It’s no secret that the world’s population is growing. The 7.2 billion humans currently on Earth may represent only a fraction of what’s to come. And although previous studies have predicted that the world’s population will stabilize around 2050, a new study projects that the population may continue to grow, to the end of this century and beyond: to 9.6 billion in 2050 and 10.9 billion in 2100.
One of the landmark studies on population projections came in 2001, in which researchers projected that the world’s population would stop growing before the century was out. In 2012, a report from the United Nations tempered that projection, pointing to a stabilization point sometime after the year 2100. But these UN projections have drawn criticism from other population researchers, mainly because they’re a little clunky. For example, the UN gets its “high” and “low” predictions by adding or subtracting half a child ...
