Demographers debate exactly when it will happen, but there is a consensus now that in the second half of this century, the global population will start to decline.
Of course, this is something that has happened before. Perhaps the best-known case is the impact of the bubonic plague in the mid-fourteenth century, which is estimated to have reduced the population by between 30 and 60 percent. But humans have always rebounded from the shocks of disease and war in the past.
What is now looming is a novel prospect: sustained population decline under “normal” conditions, when the number of people dying of old age significantly outstrips those being born. This will be new terrain for the human species.
Population decline is already a reality in many countries. Japan is the most widely recognized case: 2024 was the sixteenth consecutive year in which the population shrunk. But Japan is just at the cutting edge of a wider trend: according to the United Nations, sixty-three countries representing 28 percent of the world population are now experiencing population decline.
Sixty-three countries representing 28 percent of the world population are now experiencing population decline.
Moreover, 55 percent of countries now have birth rates lower than 2.1, meaning they are beneath the “replacement rate”: the number required to sustain the national population over the long term without immigration. While most of these countries are in East Asia, Europe, and North America, they also include developing countries like Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Iran, and Bhutan, all…
Auteur: Ben Wray
