World population
total number of living humans on Earth
In world demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently alive. It was estimated by the United Nations to have exceeded 8 billion (8,000,000,000) on November 15, 2022. It took around 300,000 years of human prehistory and history for the human population to reach a billion and only 218 more years from there to reach 8 billion. As of 2026, the world population is approximately 8.3 billion. However, this figure is only a very rough approximation (see § History).
The human population experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it had reached nearly 370 million. The highest global population growth rates, with increases of over 1.8% per year, occurred between 1955 and 1975, peaking at 2.1% between 1965 and 1970. The growth rate declined to 1.1% between 2015 and 2020 and is projected to decline further in the 21st century. The global population is still increasing, but there is significant uncertainty about its long-term trajectory due to changing fertility and mortality rates. The UN Department of Economics and Social Affairs (UNDESA) has projected the world population to reach between 9 and 10 billion people by 2050, providing an 80% confidence interval of 10–12 billion by the end of the 21st century, with a growth rate by then of zero.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “World population” as total number of living humans on Earth. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as total number of living humans on Earth. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11188. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2022, 2026, 1315 and 1317.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “World population” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.