In 1810, the world’s population was 1 billion; 200 years later, it is over 7 billion. What caused this tremendous jump in population growth? Better healthcare caused death rates to plummet, and caused successful birthrates to soar. Population growth rate is calculated with a simple formula (Birth rate – Death rate = Growth rate). The human population increases by about 80 million per year; and that number is actually increasing steadily. In another 140 years, the population could be close to 27 billion. How does all this affect the population of earth? Simple; higher population crammed onto the surface area of earth increases chances of people being involved in natural disasters because there is less unoccupied space for disasters to occur
For many years it has been thought that the maximum human population would be determined by the amount of drinkable fresh water. Earth can only hold, manage, and support so many people. This is called carrying capacity. If we go over this carrying capacity it could cause worldwide issues with the environment along with many other issues. For example if the human population goes over the carrying capacity of the earth then problems like lack of clean drinkable water, lack of land that humans could live on or occupy, and lack of available jobs could become much more serious and have terrible effects on the system which everything works.
Human population growth was relatively slow for most of human history. Within the past 500 years, however, the advances made in the industrial, transportation, economic, medical, and agricultural revolutions have helped foster an exponential, "J-shaped" rise in human population (Southwick, Figure 15.1, p. 160). The statistics associated with this type of growth are particularly striking: "Human beings took more than 3 million years to reach a population of 1 billion people...The second billion came in only 130 years, the third billion in 30 years, the fourth billion in 15 years, the fifth billion in 12 years..." (Southwick, p. 159). As human population has grown, there has
The human population rate has changed throughout the ages. By looking at the table we were given the human population has increased heaps from 2000 years ago. If we look at our ancestors they lived with a small existence but this has changed as we have developed and there is more agriculture in this world. Population grew very slowly in the 1000 A.D. also decreased after the Black Death causing large numbers of people wiped out. Then in the 1800 A.D. the industrial revolution came, soon living standards were raised and there was food shortage with the population. In 1927 medicine was introduced this meant that there was increased life expectancy, so the human population grew more. There was more advantages from agriculture, medicine and sanitation
As the human race continues to grow older the population starts to grow. Population growth is a change in the size of a population over time, depending on the balance of births and deaths over a period of time. For the world, population grows when the amount of births exceeds the amount of deaths. As shown in figure 1, the world’s population grew very slowly until about 1750 that is when the population growth started to increase rapidly. Figure 2 shows the growth of the global population from 1950 onwards, it also shows the projected population growth up to 2050. The global population is estimated to rise to approximately 9 billion people by 2050.
The Global human population increases growth amounts to around 75 million annually, or 1.1% per year. The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7 billion in 2012. It is expected to keep growing, and estimates have put the total population at 8.4 billion by mid-2030, and 9.6 billion by mid-2050. Many nations with rapid population growth have low standards of living, whereas many nations with low rates of population growth have high standards of living.
While it may be observed that the exponential rate of growth is slowing, the world population is still growing rapidly. Perhaps the biggest concern is not the actual population increase but the distribution of the growth (Wilson, Population).
