Doubling of world population unlikely

Most national and international agencies producing population projections avoid addressing explicitly the issue of uncertainty. Typically, they provide either a single projection or a set of low, medium and high variants,, and only very rarely do they give these projections a probabilistic interpret...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature (London) 1997-06, Vol.387 (6635), p.803-805
Main Authors: Lutz, Wolfgang, Sanderson, Warren, Scherbov, Sergei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age Distribution
Anthropology. Demography
Biological and medical sciences
Demographics
Emigration and Immigration
Female
Fertility
Forecasting
Human physiology applied to population studies and life conditions. Human ecophysiology
Humans
Life Expectancy
Male
Medical sciences
Mortality
Normal Distribution
Population
Population Growth
Predictions
Probability
Sex Distribution
Time series
World population
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Most national and international agencies producing population projections avoid addressing explicitly the issue of uncertainty. Typically, they provide either a single projection or a set of low, medium and high variants,, and only very rarely do they give these projections a probabilistic interpretation. Probabilistic population projections have been developed for specific industrialized countries, mostly the United States, and are based largely on time-series analysis. On a global level, time-series analysis is not applicable because there is a lack of appropriate data, and for conceptual reasons such as the structural discontinuity caused by the demographic transition. Here we report on a new probabilistic approach that makes use of expert opinion on trends in fertility, mortality and migration, and on the 90 per cent uncertainty range of those trends in different parts of the world. We have used simulation techniques to derive probability distributions of population sizes and age structures for 13 regions of the world up to the year 2100. Among other things, we find that there is a probability of two-thirds that the world's population will not double in the twenty-first century.
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687
DOI:10.1038/42935