this graph was created in PowerBi,Loocker and Tableau:
We can’t understand the world without understanding demographic change.
How many people are alive today? How many are born; how many die? What do we expect populations to look like in the future?
The United Nations updates its big dataset — the World Population Prospects — every two years to answer these questions. It just released its latest edition today.
We’ve updated all of our population-related datasets and charts with this new release. You can explore all the trends for every country in our Population and Demography Data Explorer.
In this article, we wanted to provide key insights from this latest wave of data.
The world population is projected to peak slightly earlier than in previous projections
The United Nations doesn’t only publish historical estimates of how population and demographic trends have changed in the past; it also makes projections for what the future might look like. To be clear, these are projections, not predictions of changes in the future.
In its 2022 publication, the UN estimated that, in its medium scenario, the global population would peak in 2086 at around 10.4 billion people.
This year’s edition brings this peak forward slightly to 2084, with the population topping at just under 10.3 billion.
The chart below compares the two revisions.
This isn’t the first time the projected peak has been pulled earlier. According to its 2019 edition, the global population would reach 10.9 billion by 2100 and keep growing. The 2022 revision was the first to project a peak in the 21st century.
Not every country has seen a drop in projected population compared to the last edition. The chart below shows the differences between the two UN revisions, region by region. Note that the vertical axis scale for each region is different, allowing you to see the changes more clearly.
The latest UN revision has downgraded its future population estimates in Asia, Africa, and Latin America but increased its projections for Europe and North America.