Study Reveals Major Undercounting of Rural Population in Global Datasets

There May Be Way More Than The Official 8.2 Billion People On This Planet, New Study Suggests

Have we been miscounting humans in rural areas?

World population may be undercounted by billions, new study finds

There could be billions more people living on Earth than currently thought, according to a new study which claims rural figures worldwide could be vastly underestimated.

World’s population may actually be vastly undercounted, study claims

Research warns needs of rural residents could be under-represented in decision-making

Global gridded population datasets systematically underrepresent rural population

Numerous initiatives towards sustainable development rely on global gridded population data. Such data have been calibrated primarily for urban environments, but their accuracy in the rural domain remains largely unexplored. This study systematically validates global gridded population datasets in rural areas, based on reported human resettlement from 307 large dam construction projects in 35 countries. We find large discrepancies between the ex…

In 2022, the United Nations announced that the planet had reached 8 billion inhabitants. At the time of writing these lines, the Population Today website, which...

'Significant proportion' of world's rural population missing from global estimates, says study

Governments, international bodies and researchers rely on global population data for resource allocation and infrastructure planning to disease epidemiology and disaster risk management. In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers from Aalto University in Finland show the profound and systematic extent to which these datasets underestimate rural population figures worldwide.