EARTH
IN NUMBERS
EARTH
Population in Perspective
There are over 7 billion of us and recent estimates suggest that today's population size is roughly equivalent to 6.9% of the total number of people ever born. For thousands of years the population grew only slowly but in recent centuries, it has jumped dramatically. Between 1900 and 2000, the increase in world population was three times greater than during the entire previous history of humanity-an increase from 1.5 to 6.1 billion in just 100 years.
World history can be divided into three periods marked by distinct trends in population growth. The first period was a very long age of very slow population growth. The second period had an increasing growth rate that continued to rise through 1962. Today, the third period, the population growth rate is falling and will likely continue to fall, leading to an end of population growth towards the end of this century.
THE NUMBERS
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