<i>>"When dams are built, large areas are flooded and people need to be relocated," Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. "The relocated population is usually counted precisely because dam companies pay compensation to those affected."</i><p>Sure, "we've been systematically undercounting population for decades" is a more plausible explanation than "large infrastructure projects in rural areas of underdeveloped countries are a bonanza of corruption".
I've typically heard it rumored that populations get overestimated, as corrupt local officials in developing countries want to get more resources/power allocated to their district
The article doesn’t really give much scientific information. But wouldn’t areas flooded by dams be much higher in population than other areas? They would be by rivers and within valleys. Protected land with a fresh water supply. What relative population increase did they assume for these regions?
The original paper is discussed here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398308">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398308</a>
Frustratingly problematic headline, I'd expect better from Popular Mechanics.<p>The title "Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth" is entirely misleading- it's not "scientists" who have miscalculated this, it's government bureaucrats in various countries who are responsible for collecting and reporting census information in their region.<p>This matters, because we live in a world where many people get much of their information only from headlines, and a recurring narrative of "Scientists make mistakes" or "Scientists can't be trusted" has real impact to policy on climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and other areas where distrust of scientific knowledge or expertise causes uninformed people to make decisions harmful to their own well-being or harmful to those around them on everything from nutrition to pollution to evacuations before hurricanes.
Doesn’t every country or at least major country conduct censuses? Assuming there are some countries that can’t or don’t due to conflict, lack of resources etc. it seems these would be limited and therefore whatever estimates are made for those countries would be off my millions but certainly not billions.
I’d imagine it was accounted for that these dam surveys are conducted for populations near a river, and they’re just comparing the dam survey of that area to administrative population estimates or whatever. Either way, this data might only be relevant for estimating riverside populations. Also, I’d say it’s more likely population estimates are overestimating the human population by a billion, not underestimating by a billion. That’s just my view of that though