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Population change is simply the change in the number of people in a specified area during a specific time period. Demographics (or demography) is the study of population statistics, their variation and its causes.
Canada's population clock provides information on the pace of population renewal of the Canadian population. In this tool, the components of population growth are modelled in real time in order to adjust the population of the country, provinces and territories.
Jun 1, 2023 · The world population has changed dramatically over the last few centuries. Let’s examine long-run population data to understand this change and how quickly the world’s population is growing today. The chart shows the increasing number of people living on our planet over the last 12,000 years.
- Overview
- The basic components of population change
- Fertility
population, in human biology, the whole number of inhabitants occupying an area (such as a country or the world) and continually being modified by increases (births and immigrations) and losses (deaths and emigrations). As with any biological population, the size of a human population is limited by the supply of food, the effect of diseases, and other environmental factors. Human populations are further affected by social customs governing reproduction and by the technological developments, especially in medicine and public health, that have reduced mortality and extended the life span.
Few aspects of human societies are as fundamental as the size, composition, and rate of change of their populations. Such factors affect economic prosperity, health, education, family structure, crime patterns, language, culture—indeed, virtually every aspect of human society is touched upon by population trends.
The study of human populations is called demography—a discipline with intellectual origins stretching back to the 18th century, when it was first recognized that human mortality could be examined as a phenomenon with statistical regularities. Especially influential was English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus, who is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction. This thinking is commonly referred to as Malthusianism.
(Read Thomas Malthus’s 1824 Britannica essay on population.)
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At its most basic level, the components of population change are few indeed. A closed population (that is, one in which immigration and emigration do not occur) can change according to the following simple equation: the population (closed) at the end of an interval equals the population at the beginning of the interval, plus births during the interval, minus deaths during the interval. In other words, only addition by births and reduction by deaths can change a closed population.
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Populations of nations, regions, continents, islands, or cities, however, are rarely closed in the same way. If the assumption of a closed population is relaxed, in- and out-migration can increase and decrease population size in the same way as do births and deaths; thus, the population (open) at the end of an interval equals the population at the beginning of the interval, plus births during the interval, minus deaths, plus in-migrants, minus out-migrants. Hence the study of demographic change requires knowledge of fertility (births), mortality (deaths), and migration. These, in turn, affect not only population size and growth rates but also the composition of the population in terms of such attributes as sex, age, ethnic or racial composition, and geographic distribution.
Demographers distinguish between fecundity, the underlying biological potential for reproduction, and fertility, the actual level of achieved reproduction. (Confusingly, these English terms have opposite meanings from their parallel terms in French, where fertilité is the potential and fécondité is the realized; similarly ambiguous usages also prevail in the biological sciences, thereby increasing the chance of misunderstanding.) The difference between biological potential and realized fertility is determined by several intervening factors, including the following: (1) most women do not begin reproducing immediately upon the onset of puberty, which itself does not occur at a fixed age; (2) some women with the potential to reproduce never do so; (3) some women become widowed and do not remarry; (4) various elements of social behaviour restrain fertility; and (5) many human couples choose consciously to restrict their fertility by means of sexual abstinence, contraception, abortion, or sterilization.
The magnitude of the gap between potential and realized fertility can be illustrated by comparing the highest known fertilities with those of typical European and North American women in the late 20th century. A well-studied high-fertility group is the Hutterites of North America, a religious sect that views fertility regulation as sinful and high fertility as a blessing. Hutterite women who married between 1921 and 1930 are known to have averaged 10 children per woman. Meanwhile, women in much of Europe and North America averaged about two children per woman during the 1970s and 1980s—a number 80 percent less than that achieved by the Hutterites. Even the highly fertile populations of developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America produce children at rates far below that of the Hutterites.
The general message from such evidence is clear enough: in much of the world, human fertility is considerably lower than the biological potential. It is strongly constrained by cultural regulations, especially those concerning marriage and sexuality, and by conscious efforts on the part of married couples to limit their childbearing.
Dependable evidence on historical fertility patterns in Europe is available back to the 18th century, and estimates have been made for several earlier centuries. Such data for non-European societies and for earlier human populations are much more fragmentary. The European data indicate that even in the absence of widespread deliberate regulation there were significant variations in fertility among different societies. These differences were heavily affected by socially determined behaviours such as those concerning marriage patterns. Beginning in France and Hungary in the 18th century, a dramatic decline in fertility took shape in the more developed societies of Europe and North America, and in the ensuing two centuries fertility declines of fully 50 percent took place in nearly all of these countries. Since the 1960s fertility has been intentionally diminished in many developing countries, and remarkably rapid reductions have occurred in the most populous, the People’s Republic of China.
For most of human history, the global population was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Over the last few centuries, the human population has gone through an extraordinary change. In 1800, there were one billion people. Today there are more than 8 billion of us.
Jul 11, 2024 · The global population reached nearly 8.2 billion by mid-2024 and is expected to grow by another two billion over the next 60 years, peaking at around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s. It will...
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Population growth is the increase in the number of humans on Earth. For most of human history our population size was relatively stable. But with innovation and industrialization, energy, food, water, and medical care became more available and reliable.
