2021 World Population Data Sheet Released

The 2021 World Population Data Sheet released by the US Population Reference Bureau in August 2021 gives these messages:

• World population in mid-2021 is estimated to be 7.8 billion.
• While COVID-19 has dramatically changed the way we live and work in the short-term, it will be years before we have a full understanding of the pandemic’s longer-term impact on populations.
• COVID-19 is likely the cause of an increase in crude death rates in some countries around the world and a dip in life expectancy in the United States. 
• While the pandemic’s impact on fertility rates is still largely unknown, the global population is on course to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, a nearly 24% increase over 2020.

• India is projected to have the greatest absolute increase in population size of any country between 2021 and 2050, rising nearly 246 million to 1.64 billion.
• China, Thailand, and Ukraine are among 39 countries and territories projected to have smaller populations by 2050.
• Globally, the total fertility rate dropped from 3.2 in 1990 to 2.3 in 2020. But wide variations can be found across regions, ranging from 4.7 in sub-Saharan Africa to 1.3 in East Asia and Southern Europe.
• Global life expectancy at birth is 75 years for women and 71 years for men.

First UN Food Systems Summit

The UN hosted the inaugural Food Systems Summit on September 23, 2021, uniting global leaders in a drive to find novel ways to produce healthy fare for the world’s growing population without harming the planet. It was a virtual held during the UN General Assembly in New York. The summit brought together governments, businesses, farmers, indigenous peoples, youth, academics and citizens to produce a detailed roadmap to a world where good food is affordable and accessible and produced with minimal damage to the natural systems that sustain life on Earth. 

The UN Food Systems Summit saw over 51,000 people tuned in from 193 countries, all ready to tackle global hunger, climate change and biodiversity loss for true food systems transformation.

Over the previous 18 months, the Summit had brought together all UN Member States and constituencies around the world – including thousands of youth, food producers, Indigenous Peoples, civil society, researchers, private sector, and the UN system – to bring about tangible, positive changes to the world’s food systems. As a people’s summit and a solutions summit, it recognized that everyone, everywhere must take action and work together to transform the way the world produces, consumes, and thinks about food.

Five action areas emerged through the process as the primary areas to accelerate action in order to deliver on the 2030 Agenda through food systems:

• Nourish All People
• Boost Nature-Based Solutions of Production
• Build Resilience to Vulnerabilities, Shocks, and Stresses
• Advance Equitable Livelihoods, Decent Work, & Empowered Communities 
• Means of Implementation

The first-ever UN Food Systems Summit saw nearly 300 commitments from hundreds of thousands of people from around the world and across all constituencies to accelerate action and to transform food systems. On behalf of India, NITI Aayog submitted a paper on National Pathways for Food Systems Transformation. Many Indian NGOs and other groups have submitted their commitments to the Registry.