(Bloomberg) -- One in four of the world’s nations has already passed peak population, as declining birth rates contribute to slower growth, according to new United Nations estimates.
The global population will likely peak at 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, the UN Population Division said in a report out Thursday. A decade ago, the agency only saw a 30% chance that population growth would end this century, but that’s now risen to 80%.
Growth in some of the world’s most populous nations like India, Indonesia and Nigeria will help boost the world total by 2.1 billion over the next six decades, the UN forecasts. Nine countries are projected to see their population double between 2024 and 2054, including Angola, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Meanwhile the population has already peaked in more than 60 countries including China and Japan. For some of those, such as Germany, Italy and Russia, the peak would have arrived even sooner if not for immigration — which is expected to be the main driver of population growth in more than 50 countries, among them the US, Canada and Australia, over the next three decades.
Fertility rates in some of the world’s largest countries have been declining faster than anticipated, and the UN researchers now expect that there’ll be 700 million fewer people on the planet in 2100 than they had foreseen a decade ago.
Birth rates have been falling as economic instability, political uncertainty and women’s access to education and the labor market discourage more people from having children, according to the report. Restrictions on immigration in places like Europe, and a temporary drop in life expectancy due to the pandemic, have also contributed to lower projections.
In countries where the population has already peaked, the number of women of reproductive age — between 15 and 49 years — is expected to fall rapidly in the coming decades. The UN also projects that by 2080, people age 65 and older will outnumber those under 18 worldwide.
--With assistance from Enda Curran.
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