The world’s population will drop for the first time since the Black Death 700 years ago if predictions are correct.
Up to 50 million people died, including half of Europe’s population and up to 40% of England’s, when the bubonic plague swept through medieval Europe.
Earth’s population has kept growing since that point in the mid-1300s when the number of humans fell for the only time in history.
From a post-plague population of 350,000,000, the number of humans has grown to levels unimaginable to peasants of the feudal world.
More than eight billion people roam the Earth now, a number reached due to dramatic growth sparked by the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago.
At that point, the population was less than a billion.
The global population is expected to reach 10,000,000,000 by 2060.
But it will soon fall for the second time, according to a study in the Lancet medical journal, and that spells trouble for pensions and public services.
It’s all down to birth rates.
Each woman would have to have 2.1 children on average to maintain the current population.
But this total fertility rate is 2.23 worldwide, thanks in large part to better sex education, easier access to contraception and more job opportunities for women.
The rate is even lower in countries like the UK, where it was 1.49 in 2021, down from 2.2 in the 1950s.
It is predicted to fall to 1.3 by 2100.
By contrast, Chad had the highest fertility rate at 6.99.
This means countries will have wildly different experiences by the year 2100.
Some will suffer severe depopulation, including Ukraine which will have 23,000,000 fewer people than it does now, according to the study.
Jamaica will be a fraction of its current size – just 900,000 people rather than 2,800,000.
But some countries will be bigger than ever.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is expected to more than quadruple its size to 432,000,000, while Tanzania will almost match that rate to bring it to 250,000,000.
All but one of the countries with high birth rates and a future of rapid population growth are in Africa.
‘In many ways, tumbling fertility rates are a success story’, said Stein Emil Vollset, the study’s co-author and a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
He said it reflects ‘not only better, easily available contraception but also many women choosing to delay or have fewer children, as well as more opportunities for education and employment.’
But the ‘staggering social change’ that follows ‘will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate reorganising societies’, co-author Dr Natalia Bhattacharjee added.
Such change can already be seen in the UK where fewer pupils are applying to primary and secondary schools.
The country is also struggling to keep up with the costs of providing healthcare, social care and pensions to an ageing population as well as housing and educating the young.
That will only get harder as the population grows old, fewer people are in the young force, and the number of deaths overtakes births.
Resistance to immigration makes this even worse.
If the future this Lancet study predicts comes to pass, and Britain’s population declines, migration from countries with younger, booming populations will be hard, if not impossible, to avoid.
Dr Bhattacharjee said: ‘Global recognition of the challenges around migration and global aid networks are going to be all the more critical when there is fierce competition for migrants to sustain economic growth and as sub-Saharan Africa’s baby boom continues apace.’
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