Wednesday 16 March 2011

World Population and Projections

I've been thinking about the future a lot recently because I've been working on a proposal involving scenarios and visions for the future of Europe. So, time to post a couple of things on population change and projections. The first thing is that if you type 'world population' into google, you'll get the following results:

Clicking on the graphic will take you to the google chart where you can turn different countries on and off by ticking the boxes. This makes it easy to compare data on population change from 1960 to 2009 (as below).

The data are from the World Development Indicators of The World Bank. But what if you want to know about the future. Well, there are lots of projections for different countries, but I don't think there are any that go as far as the 2004 report from the United Nations, entitled World Population 2300. Yes, the year 2300.

This is a 254 page report by the Economic and Social Affairs division and they firsst consider projections to 2050 and discuss assumptions and long-range possibilities. Part 2 looks at different scenarios and different areas of the world (e.g. Oceania). Other parts look at country rankings, population density and ageing. The world population projection for 2300 is projected to be about 9 billion. This has already been covered in a Worldmapper map, so no map here. That's all for now...