Demographic Patterns
The growth of world population has followed a very peculiar pattern as can be observed from the graph below. From the earliest beginnings at about 7 million years ago, we had reached a population of about 300 million by about 1A.D.
In the next 17 centuries, the population reached about 600 million for an annual growth rate of less than 0.05% over the entire period. After 1700, however, the population growth has been dramatically higher with the result that we reached a population of 6 billion by 2000. At the current growth rates, the target for the future world population would be as 24 billion by 2100, 96 billion by 2200 and 384 billion by 2300 A.D
Obviously such a population cannot be supported with our resources. So what is likely to change, how and when? What we offer as a part of our services is the following:
- What caused the discontinuity after 1700 that caused such a dramatic explosion in the World population?
- What are the likely population trends over the next 50-100 years given that a linear extrapolation of the current growth rates is likely to be wrong?
- What are the likely impacts of the above outcome on the society and what should we do as a society to handle the above outcomes?
This service is targeted at mainly Governments, NGO’s and other organizations that are interested in long-term population trends.