According to the lecture, “If the birth rate is higher than the death rate, then population growth will be exponential.” What sets us apart from history is the fact that our death rate has greatly decreased due to our ability to fight leading causes of death. In historic times, the average projected age of survival was far lower than it is now due to the lack of knowledge on how to deal with and prevent different diseases. As time passed, humans began to learn more about medicine and treating sicknesses, but this was a slow and steady process. Plagues like the Black Plague during the 1300s killed off millions of people in Eurasia, preventing the population from growing exponentially. Couple with war and crime that was at its peak during the 1940s, the population did not have room to grow up. But as time continued, the rate of war and crime decreased, leading to one less reason of death to worry about. Famine was also a huge cause of death during 1870 but begins to decrease in 2010. The combination of the decrease in causes of death that stems from the better technology to deal with diseases, less wide-scale wars, less famine, and the continuous birth of new live caused the population to seem rapidly grow from around the 1950s onwards (this makes sense as it was right around the end of WWII, the last major war to affect the entire world). The migration of people and intermixing
Recently, the world’s population has been going through exponential growth since the industrial revolution because of improvements in technology, medicine, sanitation, and agriculture. The first major increase in the world’s population was during the agricultural revolution that took place about 10,000 years ago (Brennan, Withgott 4). The cause of the increase was that people were beginning to settle and farm, which increased their chance of survival. The second was the industrial revolution in the mid-1700s and caused the greatest amount of growth(Brennan, Withgott 4). This was only because improvements were made in technology involving medicine, sanitation, and agriculture. This allowed life expectancy to increase and the security provided
Since 1914, global population has increased dramatically. Before 1914, there had been about 90 billion people ever born. Since then, the approximate number of people ever born has increased to 100 billion. Life was very short for the first 90 billion people and until World War I, the death rates and birth rates were neck to neck. Eberstadt (2014) believes that the number of humans born over the course of 50,000 years before the 1900’s could not have possibly grown by more than three one hundredths of one percent on average per century. The recurrent disappearance of nations and sometimes even entire civilizations enforced “population balance” for most of history. Around 1900, the human population was at around 1.5 billion and over the course
Human population and its dynamics have very important implications for the nature. Exponential human growth would have disastrous effects on the nature because a larger population means
One of the problems facing our world is population. It began about ten thousand years ago when the humans settled and began farming. The farming provides more food for the people thus making the population grow. Now we are about 6 billion in population and in a few years we will be around 10 to 11 billion. Therefore, our population will
The world is currently home to around 7 billion people, but only a century ago there were only about 1.6 billion people living on it. It is estimated that the world population will soar to approximately 9 or 10 billion within the next forty years (Lambert 6). Along with the increasing global population, climate change and water scarcity are also burdening the survival of our planet (Lambert 5). The FAO has warned that agriculture must produce 70% more food within the next 40 years to feed our expanding population, but the world’s resources and land are dwindling as quickly as the population is expanding (Lambert 5). The world urban populations have been increasing consistently and are
With rapid population growth and urbanization escalating, overcrowding has concerned many scientists, researchers, and the human populace as a whole. Overpopulation, the condition where an area holds more people than in which the area can properly function, is a serious issue which has many adverse effects on the well-being of a healthy human population. A growing seven billion people live on Earth and factors such as pollution, and human well being may all be affected by overpopulation, and continued growth in population will cause an even greater impact on society, individuals, and the environment. The effects of overpopulation is a multi-layered combination of different factors, all of them affecting each other in a variety of ways, yet they all work together to lead to the collapse of society. The continuation of these trends due to rising overpopulation will lead to the ultimate collapse of society attributed to the degradation of social structure, environmental structure, and human behavioral alterations and the culmination of the resulting effects. Continued population growth needs to be ended in the near future as it will affect every human being on the surface of the planet to a massive scale that can not be reversed.
The past 300 years have been characterized by an unprecedented exponential increase in worldwide human population. Humanity took millions of years to reach a 1700 population of around 700 million, which had nearly doubled by 1850. Only one hundred years later, world population stood at 2.5 billion and doubled again in less than forty years (Weiskel, 1995). The impressive improvements in diet, shelter, clothing, sanitation, and medicine brought about by the Industrial Revolution, beginning in eighteenth-century Europe and still expanding throughout the world, have dramatically lowered mortality and increased life expectancy in industrializing countries (Davis, 1991).
There are plenty of reasons that our minds can come up with as to how human population can spiral out of control, including religion and culture; but according to Paul and Anne Ehrlich co-authors of Population Resources Environment: Issues in Human Ecology one of the main reasons for the spike in human population over the last century is the rise in birth rate and a sharp decline in the death rate, due to "cultural advances" (9). The global crude birth rate from 2005-2010 is 20.3 children per 1000 people. Ehrlich put together a chart detailing the estimated population history since 8000 B.C. According to the chart the estimated human population in 1930 A.D. was 2 billion people, by 1975 "a mere 45 years later" the estimated population was more than double that at around 4 billion people (6).