New York:

Earth’s population will peak in the mid-2080s at around 10.3 billion people, then drop slightly to a level much lower than anticipated a decade ago, the United Nations said.

The current population of 8.2 billion people will rise to that maximum over the next 60 years, then dip to 10.2 billion by the end of the century, says a report released Thursday entitled “World Population Prospects 2024.”

It said the size of the world’s population in 2100 will be six percent lower, or 700 million people fewer, than what was anticipated in June 2013.

“The demographic landscape has evolved greatly in recent years,” said Li Junhua, UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs.

He said the unexpected population peak stems from several factors that include lower levels of fertility in some of the world’s largest countries, especially China.

He said this lower maximum will also come earlier than previously calculated and this is a hopeful sign as the world fights global warming: fewer humans accounting for less aggregate consumption would mean less pressure on the environment.

“However, slower population growth will not eliminate the need to reduce the average impact attributable to the activities of each individual person,” this official said.

More than a quarter, or 28 percent, of the world’s population, now lives in one of 63 countries or areas where the population has already peaked, including China, Russia, Japan, and Germany, the report said.

Nearly 50 other countries should join that group over the next 30 years, including Brazil, Iran, and Turkey.

However, population growth will continue in more than 120 countries beyond 2054. These include India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the United States, according to the UN.

A rise in global life expectancy — interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic — has resumed, with an average of 73.3 years of longevity in 2024. It will average 77.4 years in 2054.

So the world’s population will get more and more gray. By the late 2070s, the number of people 65 or older is projected to be 2.2 billion, surpassing those under 18, the study predicts.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Paris:

 Fertility rates in nearly all countries will be too low to sustain population levels by the end of the century, and most of the world’s live births will be occurring in poorer countries, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The trend will lead to a “baby boom” and “baby bust” divide across the world, with the boom concentrated in low-income countries that are more susceptible to economic and political instability, senior researcher Stein Emil Vollset from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle said in a statement.

The study reported in The Lancet projects 155 of 204 countries and territories worldwide, or 76%, will have fertility rates below population replacement levels by 2050. By 2100, that is expected to rise to 198, or 97%, researchers estimated.

The forecasts are based on surveys, censuses, and other sources of data collected from 1950 through 2021 as part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study.

Over three-quarters of live births will occur in low- and lower-middle-income countries by the end of the century, with more than half taking place in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers said.

The global fertility rate – the average number of births per woman – has fallen from around 5 children in 1950 to 2.2 in 2021, data show.

By 2021, 110 countries and territories (54%) had rates below the population replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.

The study highlights a particularly worrying trend for countries like South Korea and Serbia, where the fertility rate is less than 1.1 child per female, exposing them to challenges of a dwindling workforce.

Many of the most resource-limited countries “will be grappling with how to support the youngest, fastest-growing population on the planet in some of the most politically and economically unstable, heat-stressed, and health system-strained places on earth,” Vollset said.

While tumbling fertility rates in high-income countries reflect more opportunities for education and employment for women, researchers said the trend signals an urgent need for improvement in access to modern contraception and female education in other regions.

In addition, “once nearly every country’s population is shrinking, reliance on open immigration will become necessary to sustain economic growth,” IHME’s Natalia Bhattacharjee, a coauthor of the report, said in a statement.

The authors noted that predictions were limited by quantity and quality of past data, especially for the 2020 to 2021 COVID-19 pandemic period.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)