For the first time in history, the world’s population could begin to decline. What could this mean for humanity?
Global population decline
According to the study Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World, global fertility may already have fallen below the population replacement level, potentially leading to serious demographic and socioeconomic consequences in the future. Until recently, the world was warned about the threat of overpopulation. Today, however, concerns are increasingly shifting toward population decline.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Patrick Norrick, argue in their new report that the global fertility rate could fall below the replacement level in 2026. Of the 236 countries studied, 219 recorded a declining fertility trend between 1950 and 2023. The fertility rate is falling by approximately 0.062 children per woman per year.
This represents a trend unprecedented in human history: nothing similar had occurred before, even during periods of wars and epidemics.
It is true that an actual decline in the world’s population is still only a forecast. Humanity continues to grow today. However, this growth is largely driven by women from previous generations who are still of reproductive age. At the same time, their parents are also still alive. This “fertility momentum” effect, however, could last for roughly three decades. After that, if the current downward trend in fertility continues, the global population could begin to decline in 2056.
The forecasts by the Pennsylvania researchers differ somewhat from United Nations data. However, UN experts also project that the world’s population will begin to decline sometime around the 2080s. At the same time, fertility is falling faster than previously expected. For example, UN demographers expected 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023 but were off by nearly 50%: only 230,000 children were actually born. For a long time, UN experts based their projections on the theory of a “demographic explosion” and catastrophic global overpopulation. In 2024, 33 of the 37 countries with reliable statistics recorded fewer births than had been projected.
Childlessness as a global trend
Declining fertility has most often been associated with wealthy Western countries. In the United States, the birth rate has been steadily declining since 2007 and now stands at 1.6 children per woman over her lifetime. In 2000, the figure was 1.9.
Since 2008, fertility rates have also been declining across the European Union. According to Eurostat, nearly half as many children were born in EU countries in 2024 as in 1964. Italy, Spain, Greece, Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are among the countries experiencing the sharpest declines in fertility. Bulgaria, meanwhile, recorded the highest fertility rate in the EU.
Overall, the fertility rate in the EU is even lower than in the United States, standing at 1.34 children per woman in 2024. Women in the EU are also having children later in life: the average age at which women have their first child is 29.5.
In the Russian Federation, where commitment to traditional values has been increasingly emphasised in recent years, the situation regarding childbearing is comparable to that in Europe and worse than in the United States. In 2025, Russia’s fertility rate fell to its lowest level in the country’s history, reaching just 1.3 children per woman.
By contrast, countries of the Global South have traditionally been seen as places where people are more inclined to have large families. To a large extent, this was indeed the case: in agrarian societies, children represented potential workers, large families were reinforced by tradition, and fertility was also encouraged by limited access to contraception.
But today, Latin America, North Africa, and the Middle East are among the regions experiencing the sharpest declines in fertility. In 2025, low fertility rates were recorded in Thailand (0.87), Colombia (1.01), Iran (1.35), and Brazil (1.52). Mexico’s fertility rate has fallen below that of the United States.
Today, the total fertility rate has fallen below the population replacement level of 2.1 children per woman in almost all countries across South America and South and East Asia. Fertility is also declining rapidly in Africa. While women in sub-Saharan Africa had an average of 6–7 children in the 1950s, the figure had fallen to around four by 2023. In Asia, this figure declined from more than six births per woman in the 1960s to around two in 2023, while in South America it fell from 5–6 in the 1950s to below two in 2023.
According to data cited by researchers at Brown University, the share of young women who “do not want to have children” in China increased from 5% in 2012 to 47% in 2023. China is already recording 3.3 million more deaths than births each year.
Comfort and poverty: The main reasons for childlessness
And it appears that today, the reasons why people choose not to have children are, to a large extent, universal across different countries. The neoliberal economic order, globalisation, and the standards of consumer society are all playing a role.
Women are increasingly choosing to forgo having children in favour of professional careers and the education associated with them, or because they cannot afford to take time away from work. At the same time, paid extended parental leave is still unavailable even in some very wealthy Western countries.
More recently, however, this has been joined by arguments associated with the fashionable “progressive agenda” — concerns about humanity’s environmental footprint and climate change.
Economic and political instability, as well as the growing number of armed conflicts around the world, also negatively affect people’s willingness to have children. The increasingly popular model of remote work, coupled with moving from country to country, growing labour migration, and the broader deregulation of employment relationships with the expansion of temporary work, does little to encourage childbearing either.
Of course, the reluctance of some people in consumer societies to make personal sacrifices for the sake of raising children also plays a role. The decline in fertility may also be partly influenced by non-traditional sexual practices.
Some experts, meanwhile, blame digital technologies, pointing to what they describe as the “sterilising effect” of social media and AI. Young people are spending more and more time in the virtual world, increasingly reluctant to start families, have children, or even pursue relationships in real life. After all, the internet can provide a surrogate version of all of this, albeit in a much less demanding format.
At the same time, alienation between people continues to grow in consumer societies, while the level of interpersonal communication in real life is declining. Behavioural norms are also changing rapidly. Many women, including in developing countries, are abandoning the traditional role of mother and homemaker.
But it appears that financial considerations and the rising cost of living are the main obstacles to having children. In the United States, for example, raising a child from birth to the age of 18 costs an average of $200,000 to $310,000. In some states, the cost is significantly higher, reaching as much as $650,000.
The indirect evidence that difficult financial conditions have a negative impact on fertility is that the latest major decline in fertility in the EU began in 2008, coinciding with the global economic recession. Job losses and rising prices, particularly housing costs, place enormous pressure on family finances and plans to have children. Today, housing costs in many countries are reaching historic highs, significantly limiting the financial capacity of young families. In the United States, children are also most likely to be born into affluent suburban families and least likely to be born into poor African American families living in urban neighbourhoods.
Consequences of demographic decline
The long-term trend toward declining birth rates and population could have very serious consequences for the economy, social sphere, and national identity.
Although researchers also see certain “advantages” in this trend — such as reduced pressure on the environment and infrastructure — population ageing, in turn, will lead to labour shortages and place a heavier burden on government budgets and social welfare systems. Moreover, the closure of schools, hospitals, sports facilities, and other public institutions will have a serious impact on local communities, further accelerating their social disintegration. In the United States, particularly in rural areas, schools often serve as a kind of community centre and social hub.
Population decline will inevitably create a need to attract migrant workers, which, in turn, could fuel the growth of far-right sentiment. Ageing populations are also more likely to vote for right-wing populists. Europe’s recent sharp political shift toward nationalism and Islamophobia is to a significant extent linked to these demographic trends as well.
Halting population decline will require a comprehensive approach to addressing all the problems that contribute to it, but above all, it will require tackling issues of social protection and fairness.
