World Population Predictions

Nigeria’s population
• 1950 36 million
• 2017 191 million
• 2030 (predicted) 264 million
• Present Growth Rate 2.53% every year
• Doubles every 28 years
62% of the World’s Population

http://www.worldometers.info/
Indefinite Growth
 What Limits Exponential Growth?
• Carrying Capacity, the
average population
density or population size
of a species below which
its numbers tend to
increase and above which
its numbers tend to
decrease because of
shortages of resources
What limited population growth in the past (carrying capacity)?

What has changed?

Limits on human population before 1800? What changed?
• Intensive farming
• Famine
• Less wars
• War
• Modern medicine
• Plague – Antibiotics
• Infant mortality • Low infant mortality
• (female infanticide)
 Growth Rate
• Growth rate is the increase in population over a given time interval usually measured in
percentage per year.
• If Nt is the population at time t and Nt+1 is the population at time t+1 then the growth
rate is
(Nt+1 – Nt)/Nt
• Typically the growth rate is affected by three things:
– Birth rate
– Death rate
– Migration
 Age Structure

• Age structure is the classification of members of a population into groups according to

age or the distribution of members of a population in terms of age groups

• Countries that have high rates of growth usually have more young people than older
people.

• In contrast, countries that have slow growth or no growth usually have an even
distribution of ages in the population.

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Age Structure Diagrams

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 Population Profile (pyramid)
A chart showing the number of people as a
function of their ages

WORLD 7,515,284,153
2017
 Types of Population Profile
Japan, Iran, Nigeria (2017)
JAPAN NIGERIA
IRAN
Predicting Population Using Age Structure Diagrams

(a) less developed (for an expanding population) (b) highly developed countries (stable population).

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