Counting Down
Fred Pearce
New Scientist Magazine
Only 12 years have passed since we hit the 5-billion mark, so the event has been greeted with portentous warnings of a “population time bomb” and a “demographic disaster”. But delve behind the words of the doom-mongers, say some demographers, and you’ll find evidence that in the not-too-distant future, the world population may actually start to shrink.
The 20th century gave us a world population explosion. It looks increasingly as if the 21st century may see the beginnings of a population implosion. The most immediate impact of these demographic changes will be an ageing population.
“Over the past five years, fertility has declined in all major parts of the world,” says one of the heretics, Wolfgang Lutz, head of population research at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. “All changes point to lower population forecasts.” And on his most recent forecasts, the upward path of population growth, which has been accelerating ever since the Black Death killed as much as a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century, will stall and go into reverse in about 70 years.
Lester Brown, director of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC and author of a new study on world population, Beyond Malthus, is well known for his apocalyptic visions of an overpopulated future. But even he concedes: “Demographers have been surprised again and again by the rapid decline in the number of children couples choose to bear throughout the world.”
World Population Prospects: The 1998 Revision suggests that 18 countries, including Russia and Japan, will lose more than 15 per cent of their population by 2050. Revisions of these estimates provide further evidence of a population decline. In the space of just two years, Bulgaria’s predicted 2050 population was adjusted from 7.8 million to 6.7 million. Its population is currently 8.3 million.