World population projected to reach 10.9 billion by 2100

The UN Population Division published this year its report World Population Prospects: The 2019 Revision with lots of goodies, including the latest world population projections. Here are the ten key findings of the report:

1. The world’s population continues to increase, but growth rates vary greatly across regions
2. Nine countries will make up more than half the projected population growth between now and 2050
3. Rapid population growth presents challenges for sustainable development
4. In some countries, growth of the working-age population is creating opportunities for economic growth
5. Globally, women are having fewer babies, but fertility rates remain high in some parts of the world
6. People are living longer, but those in the poorest countries still live 7 years less than the global average
7. The world’s population is growing older, with persons over age 65 being the fastest-growing age group 
8. Falling proportions of working-age people are putting pressure on social protection systems
9. A growing number of countries are experiencing a reduction in population size
10. Migration has become a major component of population change in some countries

A neat visualization of population growth by region based on UN Population Division (2019) medium variant scenario projections. This chart was put together by Our World in Data, who have plenty more material on this and other topics.

     

Assorted links

1. Automation and AI will increase spatial/regional inequalities. Paper by Morgan Frank and colleagues
   
   
2. Explore, select and download data of the global population projections by age, sex and education, a great collaborative work of researchers from the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital
   
   
3. The team led by Max Roser at Our World in Data is hiring a postdoctoral researcher in the area of global health and population sciences
   
   
4. Greyhound: a powerful platform to interactively explore and analyze massive point clouds with Trillions of points in the browser, via Howard Butler
   
   
   
   
5. The dynamical structure of political corruption networks. A paper by Haroldo Ribeiro, Luis Alves et al., analyzing 27 years of political corruption scandals in Brazil
   
   
6. Citywide effects of high-occupancy vehicle restrictions: Evidence from “three-in-one” in Jakarta, by Rema Hanna et al.
   
   
7. Want to find statistically significant hierarchical modules in weighted networks? paper here and code here, by Tiago Peixoto, who is the author of the graph-tool Python library

Assorted Links

1. The world’s largest subway system goes cashless as Shanghai Metro adopts QR code
   
   
   
   
2. Fitness tracking app Strava data gives away location of secret US army bases
   
   
   
   
3. Marriages have on average long lasting positive effects on well-being and life satisfaction HT Cesar Hidalgo I cannot confirm nor deny
   
   
   
   
4. Most Americans didn't approve of Martin Luther King Jr. before his death
   
   
   
   
5. Sprawling Mayan 'cities' uncovered under Guatemala jungle using LIDAR data - "The study estimates that roughly 10 million people may have lived within the Maya Lowlands"
   
   
   
   
6. What factors are associated with population projection accuracy? by Guangqing Chi and Donghui Wang
   
   
   
   
7. The World's 15 Most Complex Subway Maps and our cognitive limits: "Multimodal transportation systems in large cities have thus already exceeded human cognitive limits and, consequently, the traditional view of navigation in cities has to be revised substantially"
   
   
   
   
8. The total seasonal snowfall in the continental US for 2017–Jan 2018, shown as a relief map. Beautiful dataviz by Garrett Dash Nelson
   
   

R Links

1. A new R package establishes an interface between R and QGIS - RQGIS , and a video tutorial showing the new ArcGIS interface for R
   
   
2. PISA 2015 – how to read/process/plot PISA data with R
   
   
3. bayesPop, the package for Bayesian population projections used by the UN, by Adrian Raftery via Bernardo L Queiroz. Here is the paper
   
   
4. Improving R animated GIFs with tweenr,by Leonard Kiefer
   
   
5. Simple and interactive R Graph Catalog
   
   
6. An interactive color chooser for #rstats
   
   
7. Creating tilted and stacked maps in R using ggplot2
   
   
8. Urška Demšar et al have written an script in R to visualize Stacked Space-Time Densities around trajectories. The related paper is here

credit: Urška Demšar

Global Grid of Probabilities of Urban Expansion to 2030

Karen Seto and her group at Yale have recently made available a dataset of Global Grid of Probabilities of Urban Expansion, which presents spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land cover change from 2000 to 2030 at a 2.5 arc-minute resolution. This is the dataset they used in their PNAS paper we have mentioned back in 2012.

