Billions missing? Truth behind world population ‘miscount’

New investigations suggest the world’s population might be wildly underestimated due to flawed data collection.

Is there a whole country’s worth of people we don’t know about?

According to Worldometer’s live count, which is actually quite overwhelming to stare at for longer than a few minutes, the global population is currently pinned at 8.2 billion people.

But what if that figure is way off?

A new study from Finland’s Aalto University has uncovered startling evidence, suggesting we might be vastly underestimating the number of people on Earth.

These ‘missing’ people aren’t hidden - they’re said to be living in rural areas right under our noses.

The study analysed data from 307 rural dam projects across 35 countries, including China, Brazil, Australia, Poland, India, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, and Vietnam, between 1975 and 2010.

These projects required the resettlement of populations providing records of displaced individuals.

The figures were compared with five widely used global population datasets, and according to postdoc researcher Josias Lang-Ritter, whose findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, these tallies tell a very different story.

WorldPop: Underestimated rural populations by 53%

GWP: Underestimated rural populations by 65%

GRUMP: Underestimated rural populations by 67%

LandScan: Underestimated rural populations by 68%

GHS-POP: Underestimated rural populations by 84%

Location of the 307 rural areas analysed in the study. Picture: Josias Láng-Ritter / Aalto University

Lang observed: “We were very surprised to see how large this underrepresentation is.”

Andrew Tatem, Director of WorldPop, clarified to New Scientist that their grid-level estimates combine broad census and satellite data, and that the quality of satellite imagery before 2010 is less reliable.

“The further you go back in time, the more those problems come about,” he says. “I think that’s something that’s well understood.”

Tatem suggests that advances in machine learning and AI could help to fill these gaps.

Rural populations are often overlooked because census teams struggle to reach remote areas, contend with poor infrastructure, track people who move frequently, and work with limited resources.

Additionally, population estimates are typically developed for cities where people live in close proximity, often failing to accurately capture the dispersed nature of rural communities.

“The impacts may be quite huge, because these datasets are used for very many different kinds of actions,” Lang explains.

“This includes planning transport infrastructure, building healthcare facilities and risk reduction efforts in natural disasters and epidemics.”

“We can say that nowadays, population estimates are likely conservative accounting, and we have reason to believe there are significantly more than these 8 billion people.”

Satellites have limits in gathering rural data. Picture: iStock

But hold off on telling your trivia team for now, because not everyone is sold.

“The study suggests that regional population counts of where people are living within countries have been estimated incorrectly, though it is less clear that this would necessarily imply that national estimates of the country are wrong,” says Associate Professor Martin Kolk from Stockholm University, Sweden.

Dr Stuart Gietel-Basten from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology called the idea “not realistic,” telling New Scientist that “if we really are undercounting by that massive amount, it’s a massive news story and goes against all the years of thousands of other datasets.”

“I think it’s a very big jump to state that there is a great undercount in places like Finland, Australia, Sweden, and other places with very sophisticated registration systems, based on one or two data points.”

However, despite his strong doubts, Gietel-Basten agrees it couldn’t hurt to “invest more in data collection in rural areas.”

The world population grows by roughly 2.5 people every second. Picture: iStock

True or not, Census Bureau surveys undercount young children in some regions, especially girls, due to cultural or bureaucratic biases.

A preliminary response from First Focus on Children to the 2030 Census proposal, highlights that ‘Children under five are especially likely to be missed if they live in complex or multi-family homes, live with grandparents or other relatives, are poor and/or experiencing homelessness, move frequently, are children of colour, or are linguistically isolated.’

People forced out by conflict also often move without official records, and satellite imagery relying on city lights miss rural homes without electricity.

Several factors like these could be skewing population data.

But are billions of people really living off the literal grid, or is this just another bold theory?

Experts remain sceptical, but it could completely change how we see global growth and development.

Then again, maybe we’re undercounting the world population because half of us are now just AI chatbots pretending to be humans.

Originally published as Billions missing? Truth behind world population ‘miscount’