Don’t panic! There’s no population bomb

Our planet is now home to seven billion people, with ravenous appetites for fuel and food — and the number keeps growing. Do you panic when you think about the expansion of the human race? Yes, the world faces great challenges but it is possible to solve them, and some are in fact already being solved.

I’m a statistician — but don’t stop reading. Because the latest demographic data show that the future may not be that gloomy, and that mankind is already doing better than many of us think.

In 1800, the world’s population stood at barely one billion. But with the industrial revolution everything changed, and in little more than a hundred years, the population reached two billion and then, when I was at school, three billion. Now we are seven billion. More than half of the world’s population has been added during my lifetime and the number is still rising.