The DOI matches its Crossref record.
How Many People Can the Earth Support?
Abstract
Estimates of the maximum number of people the earth can support have been developed and put forth routinely in environmental debates in UN reports and in papers by scholars or academic politicians trained in ecology economics sociology geography soil science or agronomy and other disciplines. However professional demographers tend to focus upon the composition and growth of populations restricting their predictions to the near term and framing them in conditional terms. How many people the earth can support depends upon nature as well as humankinds social economic cultural and political choices. There is not and will not be one single number of people the earth an support. Earths ultimate human carrying capacity hinges upon future constraints and possibilities which cannot yet be known since they remain in the future. The world still has room to accommodate additional population. However any major population growth is pointless. The population density needed for mankind to obtain all of the advantages of cooperation and social intercourse has in most populous countries already been attained.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Agricultural sustainability and intensive production practices
Tilman, D., Cassman, K. G., Matson, P. A., Naylor, R., & Polasky, S. (2002) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature01014 · Cited by 7,957
Forecasting Agriculturally Driven Global Environmental Change
Tilman, D., Fargione, J., Wolff, B., D'Antonio, C., Dobson, A., Howarth, R., Schindler, D., Schlesinger, W. H., Simberloff, D., & Swackhamer, D. (2001) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1057544 · Cited by 3,992
A global crisis for seagrass ecosystems
ORTH, R. J., CARRUTHERS, T. J. B., DENNISON, W. C., DUARTE, C. M., FOURQUREAN, J. W., HECK, K. L., HUGHES, A. R., KENDRICK, G. A., KENWORTHY, W. J., OLYARNIK, S., et al. (2006) · BioScience · doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2006)56[987:agcfse]2.0.co;2 · Cited by 3,100
(2002) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 1,279
Recent Explosive Human Population Growth Has Resulted in an Excess of Rare Genetic Variants
Keinan, A., & Clark, A. G. (2012) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1217283 · Cited by 548
Metadata
- Authors
- Cohen, J. E.
- Venue
- Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1998-03
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 25
- ISSN
- 0002-712X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2115199904
- Cited by
- 695
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 203.93
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How Many People Can the Earth Support? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/3824523
- The paper
- Cohen, J. E. (1998). How Many People Can the Earth Support? Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.2307/3824523
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
