Human population change has three components: births, deaths, and migration. On a global level, only births and deaths determine changes in population size. During the 1990s and 2000s, more than 70 million people were added to the world's total population each year and it took only 12 years for the world's population to  increase from 5 to 6 billion people and today it is 7 billion people. This growth will continue into the coming decades of the twenty-first century. How much growth will occur and how quickly, and when or whether this growth will stabilize, depends on a host of factors. In 1994, the world community agreed to the need to stabilize global population growth. This article describes the history of global population growth, factors associated with this growth, and how countries view this growth. It concludes with a discussion of prospects for the stabilization of population growth in the future.