91 percent of people live south of Bucharest

Where people actually sit

The ridge is a narrow belt around the tropic

The 2020 count puts 7.97 billion people on a one-degree latitude grid. Half of them live south of 25.4° N. The single most crowded band, 25 to 26° N, holds 278 million, 3.49% of people, more than everyone from 30° S to the southern ice by a factor of 2.82.

Dubai, Taipei and Miami sit on that ridge. Delhi and Cairo sit a little north of it. Jakarta and Nairobi sit on the other side of a surprisingly empty equator.

Twenty degrees do most of the work

20 to 40° N holds 48.9% of people

That belt is 3.63 times the entire Southern Hemisphere. India, China, the United States, North Africa and the Middle East share the same twenty degrees. Bucharest, at 44.43° N, already sits on the northern shoulder of the pile.

Toronto sits at 43.65° N, almost on Bucharest’s parallel. 9.0% of people live north of 44.43° N. From Paris, London or Stockholm, most people are already farther south.

The line everyone draws first

The Northern Hemisphere holds 86.5%

The equator leaves 13.5% of people in the south. Indonesia, Brazil and southern Africa are large. They do not outweigh the belt that runs through India and China. The planet’s middle is not the middle of its inhabitants.

How the shares are counted

One-degree bands, summed

CIESIN’s 2020 population count, published as GPWv4 Revision 11, is aggregated here to one-degree cells: 360 along longitude, 180 along latitude. Each band is the sum of a row. When a parallel cuts a band, the share uses the portion south of the line and treats people in that band as uniform in latitude. Bucharest is placed at 44.43° N.

The grid interpolates census counts at one-degree resolution, so coasts and high mountains share cells with emptier land. The ridge, the 91.0% south of Bucharest, and the 86.5% north of the equator remain visible at that scale.