Depending on who you listen to either too many or not enough babies are being born (Image: Getty Images/Connect Images)
It’s been described by turns as a decline, an uncontrollable surge and, in some circles, a potential catastrophe waiting to happen. To many leading academics, the world’s population is suffering an existential crisis, yet the question remains over whether it’s one of too many people – or too few?
You could be forgiven for thinking it is the former after a week where we’ve heard the UK population is projected to reach 72.5 million by mid-2032. The staggering rise – up from 67.6 million in mid-2022 – is driven almost entirely by net migration, according to the Office of National Statistics. But even that is a fraction of the eight billion people now living on Earth – forecast by the UN to reach nine billion in 2037.
And yet while the world seemingly edges towards a tipping point, as the pursuit of endless growth collides with the harsh realities of over-consumption, vanishing resources and a planet in peril, political leaders in the West are fretting about a decline in birth rates.
From Singapore to Sweden, they cite an impending population collapse, pointing to the quieter crises of low fertility, aging populations and shrinking workforces. According to the peer-reviewed scientific journal The Lancet, by 2050 75% of countries will have fertility rates considered too low to sustain their population size; that figure rises to 97% by 2100.
It’s no wonder we’re all confused and conflicted by what is happening.
Leading the charge for a new baby boom is tech billionaire who has been consistently vocal on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, about the dangers of declining birthrates.
The father of 12 is calling for increased pro-natalist policies and advocating for humanity to focus on growing its population to avoid economic stagnation and the collapse of society.
“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” he tweeted in August 2022 and recentlty he said it was the biggest problem the world currently faces.
But as demand for food, goods and energy grows, carbon emissions soar, contributing to global warming and wrecking ecosystems. And this unchecked consumption, warn environmentalists, not only accelerates pollution but also disrupts the delicate balance of Earth’s systems, making it harder for the planet to recover or sustain future generations.
Broadcaster Chris Packham, who investigated the impact of a growing human population on the world in his 2020 TV documentary 7.7 Billion People and Counting, is one of them.
“With an escalation in numbers, and no change in practices and an increase in consumption, those fears have increased,” he says.
“What concerns us principally about population growth is consumption of resources. It’s not necessarily an increase in people. It’s an increase in people consuming.
“We’ve got a finite amount of resources on this planet and we’re not managing them in the best possible ways to be able to cope with that increasing consumption.”
At present, the world’s population is projected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, increasing to 9.7 billion in 2050 before peaking at 10.4 billion by 2100.
But there is huge disparity in birthrates across the world with low fertility rates in developed nations, and high birthrates in developing countries.
Crowds of people on a busy shopping street in Shanghai, China (Image: Getty Images)
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Take west African country Niger which has the world’s highest birthrate with 46.6 births per 1,000 inhabitants. Here, having children is considered a traditional sign of wealth and power impacting measures which could lower fertility rates such as child marriage, female education and access to contraception.
Packham says education and empowering women is critically important when it comes to the control of population growth, and an issue that must be rectified in the UK as well as impoverished nations abroad.
He adds: “We know full well the best way to control population growth is to educate, essentially emancipate, women. That’s something that needs to be done for fundamental equality and it’s staggering that in 2025, we still don’t have that in the UK. I mean it’s shameful. You look at nations like Saudi Arabia and obviously the worst example, in Afghanistan, where women are now being withdrawn from schools and don’t have fundamental freedoms. This is in the world in 2025. It’s despicable.”
Like Packham, some academics believe consumption in industrialised nations has far more of an impact on resource demands and climate change than the Global South, as developing nations are sometimes known.
Michael Goodman, professor of environment and development at the University of Reading, says: “Research shows that the wealthiest countries and regions, such as the US and Europe, have historically used the most resources and contributed the most to climate change and biodiversity loss over time.
“Currently, with their private jets, yachts and multiple houses. It is the 1% – and those even richer – who consume a great deal of resources and produce vast amounts of climate change emissions globally.
Professor Goodman says we should be concerned by the vast concentrations of wealth within countries and across the globe as one of the drivers of biodiversity loss and the production of climate change emissions.
“The key to slowing or reducing population growth in many parts of the world is to increase women’s empowerment and allow women to decide their own destinies and life paths,” he says. “This means increasing women’s access to education and their right to economic and social equality. Research shows that lower birth rates are correlated with women having greater access to education and their subsequent empowerment within a society.”
At the other end of the spectrum is Japan with one of the lowest birth rates in the world – just 6.9 per 1,000 people.
Surveys suggest that younger Japanese balk at marrying or having families, discouraged by bleak job prospects, the high that rises at a faster pace than salaries and corporate cultures that are not compatible with both parents working.
Japan is taking steps to encourage marriage and increase the birth rate, including developing a dating app, providing financial incentives and increasing subsidies for child-rearing. But almost every country in the world has a declining birth rate.
Women’s empowerment in education and the workplace, lower child mortality and the increased cost of raising children are all playing their roles.
Sperm count globally is also decreasing, with around one in six people having trouble conceiving, according to a recent report by the World Health Organisation.
A bird’s eye view of a cattle pen in South Africa (Image: Getty Images)
Demography and population professor Melinda Mills, director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford, says: “Population composition affects everything including basic services such as schools, hospital requirements, housing and a growing or shrinking population causes huge challenges.
“The rapidly ageing population in many countries means changing public systems to support aging populations, health care and even transport.
“It also means a drop in the workforce, which means a shift to potential automation, AI and robotics to fill the gap but also rethinking pensions and longer care since an increasingly smaller working population pays into these services. There is also a cultural shift but also geopolitical implications.”
She adds that monetary incentives to have children have shown “time and time again” to be ineffective. Instead, growing evidence suggests people need strong local services, housing and childcare to have children when they would like to.
A nation which knows all too well the impact of birthrate policies is China, with a rapidly declining population. Expected to have 1.3 billion people by 2050, its controversial one-child policy that limited most families to one child from 1979 to 2015.
This led to a rapidly aging population, a gender imbalance due to a cultural preference for sons, and a shrinking workforce which now threatens the country’s economic growth and social stability. It also caused psychological and social challenges, such as the “4-2-1” phenomenon, where one child is responsible for caring for two parents and four grandparents.
Professor Mills adds: “It is clear that the one-child policy had many adverse and unintended short and long-term consequences, suggesting that these types of policies need to be considered carefully.”
One thing may be clear – Musk’s public declarations “to help the underpopulation crisis” are not helpful, say experts, as the problems between nations differ in nature and scope.
Packham says the focus should be on the science and not the serial tweeter.
“We should be listening to the scientists and not . Elon is probably good at some of the things he does because otherwise he wouldn’t end up with £350billion. Frankly, he’s not a population scientist,” he says.
“So let’s all go to where we should be getting our evidence from and that is the people who conduct independent, impartial science. And that’s who we should be listening to.”
The naturalist also opposes the Labour government’s push for economic growth at whatever cost. Packham adds: “Growth always means consumption. It’s going to take energy to produce things. It’s going to take concrete to build things all of which comes with a significant carbon cost. Climate breakdown is here and we’ve got to face up to it. What we need is a balance between all of these things and that’s where I think the problem lies.
He continues: “It’s not necessarily that the population continues to grow; it’s slowing. It’s how we are not adapting to that larger population when it comes to consumption.”
He highlights food production as a key consideration when it comes to the population, in particular transitioning away from eating less meat, which he calls “environmentally inefficient and the leading driver of biodiversity loss” because of its huge resources on land.
“We have to cut down forests to create fields to grow food which we then feed to animals and then we eat the animals. It’s clearly not going to work with a burgeoning population,” he explains.