Crowd control: the world's most sparsely populated countries

Crowd control: the world's most sparsely populated countries

Are people in the world's least populated countries happier than people in more densely populated ones?

Finland was recently named the happiest country in the world. As in previous years, it is clear that developed, conflict-free nations with stable governments tend to rank higher in these indices.

What's interesting is that many of the happiest countries in the world also have relatively low population densities. Finland, Norway, Iceland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia all have fewer than 20 people per square kilometer (closely followed by Sweden at 22.12), and all appear in the top 10 happiest countries.

These lands also offer access to nature and large wilderness areas. Likewise, there appears to be a correlation between the happiest countries and the greenest countries in the world - 15 countries appear in the top 20 of both lists.

alt="the world's most sparsely populated countries mapped">Atlas & BootsSeven of the ten happiest countries in the world have fewer than 23 people per square kilometer

Personally, I wonder if many of the world's problems (wilderness loss, global warming, pollution and lack of social mobility, to name a few) could be addressed by reducing the world's population.

How much is too much?

We have already written about how the world is not necessarily getting better. Basic education, literacy, democracy and vaccinations may all be improving for people, but for everything else – the millions of species that also call Earth home – the world is getting worse.

In 2012, a UN report summarized 65 different estimates of a maximum sustainable population on Earth. The most common estimate was eight billion, only slightly higher than the current 7.6 billion people on Earth. Simply put, the world is almost too crowded.

Population growth has slowed since the 1960s and UN data patterns show the global fertility rate per woman has fallen from 4.7 children in 1970-75 to 2.6 in 2005-10, but do we need to accelerate the decline?

The United Nations says a relatively simple way to achieve this would be to improve the status of women, particularly in terms of education and employment opportunities. In 2016, the UN Population Fund calculated that 350 million women in the world's poorest countries did not want their final child but lacked the means to prevent the pregnancy.

If these women had more control over family planning, it would have a significant impact on global population trends. According to this hypothesis, creating a sustainable population is essentially about improving women's rights.

A global two-child policy?

There is also a campaign to implement a global two-child policy. Populution.org (and similarly populationmatters.org) believes that those who have more than two children are the biggest polluters on earth. It suggests that the way to solve Earth's population problem is for people to have only two children or fewer.

alt=“least populated country population”>populution.orgPopulution.org says that those who have fewer children are greener

The campaign goes even further, suggesting that those who have five or more children are “environmental terrorists.” This kind of emotive language is unhelpful, but it's not a big leap to claim that the happiest countries in the world are among the least populated and among the greenest.

Can the solution really be that simple? Have fewer children and the world will be happier, greener, better? I can understand the logic of this argument, but I could never imagine a two-child policy being adopted – or enforced – on a global scale. Instead, I hope that empowering women will naturally accelerate the decline.

Ranking of the least populated countries

The upcoming UN World Population Day aims to highlight issues surrounding population and its relationship to the environment and development. With this in mind, we thought it appropriate to rank the world's most sparsely populated countries (and dependent territories) by the number of people per square kilometer.

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