Almost every geographer and demographer agrees that over the course of the twenty-first century Africa will witness by far the largest population growth. Some demographers expect the population of the continent to quadruple, from a bit over one billion to more than four billion people. That means there will be three billion more Africans alive in 2100 than were alive in 2000. To put that into context, over the same time period, the combined populations of Asia, North America, and South America are projected to grow by a little less than one billion!

Almost all of the world’s fastest growing countries can be found in Africa. Africa is the least developed continent on Earth, but it is rapidly developing in recent years. Many countries in Africa are experiencing stage 2 of the demographic transition model; where death rates are starting to fall, but birth rates remain steadily high. This leads to massive population growth.

Less developed countries often experience greater population growth because they are in the "infancy stage" of development. In addition, countries with a high birth rate and low mortality rate will have a shorter doubling time because number of births will greatly exceed the number of deaths. 

To undergo a population implosion entails that the population is decreasing, hugely due to a higher death rate than a birth rate. Europe has definitely been going through this for years. The other mentioned others have been more going through populations explosions, with growing populations.

The geographic term “ecumene” is used to describe land that is permanently populated by human society. It can also refer to industrial and agricultural land that is permanently used to sustain the human population.

More than three-quarters of the world’s population lives in the developing world. The term “developing world” is generally used to refer to countries that do not have highly modernized and industrial economies.

Since roughly eight to ten thousand years ago, the population of humanity has climbed consistently, but gradually; however, beginning in the late eighteenth century in England, the Industrial Revolution changed everything. Technological, medical, and economic innovations have greatly increased the number of people that the planet can reasonably support. In the last two hundred years, the population has grown from one billion to over seven billion people.

China, India, Brazil, and Germany each have a larger population than the Netherlands, but they also all have much more land available in which to house that population. Remember, population density is based on the number of people divided by the land size. So a country with a large population and a small land size will have a very high population density. This is true of many European countries, particularly Northern European countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. You might not have known the different population densities of these five countries, but you need to know that Northern Europe is an especially densely populated part of the world.

Almost all of Western Europe (including France) has a very high population density because a very large number of people live in a relatively small space. The same is true of Japan (which has one of the highest population densities on Earth). Although China and India are both very large countries by land size they are also the two most heavily populated nations on Earth and so are still relatively densely populated. Of these choices only Canada is both extremely large in land-size and relatively unpopulated. Approximately thirty million people live in Canada and it is either the largest or second largest country on Earth (depending on how you measure the polar region). It is one of the least densely populated countries in the world.

For most of human history, the population of Earth has climbed steadily and slowly, but in the eighteenth century (with the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in Britain) the population began to grow dramatically. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, the population of Earth was around one billion for the first time in human history. In just over a century, the population would double again to two billion. The population is now in excess of seven billion and still climbing.