The world’s population is expected to grow to an estimated 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, according to a new report from the United Nations, USA Today reports.
That’s up from the current global population of 8.2 billion people.
The United Nations report identified the following population trends:
- The estimated size of the world’s population at the end of the century (2100) is now expected to be 6% smaller than estimated a decade ago.
- Across the globe, one in four people lives in a country whose population has already peaked.
- In 63 countries, population size peaked before 2024. Some of those countries include China, Germany, Japan and the Russian Federation.
The U.N. Population Fund said the global population crossed the 7 billion mark in 2011. Historically, it took hundreds of thousands of years to reach a single billion before growing sevenfold in roughly two centuries, the U.N. said.
Recent dramatic growth has largely been driven by more people surviving to reproductive age, along with more urbanization and large-scale migration.
Calculating the number of future people is not a perfect science with “many sources of uncertainty in estimating the global population,” the Census Bureau said. It estimated the world reached 8 billion people last September while the U.N. timed the milestone nearly one year earlier.