Reading: Is humanity’s population about to decline — and could we face extinction?

Is humanity’s population about to decline — and could we face extinction?

Last updated: 2025/10/03 at 6:49 AM

News Room Published 3 October 2025

The world’s population is higher than ever, with around eight billion people inhabiting our Earth. We hit this number in 2022 and it marked more than a four-fold increase from just one century ago. We see how this is affecting Earth, with climate change and mass pollution reshaping our planet to the point many researchers believe we are in a sixth mass extinction event. Some scientists even argue that we’re in a new epoch known as the anthropocene, in which human behaviour is the dominant influence on the environment (Picture: Getty)

The question is, how many people could the Earth support? Well, this depends on what you would deem as a good quality of life and if there are any societal changes which could change how we live – such as underwater housing. Another issue is how we would feed the growing population (Picture: Getty)

The Global Footprint Network, a US independent think tank, reports that Earth’s Overshoot day, which is the day on the calendar each when humans officially overspend the planet’s renewable resource, was July 24 (Picture: Getty)

So, as everything seems to be getting more dire, is having an ethical population decline the answer to our issues? According to the UN, the world’s population will continue rising to 10.3 billion by 2080. But by the end of the century, this number will gradually decline to around 10.2 billion, and they currently report that one in four people lives in a country where the population has already peaked (Picture: Getty)

Fertility rates are declining, with women, on average, having one fewer child than in 1990, resulting in a global fertility rate of 2.3 live births per woman in 2024. The average life expectancy in 2024 is 73.3 years old, with projections of 77.4 years by 2054. But by 2080, the number of individuals aged 65 and older is expected to pass that of children under 18 (Picture: Getty)

By the mid-2030s, those aged 80 and over will outnumber infants. However, fertility remains high in some countries, which tend to be the ones with the lowest income per capita, such as sub-Saharan African countries. This all means the population is expected to reach nine billion in 2037 (Picture: Getty)

There is some uncertainty around the future size of the world’s population, but the UN reports that it will peak within the current century, sometime between the mid-2060s and 2100, and the size of world’s population in 2100 is now expected to be 6% smaller – or about 700 million people fewer – than anticipated a decade ago. This is due to several factors including lower-than-expected levels of fertility observed in recent years in countries such as China and India (Picture: Getty)

It’s thought that immigration will be the main driver of population growth in 52 countries and areas between now and 2054, including in Australia, Canada and the United States of America. Africa is the fastest growing continent with projections showing a 79% rise to 2.2 billion by 2054, and by the end of the century this number could reach 3.3 billion, accounting for more than one-fifth of the global increase. And nine countries are expected to double in size between 2024 and 2054 (Picture: Getty)

So, while the population does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon, are humans at any risk of going extinct? Well, it seems that, according to research, groups of related species are disappearing at a rate of 35% times higher than expected. And there is no guarantee that humans would survive the extinction event. Why? (Picture: Getty)

Extreme weather such as flooding, wildfires and drought have become more frequent. But as migration changes, humans are also introducing invasive species that are threatening ecosystems all over the world. Although extinction naturally occurs over hundreds and thousands of years, humans are speeding up this process, which researchers have dubbed as the Holocene extinction (Picture: Getty)

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