The global population looks as though it will reach its peak in the 21st century, before beginning to decline. These are the findings of a new study from the United Nations released in 2024. The data was drawn from some 1,900 national population censuses recorded in 237 countries between the years 1950 to 2023.
The report found that more than half of the countries of the world have fallen below the replacement birth rate, or the rate of births per woman that would keep the population stable, which stands at 2.1 births per woman. Currently the world average of birthrates is 2.25 births per woman, which means the world population is still growing, but this rate is already 1 point lower than the 3.25 recorded in 1990 and is not expected to last.
Graphs from the UN, which can be viewed at the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, show a steady and sometimes dramatic decline from a peak of 5.31 global births per woman, in 1963. For example, from 1970 to 1980 the global birth rate fell from 4.82 to 3.74. The current 2.25 global average is the lowest birth rate recorded.
The graphs for population by continent were almost uniform in their falling birthrates. While Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean were significantly higher than Oceania, Europe, and North America in 1951, today they are resting around 1.8. Europe has the lowest birth rate of any continent at 1.4 births per woman followed by North America at 1.6.
Africa was the only outlier, showing gradual growth until the mid-1970s, when it began its decline. Africa remains the continent with the highest birth rate in the world, at 4.07 births per woman, but even this is a far cry from 1978, when there were an average of 6.69 births per woman throughout the entire continent.
The report did not indicate solutions to the decline in the world’s population, although it noted that the world could see the population reach its peak around 2080. In May, Pope Francis spoke on the global population at the General States of Natality event. He suggested that many of the world’s problems stem from a lack of hope:
“At the root of pollution and world hunger are not children being born, but the choices of those who think only of themselves. The delirium of an unbridled, blind, and rampant materialism, of a consumerism that, like an evil virus, erodes at the root the existence of people and society.” Pope Francis continued, “Selfishness makes one deaf to the voice of God […] homes become filled with objects and emptied of children, becoming very sad places.”
