World population

What

Each country is coloured by its population on 1 July 2024 in the UN World Population Prospects 2024 medium variant. The same table’s world total is 8.16 billion. India is the largest country total, then China. The colour is a log scale of people, from about 16 thousand (the 5th percentile of the countries drawn) to India’s 1.45 billion.

Why on this shelf

One UN revision puts every country total on the same date. The colour is how many people, not how many per square kilometre and not lights at night.

How to read it

Darker brown is a larger country total. The bar is people, on a log scale. Grey land has no 2024 row matched to that polygon. Lakes and the Caspian are left as water.

Caveats

A country total is not a density grid. French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, Réunion, Gibraltar, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, and Tokelau are in the table but are not separate polygons on this Natural Earth 1:50m coastline. The 8.16 billion is the table’s World row, not a sum of the coloured countries.

Sources

• UN DESA, World Population Prospects
• UN DESA: World Population Prospects 2024
• UN DESA: WPP 2024 demographic indicators, medium variant

License

UN DESA Population Division, World Population Prospects 2024, demographic indicators, medium variant, population on 1 July 2024. Boundaries: Natural Earth 1:50m, public domain.

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