Thanks Marcia Castro for the pointer.

India expected to overtake China′s population by 2026

Aron Strandberg has a great series of tweets on demographic trends.

Projection: #India overtaking #China as the world's most populous country. @conradhackett @MaxCRoser pic.twitter.com/epSN0pNw9k

— Aron Strandberg (@aronstrandberg) November 26, 2015

Nigeria is also expected to overtake the US population at some point after 2050.

Projection: #Nigeria closing in on the US as the world's third most populous country @conradhackett @MaxCRoser pic.twitter.com/gKQLRUX0xj

— Aron Strandberg (@aronstrandberg) November 26, 2015

Some Demographic Assorted Links

1. The UN has recently released the 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects (via Bernardo Queiroz)
   
   
2. Cutting edge research behind new population projections
   
   
3. Can Demography Affect Inflation and Monetary Policy? (via MR)
   
   
4. Which countries have the most immigrants?
   
   
5. There are now at least two good open access journals in demography/population studies. The well known Demographic Research (twitter) , and the new International Journal of Population Studies (twitter)
   
   
6. The new Institute for Asian Demographic Research, in Shanghai (via Emilio Zagheni)
   
   
7. In celebration to World Population Day (11th of July), Springer and BioMed have made freely available a selection of free articles that investigate the consequences of the ever increasing population on health, migration and the environment. These papers will be freely available until September 10, 2015
   
   
8. Nice piece in the NYT on the The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion
   
   
9. A great series of GIFs showing demographic changes in different counties (ht Conrad Hackett)

[image credit: Laird Research]

Assorted Links

1. What The World's Cities Look Like Without People
   
   
2. Urban street networks, a comparative analysis of ten European cities
   
   
3. By 2030, the World's Biggest Cities Will Be in Asia and Africa
   
   
4. 150 years of history in great pictures of the Tube (London Underground)
   
   
5. Sabina Alkire and her team at the the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative have just published a new book on Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis. The entire book is freely available to download
   
   
6. Impressive photos of the Central Park now and then via MR
   
   
7. Every active satellite orbiting Earth
   
   
8. A national map of cycling to work in the UK, by Alasdair Rae

Higher resolution, here

[image credit: Alasdair Rae]

Assorted links

1. Skype Translator is on the way via MR
   
   
2. Paris's history, captured in its streets (using R!)
   
   
3. Compare the actual size of countries
   
   
4. Flowcharts
   
   
5. A systematic approach to interactive visualization and algorithms
   
   
6. Which Countries Require Visas To Visit
   
   
7. The Evolution of Moscow's Subway Maps
   
   
8. Serious scientific progress
   
   
9. Other things I would rather be doing
   
   
10. According to UN projections, nearly 9% of the world’s population will be living in just 41 megacities by 2030. Great Dataviz by The Economist

Assorted links

1. All papers published in Nature will be made free to read in screen-view format (ht Cheli Cresswell)
   
   
2. The world's most beautiful metro stations in pictures
   
   
3. Nature explores the most-cited research of all time
   
   
4. Mind-blowing post "Visualizing Algorithms" (ht Andy Boneau) 


5. Louis Smith has written a great piece to celebrate the 100th anniversary Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian architect who designed MASP in Sao Paulo and the Bowl Chair
   
   
6. Some common ways we're misled with charts
    
7. Migrants account for 70% of the increase in working-age population in OECD area
   
   
8. How big is #67P? Compare size of the comet with cities across Europe
   
   
9. World population predictions keep getting upward revisions these days (ht Sander Wagner)

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: Scientific American]

Assorted Links

1. The Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning at the MIT found a great way to visualize their faculty members
   
   
2. Suprise in an Abandoned Bangkok Shopping Mall
   
   
3. You will thank me for this: How much underwear to bring on a trip
   
   
4. Prisons Are Facing Aging Populations, Too
   
   
5. Call for Papers: New Directions in Geospatial Simulation
   
   
6. Diver-less Cars With Adjustable Ethics Settings? via Karel Martens
   
   
7. The world population will not stabilize this century, says a new report that Patrick Gerland et al. published yesterday in Science.

