Billionaire Elon Musk tweeted, not for the first time, that "population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming." Climate change is a serious problem facing the planet, and experts say it's difficult to compare problems.
Is it true or not ?
Even though he's not always the best at prediction, SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk keeps predicting that the world's population is on the verge of a catastrophic collapse due to declining birth rates. "Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming," Musk tweeted last week, for instance. Actual experts on population dynamics say he's totally wrong. "He's better off making cars and engineering than at predicting the trajectory of the population," Joseph Chamie, a consulting demographer and a former director of the United Nations Population Division, told CNN this week. "Yes, in some countries, their population is declining, but for the world, that's just not the case."
What experts says ?
It's true that birth rates are declining in specific countries around the world, although the world population overall is still growing, and is anticipated to pass the 8 billion mark this year. In reality, global population dynamics are extremely complex, slow moving, and dependent on the exact balance of ages in different locations. A rapidly aging cohort without enough kids to take care of them, for instance, can spell economic ruin. But although most researchers do anticipate that the global population will eventually start to decline, what matters much more than that overall phenomenon will be the specifics of how it happens. And the good news is that by definition, population changes gradually, so there's plenty of time to adjust course.
Population projections by the numbers :
The world's population is projected to reach 8 billion by mid-November of this year, according to the Unaited Nation. The UN predicts the global population could grow to around 8.5 billion in just 8 years. By 2080, the world's population is expected to peak at 10.4 billion. Then there's a 50% chance that the population will plateau or begin to decrease by 2100. More conservative models like the one published in 2020 in the lancet anticipate the global population would be about 8.8 billion people by 2100. It's true that what's driving current population growth is not a higher birth rate. What drives global population growth is that fewer people are dying young. Global life expectancy was 72.8 years in 2019, an increase of nine years since 1990. That is expected to increase to 77.2 years by 2050.
Globally, the fertility rate has not "collapsed," nor should it, according to the UN, but it has dropped significantly.
In 1950, women typically had five births each; globally, last year, it was 2.3 births. By 2050, the UN projects a further global decline to 2.1 births per woman. In some countries, it is lower. In the US the 1950s, it was 3.6 births per woman, it slipped to 1.6 in 2020, according to the world bank. In Italy, it was 1.2; in Japan, it was 1.3; in China, 1.2. In January 2022, the country announced the birth rate fell for the fifth year, in a row, even with the repeal of the one child policy, allowing couples to have up to three children as of 2021. "Virtually every developed country is below two, and it's been that way for 20 or 30 years," Chamie said. Most countries have gone through what's called a demographic transition. He only continent that hasn't finished this transition, he said, is parts of Africa, where there are 15 to 20 countries where the average number of children couples have is five. But in those countries, children still face high death rates. The infant mortality rate for kids under 5 is 8 to 10 times higher than in developed regions, and maternal mortality is more than double, Chamie said. If women in these African regions had more access to contraception, education, and health care, these problems could be addressed and the global population could decline further -- but people would be better off in terms of individual health.
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