How has world population growth changed over time?

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. This is a mind-boggling change: the world population today is around 2,000 times the size of what it was 12,000 years ago, when it was around 4 million, less than half of the current population of London.

What is striking about this chart is, of course, that almost all of this growth happened just very recently. Historical demographers estimate that around 1800, the world population was just under 1 billion people. This implies that, on average, the population grew very slowly from 10,000 BCE to 1700 (by 0.04% annually). After 1800, this changed fundamentally: the world population was around 1 billion in 1800 and is now around 8 billion — 8 times larger.

Around 108 billion people have ever lived on our planet. This means that today’s population makes up 6.5% of the total number of people ever born.[1]

For a long period from the appearance of modern Homo sapiens up to the starting point of this chart in 10,000 BCE, it is estimated that the total world population was often well under one million.[2] In that period, our species was often seriously threatened by extinction.[3]

You can explore the interactive visualization of this change.

How has the world population growth rate changed?

We looked at the absolute change in the global population over time. But what about the rate of population growth?

The global population growth rate peaked long ago. The next chart shows that global population growth peaked in 1963 at an annual growth rate of 2.3%; however, since then, world population growth has halved.[4]

For the last half-century, the population growth rate has been declining. The UN projects that this decline will continue in the coming decades.

A common question we’re asked is whether the global population is growing exponentially. The answer is no.

For population growth to be exponential, the growth rate would have to be the same over time — for example, 2% growth every year. In absolute terms, this would result in an exponential increase in the number of people. That’s because we’d be multiplying an ever-larger number of people by the same 2%. 2% of this year’s population would be larger than 2% last year, and so on; this means the population would grow exponentially.

However, as this chart shows, the growth rate has been falling since the 1960s. This means the world population is not growing exponentially.

Other ways to visualize population growth

How long did it take for the world population to double?

There are a few other ways to contextualize this period of population growth.

In the next chart, we show the time it took the world population to double. On the vertical axis, we have the number of years needed to double; on the horizontal axis, we have the year that a population level was reached. This is based on the 2024 revision of world population estimates from the UN Population Division.

In the past, the world population grew slowly: it took over ten centuries for the population to double from 250 million (in the early 5th century) to 500 million in the middle of the 15th century. As the growth rate slowly climbed, the population doubling time fell but remained in the order of centuries.

Things sped up considerably in the middle of the 20th century. The fastest doubling of the world population happened between 1950 and 1986: from 2.5 to 5 billion people in just 36 years — the population doubled within a little more than one generation. This period was marked by a peak population growth of 2.3% in 1963.

Since then, population growth has slowed, and the doubling time alongside it. In this visualization, we have used the UN projections to show how the doubling time is projected to change until the end of this century. By the 2060s, it will once again have taken approximately 74 years for the population to double to a predicted 10 billion.

How long did it take for the world population to increase by one billion?

This last visualization provides an additional perspective on population growth: the number of years it took to add one billion to the global population. This is based on the 2024 revision of world population estimates from the UN Population Division.

This visualization shows again how the population growth rate has changed dramatically over time.

It wasn’t until 1805 that the world reached a population of 1 billion; it then took another 121 years to reach two billion. By the third billion, this period had reduced to 34 years, reduced further to 14 years to reach four. The fastest growth period occurred from 1974 to 2022, taking only 12 years to increase by one billion for the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th time.

The world has now surpassed this peak rate of growth, and the period between each billion is expected to continue rising. It’s estimated to take approximately 15 years to reach nine billion in 2037 and 23 years to reach 10 billion in 2060.

The latest medium projection from the UN finds that the world will not reach 11 billion people this century: it projects the population to peak at 10.3 billion in the 2080s before falling again.

Endnotes

1] As per 2011 estimates from Carl Haub (2011), “[How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?” Population Reference Bureau.

2] See, for example, Kremer (1993) – [Population growth and technological change: one million BC to 1990. In the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 108, No. 3, 681-716.

3] John Hawks, Keith Hunley, Sang-Hee Lee, Milford Wolpoff; [Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 17, Issue 1, 1 January 2000, Pages 2–22.

4] This data comes from the [UN World Population Division.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “How has world population growth changed over time?” by Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska (June 1, 2023), published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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