Abstract

We performed a meta-analysis on the basis of 69 past studies that have assessed a limit to the world population. The estimates of this limit range from 0.5 billion to 1 × 10²¹ billion people. A meta-analysis allows us to see what overall picture emerges when different methods, limiting factors, levels of aggregation, and data are taken into account. Limiting factors for the world population include water availability, energy, carbon, forest products, nonrenewable resources, heat removal, photosynthetic capacity, and the availability of land for food production. Methods employed in the population studies include spatial extrapolation, modeling of multiple regions, temporal extrapolation, actual supply of a resource, hypothetical modeling, and dynamic systems modeling. Many studies rely on important assumptions about the level of technology, the energy intake per person, and the available arable land. The meta-analysis employs both descriptive statistics and regression analysis. We used the findings of these analyses to propose a number of meta-estimates of limits to world population. When taking all studies into account, the best point estimate is 7.7 billion people; the lower and upper bounds, given current technology, are 0.65 billion and 98 billion people, respectively. We offer a range of other conditional estimates as well. An important conclusion of this study is that recent predictions of stabilized world population levels for 2050 exceed several of our meta-estimates of a world population limit.