The world drawn by its people

AfricaAsiaEuropeLatin America & CaribbeanNorthern AmericaOceania

How to read this: each group is one continent, and each bar is how many squares — how many millions of people — it has in 1950, 2025 and 2100, in the continent's colour; the Americas' bar is split into its two parts. Striped bars are the UN's middle guess for 2100.

Africa grows the most: 228 squares in 1950, 1,551 in 2025 and 3,815 in 2100 — more than 16 times as many people as in 1950. Europe had 545 squares in 1950 and has 747 now; by 2100 the UN expects 587. Asia grows from 1,366 to 4,840 and then shrinks, to 4,613.

2100 is a guess, not a count. The UN's middle guess is 10,173 squares for the whole world, but it gives a range: it is 95% sure the world will have between 9.0 billion and 11.4 billion people then.

landpeople, in the continent’s colour

How to read this: for each continent, the grey bar is how much of the world's land it has and the coloured bar how many of the world's people live there in 2025, both out of every 100. The Americas' people bar is split between its two parts by their squares.

Asia has about 23 of every 100 pieces of land and 59 of every 100 people. The Americas are the other way round: 31 of every 100 pieces of land, 13 of every 100 people. That is why an ordinary map and this one look so different.

61 places have fewer than half a million people, so they get no square: Brunei, Belize, the Bahamas, Iceland, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, Vanuatu, French Guiana, New Caledonia, Barbados, French Polynesia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Samoa, Curaçao, Saint Lucia, Guam, Kiribati, the Seychelles, Grenada, Micronesia, Aruba, Jersey, Tonga, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, the US Virgin Islands, Isle of Man, Andorra, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, Bermuda, Guernsey, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Saint Kitts and Nevis, the Turks and Caicos Islands, American Samoa, Sint Maarten, the Northern Mariana Islands, Liechtenstein, Gibraltar, the British Virgin Islands, Monaco, the Marshall Islands, San Marino, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, Saint Martin, Palau, Anguilla, the Cook Islands, Nauru, Saint Barthélemy, Wallis and Futuna, Tuvalu, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Helena, Montserrat, the Falkland Islands, Tokelau and Niue. Together they are home to 7,513,691 people — about 8 squares' worth, spread over many small islands and cities.

How to read this: one square is one million people, rounded, so 0 means fewer than half a million. 2100 is the UN's middle guess.

• Near, not exact. Each country starts from where it is on the map and grows outward. Big countries are placed first, so smaller neighbours get pushed aside. The blocks are not borders and their shapes mean nothing.
• Russia is counted with Europe, as the UN does, although most of its land is in Asia.
• 2025 is the UN's figure for this year, carried forward from its last estimates for 2023.
• 2100 is the UN's middle guess. The real number could be well above or below it.
• Land is measured from a world map drawn at a coarse scale, so the land figures are about right, not exact. Antarctica is left out.

Method: every country's mid-year population, divided by one million and rounded, is its number of squares; the world's squares are the sum of the countries'. The same grid, with the same size of square, is used for all three years. Countries are placed largest first, each starting at the free square nearest its place on the site's world map (the Equal Earth projection) and growing into the free squares nearest that start, so each country is one piece. Land is the area of each country's outline on the globe.

Sources: UN WPP 2024 · Natural Earth. Every source, its licence and how to cite it →

Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries