Population - Past and Present

The Global population is currently over 7 billion. The biggest contributors to the world’s population are China and India, they both have populations of over 1 billion and China contains 19% of the population whilst India contains 17.4%. The highest populated continents are Asia and Africa, which are continents that most of the LEDCs are from. Asia has a population of over 4 billion and Africa has a population of over 1 billion, which makes up more than half of the world’s population. The population in these countries and continents are continuing to rise which could cause problems in the future as countries may start to become over-populated and not have enough resources to provide for all their citizens. The reason for the population being so high in the less economically developed continents is because of a much larger birth rate in these places. Reasons for this include the fact that people in LEDCs are not as well educated as people in MEDCs and so are less practical when it comes to having children, for example, the fertility rate in 2011 in Nigeria was 5.49, whereas in the UK it was 1.98 children. Another reason for these high fertility rates is because children are more needed in LEDCs than MEDCs. The reason for this is that in LEDCs a common job for people living in poverty is farming and so couples will need to have lots of children to help them on their farm, whereas in MEDCs a common job for people is office-based work in a city where workers can do their job easily on their own and so it would make more sense for them to have smaller families as it would save them money. In more economically developed continents such as Europe and North America, they have a much lower population that the less developed, with Europe having a population of over 700 million and North America having a population of over 300 million. The reason for the population being much lower in places like this is because they have low birth rates, the reason for this I have explained earlier. However, for a lot of these countries, such as the UK, this low birth rate has left the countries with an ageing population which has resulted in a slightly declining population growth. In the UK, this declining population is being managed by allowing migrants to move to the UK and work there. However, in other MEDCs such as Germany and Denmark, this issue isn’t being addressed as well as it is in the UK and this could cause problems for them in the future.
The world population has changed dramatically over the last 1000 years. In the 1900s, the world population had only risen to as high as 1.7 billion people and up until then the population growth had stayed fairly consistent and low. Then a sudden burst in population growth caused the population to increase to over 6 billion by 2000, an increase of more than 5.3 billion people. In the 1900s, the most populated territories in the world were in Europe, with the countries from the British Empire making up 420 million of the population. The British and the Chinese together took up more than half of the human population. Africa and most Asian countries did have much of an impact on the world’s population, which is the complete opposite of how the world population is today, which explains why the population is now much higher. The population of places such as Europe did grow, but didn’t grow at that fast a rate. Countries in the developing world started to grow in numbers very rapidly due to reasons already covered and overtook the developed world in population, which is why today the population is so much more than it used to be. The developing world continues to grow at this rate and something needs to be done to prevent their numbers getting so high that there aren’t enough resources for them. The graph on the next page demonstrates this trend.