UN 2012 population projections by continent [click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: Patrick Gerland et al.]

R Links

1. Robin Lovelace will be teaching a practical introduction to spatial microsimulation in R, Cambridge/UK Sept 18 - 19th
   
   
2. Free e-book on Data Science with R
   
   
3. Rob Hyndman talks about how to do Forecasting, Backcasting and Coherent population forecasting using R
   
   
4. Computational Actuarial Science with R
   
   
5. Exploring the United Nations population projections with rCharts, by Kyle Walker
   
   
6. There are many useful tips in the Applied Demography Toolbox
   
   
7. Behold the R meme generator! Your life will never be the same after this.

Demographic papers published on Science and Nature

It's not everyday you see demographers publishing on journals like Science and Nature. So here is a short list with some of the papers published since 2000.

ps. Massive presence of @IIASAVienna and @WiCVienna researchers!

• (2013) Pervasive Externalities at the Population, Consumption, and Environment Nexus, by Partha S. Dasgupta, Paul R. Ehrlich
  
  
• (2012) Demography's Role in Sustainable Development, Many authors
  
  
• (2011) China’s Demographic History and Future Challenges, by Xizhe Peng
  
  
• (2011) The Demography of Educational Attainment and Economic Growth, by Wolfgang Lutz, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, Warren Sanderson
  
  
• (2011) 7 Billion and Counting, by David E. Bloom
  
  
• (2008) Health and Urban Living, by Christopher Dye
  
  
• (2008) The coming acceleration of global population ageing, by Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson, Sergei Scherbov
  
  
• (2006) The Demography of Growing European Identity, by Wolfgang Lutz, Sylvia Kritzinger, Vegard Skirbekk
  
  
• (2005) Average remaining lifetimes can increase as human populations age, by Warren C. Sanderson, Sergei Scherbov
  
  
• (2003) Europe's Population at a Turning Point, Wolfgang Lutz, Brian C. O'Neill, Sergei Scherbov

and my two favorites:

• (2010) Remeasuring Aging, by Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov
  
  
• (2011) Global Human Capital: Integrating Education and Population, Wolfgang Lutz, Samir KC
• Interactive Age and Education Pyramids by Country

[Image Credit: Lutz and KC, 2011]

Assorted Links

1. New U.S. and World Population Clock (via @DataGeekB)
   
   
2. The most beautiful and least accessible memorial on the planet? (via C. Blattman)
   
   
3. Mapping Electricity Use at the very local level in NY and in LA
   
   
4. 10 of the most ridiculous japanese inventions of all time (via Leo Monasterio)
   
   
5. A population simulator called "demographics lab" (via John Weeks)
   
   
6. What Pangea looks like mapped with modern political borders
   
   
7. The Dynamics of City Size and Related Distributions by M. Batty
   
   
8. Islands of Mankind [Interactive] 

Forecasting Migration

Andres Marroquin points to this chart showing long-term trends of net migration by continent. [By the way, the original report has many interesting charts that give a clear summary of global demographic trends]

When we hear the words “long-term migration” in the same sentence, it is impossible not to remember one prominent Achilles' heel in demographic studies: the inability to forecast long-term migration. Here is Willekens' opinion on this topic.

Why is it not possible to do long-term [migration] forecasts?

