Imagine the cities of the future. Do you imagine glittering skyscrapers, high-speed trains whizzing through lush parks, flying taxis and unlimited clean energy?
I’m afraid you will be disappointed. A century from now, swaths of the world’s cities are at greater risk of being abandoned, with small numbers of residents clinging to dilapidated homes on empty, weed-strewn streets – like today’s Detroit.
According to a new report in the medical journal Lancet, by 2100, just six countries could have children at the “replacement rate,” that is, with enough births to keep their populations stable, let alone growing. .
The six nations will be located in sub-Saharan Africa. In Europe, the West and Asia, the birth rate will have collapsed – and the total world population will be in free fall.
Environmentalists have long denounced humans as a curse on the planet, greedily gobbling up resources and despoiling the natural world.
A century from now, swaths of the world’s cities will be more likely to be abandoned, with small numbers of residents clinging to crumbling homes on empty, weed-strewn streets, writes Ross Clark.
Hysterical BBC presenter Chris Packham has claimed that “human population growth” is “our biggest concern… There are simply too many of us.” Because if you lack resources, it doesn’t matter how well you cope: if you’re hungry and thirsty, you’ll die.
Greens like Packham seem to think that if only we could reduce the global population, the rest of humanity could live in greater harmony with nature. On the contrary, population collapse would portend a terrifying dystopia.
Fewer babies means older populations – which means fewer young people paying taxes to fund older people’s pensions. This means that everyone must work longer and longer into old age, and in a context of decline in public services and deterioration in quality of life.
So if you’re worried that finding caregivers to care for your elderly loved ones today will be difficult, that will be nothing compared to what your children or grandchildren will experience when they are old.
In modern industrialized societies, it is generally accepted that the total fertility rate (TFR) – the average number of children born by each woman during her lifetime – must be at least 2.1 to ensure a healthy population stable.
By 2021, the TFR had fallen below 2.1 in more than half of the world’s countries.
In Britain it now stands at 1.49. In Spain and Japan it is 1.26, in Italy 1.21 and in South Korea 0.82.
Even in India – which recently overtook China to become the world’s most populous country – the TFR fell to 1.91.
There are only 94 countries left where the rate exceeds 2.1 – and 44 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, which has much higher infant mortality rates.
The dramatic fall in Britain’s birth rate has been hidden until now because we import hundreds of thousands of migrants every year to take low-paid jobs that local people increasingly despise.
In 2022, net migration will reach more than 700,000 people. The Office of National Statistics predicts that the UK population will reach 70 million by 2026, almost 74 million by 2036 and almost 77 million by 2046 – a population largely driven by migration massive.
Unless migration remains high, the UK population will likely start to decline soon after this point – especially as the last ‘baby boomer’ (born between 1946 and 1964) will reach their 80th birthday in 2044. birth rate has enormous consequences on our social fabric.
The dramatic fall in Britain’s birth rate has been hidden until now because we import hundreds of thousands of migrants every year to take low-paid jobs that local people increasingly reject.
In the years to come, Britain faces an all-out battle with other advanced economies – many of whom are already far richer than us – to import millions of foreign workers to staff our hospitals, care homes , our factories and everything else.
And when the world’s population begins to decline in the last decades of this century, it will become increasingly difficult to recruit such workers from abroad. At this point, we may see hospitals having to reduce their services or even close their doors.
So while medical advances will likely mean people will live even longer, we face a bleak future in which older people will increasingly die from neglect or be cared for by robots – an idea that has already been tested in Japan.
How did this crisis spread so stealthily on us? Not long ago, the United Nations and others were concerned about overpopulation.
For decades, self-appointed experts have warned – much like the early 19th century economist Thomas Malthus – that the world’s food and water supplies, as well as natural resources, would run out.
The graphs confidently showed that the world’s population was accelerating exponentially, with many arguing that humanity had no choice but to launch interplanetary civilizations as we inevitably outgrew our world.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
Amid all the Packham-esque hysteria about a “population explosion,” many have failed to notice that birth rates have already begun to collapse: first in a few developed countries, such as Italy and South Korea, then elsewhere.
As societies become wealthier and middle classes explode, women begin to delay childbearing. This means they end up having fewer children overall. In Britain in particular, there are the added costs of childcare and the often permanent loss of income that results from leaving the workforce, even temporarily.
The striking result of all this is that the number of babies being born around the world has already reached a peak.
The year 2016 will likely go down in history as the year when more babies were born than any other: 142 million of them. In 2021, that figure was 129 million, a drop of more than 9 percent in just five years.
To be clear, the world’s population for now continues to increase because people are living longer thanks to better medical care. We don’t die as quickly as babies are born.
According to the UN, the world’s population reached 8 billion on November 15, 2022. It is expected to continue growing before peaking at 10.4 billion in the 2080s – although the world will feel the effects of the decline in population well before then. birth rate.
Based on current trends, the world’s population will begin to decline by the 2090s – the first time this has happened since the Black Death swept across Eurasia in the 14th century.
So what, if anything, can we do to avoid hurtling toward this calamity?
First, governments must work tirelessly to encourage people to start families. Generous tax incentives for marriage, generous child benefits and better and cheaper childcare are essential, so that mothers are not forced to stop their careers to start a family.
Britain could, if it wished, lead the way in this area.
But this seems highly unlikely in the looming prospect of a Labor government: the statist left usually loathes any measure which could be seen as beneficial to the nuclear family or which would encourage people to have more children.
Yet in reality, the scale of this problem is so vast – and the problem so widespread – that it might be nearly impossible to thwart it effectively.
Unless extraordinary change occurs, the gradual impoverishment of an aging and shrinking population appears to be the fate of the planet. This is not an attractive idea.