In 2022, the United Nations announced that the planet had reached 8 billion inhabitants. At the time of writing these lines, the website Population Today, which updates us one by one, and second by second, says that we are already at 8,211,333,125, with India being the most populous country and Spain the 32nd. All scientific decisions and calculations regarding climate change, resource allocation, infrastructure planning, disaster risk management, or pandemic control depend on that figure. Experts agree that by 2050, we will reach 9 billion inhabitants. However, a study by the Finnish Aalto University, recently published in Nature Communications, not only states that we may have already surpassed that figure, but perhaps even reached 10 billion.
"The actual population living in rural areas is much higher than indicated by official global population data," says water and development expert researcher Josias Láng-Ritter.
Around 43% of the 8.2 billion inhabitants live in rural areas. According to this research, the figure would be between 53% and 84% higher than previously thought, with a significant impact on China and Southeast Asia, but also with significant gaps in Latin America and Central Europe. "The results are important as erroneous data have been used to support decision-making in thousands of studies," points out Láng-Ritter.
This is not the first time that research has been conducted to determine if there are errors in the estimates, but previous attempts apparently tended to focus on individual countries or urban areas. The issue is that not all countries have the necessary resources for accurate data collection, and sometimes it can be very difficult to access rural regions with widely dispersed populations and vast land areas. Researchers quickly discovered that the negative bias was systematic worldwide, with particularly noticeable discrepancies when analyzing data sets from rural communities in China, Brazil, Australia, Poland, and Colombia.
To uncover these errors, they used data from multinational companies involved in dam construction: "When dams are built, large areas are flooded, and it is necessary to relocate the population, which is usually counted precisely because companies have to pay compensation to those affected. Unlike global population data sets, these local impact statements provide comprehensive population counts on the ground, without the bias of administrative borders."
The findings suggest that the needs of people living in rural areas have been underrepresented in global decision-making, which could have led to insufficient resources for healthcare or transportation.
The study's conclusion is that "there are strong reasons to believe that the most recent data still omit part of the global population," and by extrapolating their estimates, we could be talking about between 2,000 and 3,000 million inhabitants. The problem is that "even if the most recent population maps reflect reality, previous data sets have influenced decision-making for decades and are still being used," they point out. And it is not easily solved: "For example, here in Finland, population data is very reliable, even in rural areas, as we were the second country in the world to start digital population records in 1990. But in underdeveloped countries, the transition to digital population records could take years, even decades," says Láng-Ritter.