World Population Clock

No one could ever count all the people who are born or die every day. The climbing numbers on the World Population Clock in the Maths Adventure Land are based on the calculations of the US Population Reference Bureau (PRB), which has been collecting data on population development and human health worldwide since 1929 and making it available to the public.

The increase in humanity is currently 83,276,563 people per year. This equates to 228,155 people every day, or 158 people every minute, or 2.6 people every second.

According to the DSW data report of the “German Foundation for World Population” from September 2014 — they correspond to the data of the Population Reference Bureau — the world population was 7238 million people (about 7.2 billion).

The following figures were determined for the 5 continents:

For the 16 most populous countries in the world, the balance is as follows:

These 16 most populous countries are home to 4,822 million people, or about two-thirds of the world’s total population.

History

For the year zero, the world population is estimated at 300 million people.

By 1650, immediately after the end of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe (1618–1648), the number had risen to 500 million.

Around 1900, at the end of the Industrial Revolution, it was 1,600 million.

In 1965, 20 years after World War II and after the independence of most former colonies, the world population had already grown to 3,300 million.

In 1980, at the height of the Cold War, it reached 4,430 million; in 1990, at the end of the confrontation, it reached 5,250 million.

In 2000, the number of people exceeded the 6,000 million mark (six billion). This corresponded to a twenty-fold increase in the world’s population in two millennia.

Since the year 1700, the following growth curve emerges, which even shows a more than exponential growth in the 20th century:

And this … awaits us:

In October 2010, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA — formerly the United Nations Fund for Population Activities) announced:

World population in 2050 at 9.1 billion.

Geneva — The world population of 6.8 billion today will grow to 9.15 billion by 2050, according to United Nations forecasts. Accordingly, Europe will be the only continent in which the population will decline over the next four decades. If today (2010!) 732 million people live in Europe between the North Cape and Gibraltar, according to UN calculations there will only be 691 million men, women and children in 2050. Above all, the low birth rate in countries such as Germany will lead to shrinkage, it said. Asia will remain the most populous continent in 2050, with around 5.2 billion people by then. Today (2010!), UN experts count around 4.1 billion Asians. According to the UNFPA, Africa’s population will double from around one billion today (2010!) to almost two billion in 40 years.

Literature

[1] Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung (DSW): DSV-Datenreport Weltbevölkerung 2014.

[2] Kernig, C.D.: Und mehret euch? Deutschland und die Weltbevölkerung im 21. Jahrhundert, Bonn, 2006.