The earth's population reaches 8-billion milestone. The last time we added 1 billion to the population was 2010.
In the UN's World Population Prospects 2022 report, the international agency said that it expects the population to reach somewhere near 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, 10.4 billion in the 2080s and remain at that level until 2100.
Between 1804 and 1927, the global population grew from one billion to two billion. It took 33 years after that to reach three billion. Since then, it's taken roughly 12.6 years to add another billion people.
But at least one population expert is skeptical about this projection by the UN.
"This is the last time we're probably going to have a conversation about reaching another billion marker," said Darrell Bricker, CEO at Ipsos Public Affairs and a fellow at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
'Where we're going to end up'
"Somewhere between eight and nine billion is where we're going to end up [by the end of the century]," said Bricker, who co-wrote Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline.
"The reason that it's not going to increase more than that is because … China now is recording its lowest birth rate in history. India has just dropped below replacement rate for its birth rate. That's 36 per cent of the entire global population that are now not replacing or not at replacement level birth rates."
And once it gets to eight or nine billion people, he said, it's likely it'll drop even lower.
