In the year 2021, the world population increased by around 82 million people.

According to the German Foundation for World Population (DSW), around 7,920,278,000 people live on earth on the night of January 1st.

However, the relative growth has almost halved in the past 50 years.

The world population is currently growing by 1.09 percent every year.

Between 1965 and 1970 there was a high of 2.05 percent, according to data from the United Nations.

The reason for this is primarily the lower fertility rates, the DSW said.

“Worldwide, the average number of children per woman is 2.3.

With a fertility rate of 2.1, the world population would not continue to grow. "

Peter-Philipp Schmitt

Editor in the section “Germany and the World”.

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In regions with a particularly high number of teenage pregnancies, the population continues to rise sharply.

In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the fertility rate is still 4.7 on average, and 4.3 in Africa as a whole.

In the middle of the century, 2.1 billion people could live in the south of the continent alone, twice as many as today.

China currently still has the largest population (1.44 billion), but the United Nations expects the number to drop to just under a billion by the end of the century.

Calculations show that India could replace China as the most populous country as early as 2027.

The particularly populous countries India, USA, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil and Nigeria alone will grow by around 900 million people by 2100.

Life expectancy fell in several states

Corona also affects population growth.

As the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock found in a study, life expectancy fell last year in 31 of 37 countries examined, particularly sharply by more than two years in Russia and the United States.

Germany ranks 30th with a loss of 0.36 years (men 0.43, women 0.38 years).

In the 31 countries where life expectancy fell in 2020, more than 222 million years of life were lost.

In the United States, population growth fell to the lowest level in the country's history because of the pandemic.

In the twelve months from July 1, 2020, the population grew by just under 393,000 to 331.9 million people.