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As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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While most estimates put the current population at about 8.2 billion, one study suggests we may be significantly underestimating how many people live in rural areas.
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By analyzing 300 rural dam projects in 35 countries, researchers at Aalto University in Finland found discrepancies between these independent population counts and other population data collected between 1975 and 2010.
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Such underreporting could have consequences for the allocation of resources within a country, but other experts remain skeptical that decades-long demographics could be so skewed.
Homo sapiens The most successful mammalian species in Earth’s history, but not even close. The species thrives in adverse conditions on nearly every continent and outnumbers its next closest competitor, rats.at least one billion dollars. However, a new study suggests that the impressive nature of human dispersal may be vastly underestimated.
Most estimates put Earth’s population at around 8.2 billion, but Josias Láng-Ritter, a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University in Finland and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications—It is claimed that these estimates may be significantly underrepresentative of rural areas.
“We were surprised to find that the actual number of people living in rural areas is much higher than global population data suggest, with rural populations being underestimated by between 53% and 84% during the study period, depending on the dataset,” Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. “The results are significant because these datasets have been used in thousands of studies and widely support decision-making, but their accuracy has not yet been systematically evaluated.”
First, how exactly do you test the accuracy of a global dataset used to derive population totals? Láng-Ritter, who has a background in water resources management, looked at a different kind of population data collected from rural dam projects—300 such projects in 35 countries, to be exact. Focusing on the years 1975 to 2010, these demographics provide an important data set that can be reconciled with other population totals calculated by organizations such as WorldPop, GWP, GRUMP, LandScan and GHS-POP (which were also analyzed in this study).
“When dams are built, large areas are flooded and people need to be resettled,” Long-Ritter said in a press statement. “Relocated populations are often accurately calculated because dam companies pay compensation to those affected. Unlike global population datasets, such local impact reports provide comprehensive on-the-ground population counts that are not affected by administrative boundaries. We then combine these with spatial information from satellite imagery.”
Part of the reason for this disparity may be that many countries do not have the resources for precise data collection, and the difficulty of traveling to remote rural areas only exacerbates differences in census counts. The widespread underpopulation of rural areas around the world can have profound consequences for these communities, as censuses are critical in determining how resources are distributed.
However, not everyone is convinced by the research. Stuart Gietel-Basten of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology told New Scientist that while increased investment in data collection on rural populations would be beneficial, the idea that the planet might have billions more people than we think is highly unlikely. “If we are indeed underestimating such a large number, then this is a huge news story and goes against thousands of other data sets over the years.”
When trying to count such a large population, hundreds or even thousands of people can be missed. But a few million or even billion will upend our understanding of human occupation of this planet. Scientists need more evidence before rethinking decades of research on data sets.
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