The data from statistical offices are not suitable for long-term migration forecasts. The reason is that these data document the outcome of migration flows – not the reasons behind them. Predictions on the basis of past behaviour are reliable when the system is stable, i.e. when conditions do not change and people respond to these conditions in the same way as people in the past. But conditions change, for instance when regulatory measures are taken to prevent migration flows, or events occur, like political changes in the country or natural disasters. (Frans Willekens)

Related Links:

• A new journal of Migration Studies, from Oxford University Press.
• Estimating global migration flow tables using place of birth data
• Changing Patterns and Determinants of Interprovincial Migration in China 1985–2000
• The Mystery of Declining Mobility in the USA

Demographic evolution of cities, 1950-2025

A nice chart showing the U.N. estimate for the demographic evolution of cities between 1950 and 2025. (via RC21 Network). 

Here are some other charts based on a similiar idea:

• Urban Hierarchy of 590 cities (1950-2050)
• Relative Rank of American States for Nine Decades (1790-1870)
• Urban hierarchy of the United States over time (1790-2000)
• The Richest Cities in the US in 1978 and Now

A demographic projection of engineering workforce

 shameless  self-promotion alert! The Scientific Programme of the XXVII IUSSP International Population Conference is out. Here is my self-recommending paper.

Title:
A demographic projection of engineering workforce in Brazil through 2020

Abstract:

One major hurdle for the Brazilian economy relates to the availability of qualified workforce in key occupations. This paper contributes in this matter presenting a demographic projection of engineering workforce availability in Brazil up to 2020. The projection method we have used adapts the cohort-component method to a simplified model of entries and exits in the labor market. Data from five different public databases available in Brazil were used to run the projections on yearly basis. The method is rather flexible and can be used to project almost any population group with higher education degree from different backgrounds, by sex and age. We draw four scenarios that differ in terms of possible growth rates to be observed in the number of student entries, including a constant enrollment number (CER) variant. The results suggest that Brazilian labor market would have between 1.6 and 2.3 million people holding a degree in engineering fields in the year 2020. Finally, our findings suggest that the claimed lack of engineering workforce in the country might not be a matter of purely quantitative supply, but rather of education quality and geographical concentration of engineering schools and engineering workforce.

See extended abstract.

Assorted Links on Workforce and Education

1. What is a College Degree Worth?
   
   
2. Self-perceptions and college dropout
   
   
3. Fertility rate and female education (the US)
   
   
4. Age transition and working-age population in China - more here
   
   
5. The Role of Skills in a Growth Strategy for the UK
   
   
6. Older, but Not Yet Retired
   
   
7. "The vanishing workforce"
   
   
8. Share of employers that reported recruitment difficulties in 2010

[Image Credit: NYT; Data source: OECD report]

Chart of the Day

The sum of human experience.

"By the end of this century [...] the world's population will have stabilised at just over 10 billion and those people will have accumulated 430 billion years of human experience between them."

Related Links:

• Modeling and Forecasting Health Expectancy: Theoretical Framework and Application
• Steep Increase in Best-Practice Cohort Life Expectancy
• Swiss Re on Understanding and Predicting Longevity

Global forecasts of urban expansion

A cutting edge study by Karen C. Seto (Yale) and others on urban growth projections around the world and some of its environmental impacts (via  Urbanization Project). Read a briefing of the study here or here.

Abstract:

"[...] despite projections that world urban populations will increase to nearly 5 billion by 2030, little is known about future locations, magnitudes, and rates of urban expansion. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land-cover change and explore the direct impacts on biodiversity hotspots and tropical carbon biomass. If current trends in population density continue and all areas with high probabilities of urban expansion undergo change, then by 2030, urban land cover will increase by 1.2 million km2, nearly tripling the global urban land area circa 2000."

[Image Credit: Yale]

Related Links:

• Las Vegas Urbanization (1976-2010) - more here
• Seto Urbanization and Global Change Group
• Atlas of Urban Expansion