That item didn't make the news, although there could hardly be tidings of greater import. And the fact that the projection has been revised upward tells us something not only about the future, but about the present. It is the result of a decade of economic stagnation in many of the poor countries of the world. In order to come up with its population projections, the World Bank uses two wildly optimistic assumptions. The first is that economic development will proceed smoothly and bring birth rates down.
Development does decrease birth rates - rich countries all have slow or no population growth.
But the assumption that development will chug along without interruption broke down in the 1980s. That is why the forecast just went up by a billion people. The last decade also provided evidence to cast that assumption in doubt. Soils, forests, fish stocks, waters, the atmosphere, the oceans are already strained by the present 5.4 billion people. There is no guarantee that we can plop down another whole human world on top of this one, much less two or three.