Insights
The world passed 8 billion. What happens next?
When the world crossed eight billion people, headlines treated it as a cliff edge. The data tells a calmer story: growth is real but decelerating. The World Bank's 2025 estimate puts the annual growth rate at 0.911% — roughly 75 million added people a year, down from rates above 1% two decades ago.
That deceleration is the demographic transition playing out: as fertility falls toward the replacement level of about 2.1 births per woman (the world is now near 2.19), each generation adds fewer people than the last.
Where the growth is
It is heavily concentrated. The fastest-growing large populations are in sub-Saharan Africa — Niger, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo — where growth rates still exceed 3% a year. Meanwhile dozens of countries, from Japan to Latvia, are shrinking.
The takeaway: "overpopulation" and "population collapse" are both true at once, in different places. The single global number hides a world that is diverging.
See the live figures for Niger and Japan to feel the contrast.