Decline and alarm: with fewer births and more deaths, the world’s population faces the unknown

NEW YORK.- Countries around the world are experiencing demographic stagnation and fertility collapse, a dramatic turning point unprecedented in history., which will make first birthdays less frequent than awakenings and empty houses, an increasingly common aberration.

At Italy maternity hospitals are closing and in the northeast China ghost towns are flourishing. In South Korea, universities do not have enough students, and Germany razed hundreds of thousands of vacant houses to turn land into parks.

Like an avalanche, demographic forces are pushing the world toward more deaths than births, and they seem to be gathering momentum and accelerating. Although the populations of some countries continue to grow, particularly in Africa, fertility rates are declining in virtually all of the rest of the world.. Today, demographers predict that by the second half of the century, or perhaps sooner, the world’s population will begin a sustained decline for the first time.

A less inhabited planet could ease the pressure on natural resources, slow the destructive effects of climate change, and reduce the household burden on women. But this month’s announcements of census results in China and the United States, which show the slowest population growth rates in decades in both countries, also reveal difficult-to-disentangle changes.

The sum of longer lives and lower fertility – which leads to fewer active workers and more retirees – threatens to disrupt the way societies are organized, which until now has revolved around the idea that with the growth of young people, it would motorize the economy and help pay the expenses of the elderly. It could also encourage a reconceptualization of the family and of the countries themselves. Imagine entire regions where the entire population is at least 70 years old. We have to think of governments that pay huge economic incentives to immigrants and mothers of many children. Or a money saving, full of grandparents and procreation advertisements.

“A paradigm shift is needed,” says Frank Swiaczny, a German demographer who until last year led demographic trends and analysis for the United Nations. “Countries must learn to live with and adapt to this decline.”

The repercussions and responses are already starting to emerge, especially in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments go to great lengths to balance the demands of the growing number of older people with the needs of young people, whose most intimate reproductive decisions are conditioned by both positive (more employment for women) and negative (persistent gender inequality and high cost of living) factors.

The 20th century presented an entirely different challenge. The world’s population experienced its largest increase on record, rising from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6,000 in 2000. Life expectancy has increased and infant mortality has declined. In some countries – which represent nearly a third of the world’s population – this growth dynamic is still in effect. By the turn of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in terms of population. In sub-Saharan Africa, families continue to have four or five children.

But in most other countries of the world, the era of high fertility is drawing to a close. As women have better access to education and contraception, and the anxiety associated with the decision to have children continues to increase, more and more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer are fewer babies are born. Even in countries long associated with high population growth, such as India and Mexico, the fertility rate falls to 2.1 children per woman, or even less.

Change can take decades, but once it starts, decline (as well as growth) skyrockets exponentially. And if there are fewer births, fewer girls are born who in turn would have children, and if they have families smaller than their parents – which is happening in dozens of countries – the fall starts to look like the cascading effect of a rock falling from a cliff.

“It becomes a vicious cycle,” says Stuart Gietel Basten, an expert in Asian demography and professor of social sciences and public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “It’s an unstoppable demographic surge.”

Some countries, such as the United States, Australia and Canada, where fertility rates are between 1.5 and 2 children per woman, have mitigated the impact on immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, emigration from the region has exacerbated depopulation and, in much of Asia, the ‘demographic time bomb’, which was debated decades ago, finally exploded.

In Capracotta, a small town in southern Italy, a sign with red letters on an 18th century stone building reads “Nursery and Kindergarten”, but today it functions as a geriatric residence. At night, residents eat their soup on oilcloth tablecloths in the old meeting room.

“Before, there were lots of families and children,” says Concetta D’Andrea, 93, who was a student and teacher at the school and now resides in the retirement home. “But there is no one left.” Capracotta’s population has aged and declined dramatically, from around 5,000 to 800 people. Local carpentry workshops and workshops have closed and organizers of the local football tournament are even struggling to put together teams.

Last Friday, in a speech at a conference on the birth crisis in Italy, Pope Francis said that “the demographic winter” remains “cold and dark”.

In many countries, people will soon begin to search for their own metaphors. Birth projections tend to change based on the response of governments and families, but according to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in the journal The LancetBy 2100, out of a total of 195 countries and territories, 183 will have fertility rates below the generational replacement rate.

This projective model reveals a particularly large collapse in China, where the population is expected to drop from the current 1.410 million to around 730 million in 2100. If this were the case, the age pyramid would be practically reversed. Instead of a base of young workers supporting a smaller number of retirees, China would have the same number of people aged 85 and 18.

Demographers warn that population decline should not be viewed as just a cause for alarm. Many women now have fewer children because they want to. And with less population, perhaps wages would be higher, societies more equal, there would be less carbon emissions and a better quality of life for the children who continued to be born.

The challenge ahead is still a dead end, as no country with a serious slowdown in population growth has managed to increase its fertility rate, well beyond the meager result achieved by Germany. In economies in recession, there are few signs of wage growth and there is no guarantee that with less people there will be less damage to the environment.

Many demographers argue that future historians might view the present moment as a time of transition or gestation, the moment when humans realized – or failed to realize how to make the world more hospitable, enough for people to form the family that they really want to form.

Translation of Jaime Arrambide

The New York Times

The New York Times