Population Research Discovery Seminars

An Earth-Scientist's View of Human Population Dynamics

During the 20th century, the world’s population grew by the factor 3.5. What permitted this growth was the agricultural advances of the 20th century; without those advances the population would not have grown as it did, from 1.7 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000. Now in the 21st century, the ability to secure adequate food and water worldwide is threatened by continued rapid population growth, which has been steady at ~80 million per year for each of the last 50 years. For some countries the growth has instead been nearly exponential, as in the Philippines, whose population grew from 7 million in 1900 to 100 million in 2014, by doubling every 28 years (requiring on average 4 children per couple surviving to reproduce).