World population: Boom or bust?

For centuries, overpopulation had been a dark cloud hovering over our future. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) predicted that there would be more of us by 2050 than the planet could accommodate. Based on the latest UN projections, there will be 8.6 billion of us by 2030, 9.8 billion by 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100.

This prediction has inspired visions of the Apocalypse. “Every which way you look at it, a planet of 10 billion looks like a nightmare,” said Stephen Emmott, author of 10 Billion, which detailed the horrors of population explosion, such as food shortage, energy wars, and civil conflict.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus shared that “population would grow at a geometric rate while food production increased at an arithmetic rate,” but had he lived beyond the 1800s, he would have been even more alarmed. From an annual growth rate of 0.6 percent between 1850 and 1900, world population grew at an unprecedented rate of 2.06 percent by 1970.