Global Population Distribution and Density

Population distribution describes where people live across the surface of the Earth, while population density measures how many people live in a given area, usually expressed as persons per square kilometer. The two ideas are related but distinct: distribution is a pattern, and density is a number that helps us describe that pattern. Globally, the distribution of roughly eight billion people is strikingly uneven. About half of humanity lives on a small fraction of the land, while vast regions such as the Sahara, the Amazon interior, Siberia, the Australian outback, and the polar zones remain almost empty.

Measuring density

The most common measure is arithmetic (or crude) density: total population divided by total land area. It is easy to calculate but can mislead, because it treats deserts