Where People Live: Population Distribution and Density

Remember from Grade 7

In Grade 7 geography you studied the physical patterns of the world (landforms, water, climate and natural vegetation) and the world's natural resources. In Grade 8 the focus turns to people: where do people settle, why there, and how do their settlements affect the environment? Everything you learned about the physical world will help you answer those questions.

Let's start with a question

The United Nations reported that the world's population passed 8 billion people in November 2022. Earth has roughly 149 million km² of land (counting Antarctica). If everyone were spread out evenly, there would be about 54 people on every square kilometre of land.

But people are not spread out evenly. Some places, like the centre of a big city, have thousands of people on every square kilometre. Other places, like the ice of Antarctica or most of the Sahara Desert, have almost nobody. Geographers want to describe this pattern and explain it.

Two different ideas: distribution and density

Population distribution describes the pattern: where are the people? Are they clustered in a few spots, lined up along a coast, or spread out evenly? You usually describe distribution in words or show it on a dot map.

Population density is a number: how many people live in each square kilometre, on average. You calculate it with a formula:

Population density = population ÷ area

The answer is in people per km².

A country can have a low density and still have most of its people crowded into a few cities. That is why geographers use both ideas.

The world pattern

When geographers map where the world's people live, some patterns stand out:

• Most people live in the Northern Hemisphere. Most of Earth's land is north of the equator.
• Four very large clusters: East Asia (eastern China, Japan and Korea), South Asia (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), Europe, and eastern North America. Other dense areas include West Africa (for example, southern Nigeria), the island of Java in Indonesia and the Nile Valley in Egypt.
• People cluster near water: along coasts, on the shores of large lakes, and along rivers.
• People cluster on lowland plains and in river valleys with fertile soil and moderate climates.

The sparsely populated regions are places that are hard to live in or to farm:

• Very cold lands: the Arctic tundra, Antarctica and Greenland's ice sheet.
• Very dry lands: hot deserts such as the Sahara, the Arabian Desert and the interior of Australia.
• High, rugged mountains: the Himalayas, the Andes and the Rockies.
• Dense forests far from coasts, such as much of the Amazon rainforest and the boreal forest of northern Canada and Russia.

Sparse does not mean empty or unimportant. Many Indigenous peoples, including Inuit in the Arctic, live in and know these regions very well.

Canada's pattern

Canada is the second-largest country in the world by area, but its density is only about 4 people per km². That number hides a strong pattern. Statistics Canada reported that in 2016, two out of three Canadians (66%) lived within 100 km of the border with the United States, in a strip that covers only about 4% of Canada's land. The biggest cluster is in southern Ontario and southern Quebec, along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. Canada's ecumene (the area where people live permanently) is mostly a narrow band in the south, with communities spread across the North.