THE world population, in the current decade, reached about seven billion and 125 million inhabitants. It's a lot of people, isn't it!? But after all, like this population is distributed? Where do more people live and where do they live less?
The main factor we need to understand about distribution of world population is that the number of inhabitants on Earth is very unequal between regions. While Asia alone concentrates more than half of the people living on the planet, there are areas practically uninhabited, such as the poles and desert regions, given the little climate favorable.
The Asian continent, in fact, concentrates more than 60% of the world's population. Its area is equivalent to approximately 30% of all emerged lands on our planet. Not by chance, three out of five most populous countries on the planet are on that continent. See the list of countries with the largest populations:
1st China (Asia) – 1.30 billion inhabitants
2nd India (Asia) – 1.20 billion inhabitants
3rd United States (North America) – 310 million inhabitants
4th Indonesia (Asia) – 240 million inhabitants
5th Brazil (South America) - 202 million inhabitants
To realize this inequality in terms of the distribution of populations among thecountries, just add the number of inhabitants in the third, fourth and fifth places in the list above, which gives 769 million people, a number lower than the number of the first two places. China, in recent decades, has been adopting strong measures to reduce the population growth and, in the near future, it will be overtaken by India.
If we consider the populations of the Earth's inhabited continents, we can get an even greater sense of how the world's population is poorly distributed across the globe:
1st Asia - 4 billion and 427 million inhabitants
2nd Africa - 1 billion and 111 million inhabitants
3rd America – 953 million inhabitants
4th Europe – 742.5 million inhabitants
5th Oceania – 40 million inhabitants
As we can see, there are more people living in Asia than in the rest of the world. There are some areas of this continent that are called “human anthills”, such is the demographic density of the places.
The darkest areas of the map are from the countries with the highest number of inhabitants
Among all the continents, the one that grows the most in population is Africa, which, by 2100, should have ten of the twenty most populous countries on the planet, according to projections carried out by the UN. Brazil, in turn, will lose its fifth place to Pakistan (Asia) and Nigeria (Africa) over the next decade, as our country's population grows at an ever slower pace.
By Me. Rodolfo Alves Pena
