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 y ... Read full article.