Press conference by UN Assistant-Secretary-General for Policy Coordination and Inter-Agency Affairs, Maria-Francesca Spatolisano, Director, Population Division, John Wilmoth and Chief, Population Estimates and Projection Section, Population Division, Patrick Gerland. A briefing on the launch of the World Population Prospects 2022: Summary of Results.
On 15 November 2022, the global population will surpass 8 billion people for the first time, according to a new UN report.
Speaking to journalists in New York on Monday (11 July), the Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Coordination and Inter-Agency Affairs, Maria-Francesca Spatolisano, said “the historic moment calls for celebration.”
According to Spatolisano, “population growth is a tangible sign of our collective success in improving the living conditions of everyday people throughout the world.”
The Assistant Secretary-General explained that the milestone “also brings important responsibilities and highlights related challenges for social and economic development and environmental sustainability.”
“For example, countries whose populations are growing rapidly, must provide schooling and health care to grow numbers of children, and ensure education and employment opportunities through increasing numbers of views”, Spatolisano said.
The Assistant Secretary-General added that “whereas population growth may exacerbate environmental damage, more developed countries, whose per capita consumption of material resources is generally the highest, have the greatest responsibility for implementing strategies to decouple human economic activity from environmental degradation.”
John Wilmoth, the Director of the Population Division at the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), also informed that the global population will continue to grow and could reach 9.7 billion in 2015.
According to Wilmoth, the number “is projected to reach a peak of around 10 point 4 billion people during the 2080s and to remain at that level until 2100.”
“The projected global population of 10 point 4 billion at the end of the century is more than a half a billion lower than what we projected three years ago,” the expert added.
World Population Prospects 2022 is the twenty-seventh edition of the official United Nations population estimates and projections.
It presents population estimates from 1950 to the present for 237 countries or areas, underpinned by analyses of historical demographic trends.
This latest assessment considers the results of 1,758 national population censuses conducted between 1950 and 2022, as well as information from vital registration systems and from 2,890 nationally representative sample surveys.
The 2022 revision also presents population projections to the year 2100 that reflect a range of plausible outcomes at the global, regional and national levels.
For the first time, the estimates and projections are presented in one-year intervals of age and time instead of the five-year intervals used previously.
