Geography Population

Population geography describes the changes in world's population's size, growth trends, distribution of population increase in different areas and different types of migrations. It also explains the reasons that lead to such changes. Furthermore, population geography also states the issues of various aspects arising from the changes in nature and distribution of the world's population.

As time goes on, the rate of world's population growth is changing. Before 1800, the world's population grows slowly. Since there were only 1 billion people in the world till the sum of world's population is 7 billion in 2011, the rate of population growth increases rapidly. The years to add I billion decreases from 130 years to 12 years. However, the data presents that after 2020, the rate of population will drop gradually and it will take more years than now to add 1 billion people. The reason why the rate of population growth changes is that as living conditions improved, the birth rate and death rate are changing.

In preindustrial age, there are not much social activities and the birth rate is very high. However, due to the poor living condition warfare, the death rate is high as well. The high birth rate and high death rate create a small and constant population size. The population boom begins around 1950; the birth remains high, but as a result of having better sanitation, health care and food supply, the death rate falls rapidly and the world's population booms as the death rate declines. With the development of civilization and society, the third stage of world's population comes. The birth rate starts to drop as women gain access to education, occupation and engage in family planning, the death rate continues to decline; but population is still increasing sharply. After entering the 21-century, death rate remains low or increase slightly due to older population and birth rate drops to replacement level or even below. As a result, the world's population stabilizes as birth rate and death rate become balance.

Due to the specific situation in each country, different nations are at different stages of population increase. Nowadays, the population of countries like Uganda, Nigeria and Angola are increasing sharply which means they are at the second stage when birthrate remains high but death rate drops rapidly. The population in countries like Brazil and Bangladesh is at the third phase which is still rising. In most of the developed nations such as Japan, Russia, Italy and Australia, the population is leaving off as the result of birth and death rate come into balance. It can be seen that the nations whose population is falling or stabilizing most are developed nations, the countries whose population still stays at the boom stage or still rising stage are developing countries.

The reason why wealthy developed nations tend to have low rate of population