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What’s happening?
Rapidly falling birth rates mean the world’s population will peak, and then start to decline rapidly within decades, according to a new study led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. If so, this will be the first time since the Black Death, which killed about 50 million people in the mid-1300s, that the global population will have fallen – and it will mark a radical change from the pattern of global population explosion since the Industrial Revolution. These forecasts are not entirely new. In 2020, a similar large-scale study