It’s going to get a bit more crowded in the world as the United Nations says the globe will cross a new population threshold — 8 billion.
The U.N. said that over the past 12 years, 1 billion people have been added to the global population, CNN reported.
BBC News, however, reported that it is difficult to get an exact moment the population will cross the 8 billion mark but that the U.N. said that Nov. 15 is the best estimate, conceding that it could be off by a year or two.
The international organization says the reason is that people have been living longer due “to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine.”
Middle-income countries in Asia have had the highest growth, adding about 700 million people over the past decade. India alone has added about 180 million and is expected to have a larger population than China next year.
The U.N. says that the world will hit the next major milestone in less than 30 years.
The population will hit 9.7 billion in 2050 and then will hit a peak of 10.4 billion by the 2080s, with the highest growth in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the summary released by the organization.
The Associated Press reported that Nigeria will be the fourth-most populous country in the world after India, China and the U.S. over the next 30 years. The country is already feeling the effects of a population explosion, with more than 15 million people living in and around Lagos — forcing workers into a two-hour commute each way and some children in the country having to leave for school as early as 5 a.m.
“We are already overstretching what we have — the housing, roads, the hospitals, schools. Everything is overstretched,” Gyang Dalyop, an urban planning and development consultant in Nigeria, told the AP.
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