3.2.1.1 Population projections
Current population projections reflect less global population growth than was expected at the time the TAR was published. Since the early 1990s demographers have revised their outlook on future population downward, based mainly on new data indicating that birth rates in many parts of the world have fallen sharply.
Recent projections indicate a small downward revision to the medium (or ‘best guess’) outlook and to the high end of the uncertainty range, and a larger downward revision to the low end of the uncertainty range (Van Vuuren and O’Neill, 2006). This global result is driven primarily by changes in outlook for the Asia and the Africa-Latin America-Middle East (ALM) region. On a more detailed level, trends are driven by changes in the outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa region, and the East Asia region, where recent data show lower than expected fertility rates, as well as a much more pessimistic view on the extent and duration of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast, in the OECD region, updated projections are somewhat higher than previous estimates. This comes from changes in assumptions regarding migration (in the case of the UN projections), or to a more optimistic projection of future life expectancy (in the case of International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) projections). In the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (Reforming Economic, REF) region, projections have been revised downward, especially by the UN, driven mainly by recent data showing very low fertility levels and mortality rates that are quite high relative to other industrialized countries.
Lutz et al. (2004), UN (2004) and Fisher et al. (2006) have produced updated projections for the world that extend to 2100. The most recent central projections for global population are 1.4–2.0 billion (13–19%) lower than the medium population scenario of 10.4 billion used in the SRES B2 scenarios. As was the case with the outlook for 2050, the long-term changes at the global level are driven by the developing-country regions (Asia and ALM), with the changes particularly large in China, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Most of the SRES scenarios still fall within the plausible range of population outcomes, according to more recent literature (see Figure 3.1). However, the high end of the SRES population range now falls above the range of recent projections from IIASA and the UN. This is a particular problem for population projections in East Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the Former Soviet Union, where the differences are large enough to strain credibility (Van Vuuren and O’Neill, 2006). In addition, the population assumptions in SRES and the vast majority of more recent emissions scenarios do not cover the low end of the current range of population projections well. New scenario exercises will need to take the lower population projections into account. All other factors being equal, lower population projections are likely to result in lower emissions. However, a small number of recent studies that have used updated and lower population projections (Carpenter et al., 2005; Van Vuuren et al., 2007; Riahi et al., 2006) indicate that changes in other drivers of emissions might partly offset the impact of lower population assumptions, thus leading to no significant changes in emissions.