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Here’s what you’ll learn as you read this story:
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While most estimates put the current human population at around 8.2 billion, one study shows that we are vastly underrepresenting rural areas.
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By analyzing 300 rural dam projects in 35 countries, researchers from Aalto University in Finland found differences between these independent population counts and other population data collected between 1975 and 2010.
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Such underreporting could have consequences for resource allocation within countries, but other experts doubt that decades of population counts could be off by such wide margins.
A wise man The most successful mammal species in Earth’s history, and it’s not even close. The species thrives on almost every continent, in a variety of adverse conditions, and far outnumbers the second-place contender—rats.By at least a billion. However, a new study suggests that the dominant nature of humanity’s spread may be largely underreported.
Most estimates put the Earth’s human population at around 8.2 billion, but Josias Lang-Ritter – a postdoctoral researcher at Finland’s Aalto University and lead author of the study published in the journal nature communication –claims that these estimates may underrepresent rural areas by a significant margin.
“We were surprised to find that the actual number of people living in rural areas is much higher than indicated by global population data – the dataset underestimated the rural population by 53 percent to 84 percent over the period studied,” Lang-Ritter said in a press release. “The results are remarkable, as these datasets have been used in thousands of studies and widely support decision-making, but their accuracy has not been systematically evaluated.”
How do you test the accuracy of global datasets used to derive population totals in the first place? Well, with a background in water resources management, Lang-Ritter looked at a different kind of population data collected from rural dam projects—300 such projects in 35 countries, to be exact. This data was focused on 1975 to 2010, and these population lengths provided an important dataset to check against other population totals calculated by organizations such as WorldPop, GWP, GRUMP, LandScan, and GHS-POP (which was also analyzed in this study).
“When dams are built, large areas flood and people need to be relocated,” Lang-Ritter said in a press release. “Relocated populations are usually calculated precisely because dam companies pay compensation to those affected. Unlike global population datasets, such local impact statements provide broad, on-the-ground population counts that are not skewed by administrative boundaries. We then combined this with spatial information from satellite imagery.”
Part of this discrepancy likely stems from the fact that many countries lack the resources for accurate data collection, and the difficulty of traveling to remote rural areas only exacerbates census-enumeration discrepancies. The gross underrepresentation of rural populations around the world can have a profound impact on those communities, as censuses are central to figuring out how to allocate resources.
However, not everyone is convinced by this research. Stuart Gittel-Basten of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology told New Scientist that increased investment in rural population data collection would be beneficial, but we thought the Earth could be home to a few billion more people. “If we’re really counting by that large an amount, it’s a huge news story and goes against thousands of other datasets all year.”
When attempting to count such a large population, a few hundred or perhaps even a few thousand may slip through the cracks. But a few lakhs or so billion Enhances our understanding of human occupation on this planet. Scientists need a little more evidence before rethinking decades of dataset research.
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