There May Be Several More Billion Humans on Earth Than We Thought

We could be severely undercounting the number of humans living on Earth, researchers suggest.

While the United Nations has determined that as of last summer, there were about 8.2 billion humans sharing the limited resources of our planet, a new estimate finds that figure could be off by anywhere from hundreds of millions to an astonishing several billion people.

That might sound like an alarming revelation. But as Queen Mary University of London professor Jonathan Kennedy argues in a recent opinion piece for The Guardian, overpopulation is "rarely just about the numbers."

"They reflect power struggles over which lives matter, who is a burden or a threat and ultimately what the future should look like," he wrote.

The UN's figures are based on census data and population density across a global grid. But employing a different methodology, as Aalto University postdoctoral researcher Josias Láng-Ritter and his colleagues outlined in a paper published in the journal Nature earlier this year, the real number of people on Earth could be vastly higher.

That's because datasets in rural areas are often incomplete and can be unreliable. The researchers found "large discrepancies between the examined datasets," implying that "rural population is, even in the most accurate dataset, underestimated by half compared to reported figures."

At the same time, concerns about "overpopulation" have historically been blown out of proportion, Kennedy argued. The world's population, per the UN, will stabilize and peak around the mid-2080s, at which point, it's expected to start falling.

"That many people will put considerable stress on the Earth’s resources," Kennedy wrote, "but if consumption is managed responsibly and sustainable technologies are developed, the world will avoid an apocalyptic catastrophe."

Others, most notably billionaire Elon Musk, see population collapse as a far bigger threat.

"Population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization," Musk argued in a 2021 tweet.

Of course, there are plenty of other enormous existential threats facing humanity, from climate change to dwindling resources to a devastating loss of biodiversity.

But overpopulation concerns often perpetuate ethnonationalism and a perceived threat of immigrants bringing the end of the "western civilization," Kennedy warned.

"They worry about their countries being indelibly changed by mass migration," he wrote. "But the cold hard truth is that in a few decades our shrinking, ageing societies will desperately need these newcomers to pay taxes and work in healthcare and social care."

"This vision of the future may be unsettling for some, but the alternative is much worse," Kennedy added.

More on overpopulation: Hordes of Tourists Are Trashing Antarctica