Countries, including Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain and Thailand, will see their population reduce by at least half by the year 2100, according to projections in a major study – AlJazeera.
The Earth will be home to 8.8 billion people in 2100, two billion fewer than current UN projections, the study said, foreseeing new global power alignments shaped by declining fertility rates and aging populations.
China’s population is projected to fall from 1.4 billion people today to 730 million in 80 years.
Sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, will triple in size to some three billion people, with Nigeria alone expanding to almost 800 million in 2100, second only to India’s 1.1 billion.
By century’s end, 183 of 195 countries, barring an influx of immigrants, will have fallen below the replacement threshold needed to maintain population levels, it said.
“These forecasts suggest good news for the environment, with less stress on food production systems and lower carbon emissions, as well as significant economic opportunity for parts of sub-Saharan Africa,” lead author Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, told AFP news agency.
For high-income countries in this category, the best solutions for sustaining population levels and economic growth will be flexible immigration policies and social support for families who want children, the study concluded.
As fertility falls and life expectancy increases worldwide, the number of children under five is forecast to decline by more than 40 percent, from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100, the study found.
The number of those over 80 will balloon from about 140 million today to 866 million.
