 1.5 to 6.1 billion in just 100 years.