With over seven billion humans inhabiting our crowded planet, forests have mostly disappeared, animal species have gone extinct and the Earth’s atmosphere keeps getting dangerously warmer by the day. The number of humans is expected to grow to nine billion people by 2050 and reach 11 billion by 2100, according to the United Nations (UN).
New research published this July in The Lancet forecasts that continued growth “through the century is no longer the most likely trajectory for the world’s population.” Rather, the global population is likely to peak in 2064 at 9.7 billion, before declining to 8.8 billion by 2100.
ASEAN countries have collectively achieved remarkable economic growth, however, when it comes to fertility rates, the region has been drifting. The total fertility rate (TFR) of Southeast Asia has dropped from 5.5 in 1970 down to 2.11 in 2017. At the Future of Work Conference in Singapore in April 2019, Singapore’s Minister for Manpower, Josephine Teo stated that more than half of the world’s population live in countries with a TFR that is below the replacement level of 2.1.
With 7.7 billion humans inhabiting our crowded planet, forests have mostly disappeared, animal species have gone extinct and the Earth’s atmosphere keeps getting dangerously warmer by the day. The number of humans is expected to grow to nine billion people by 2050 and reach 11 billion by 2100, according to the United Nation’s (UN) 2019 World Population Prospect report.
ASEAN countries have collectively achieved remarkable economic growth, however, when it comes to fertility rates, the region has been drifting. The total fertility rate (TFR) of Southeast Asia has dropped from 5.5 in 1970 down to 2.11 in 2017. Half of the region is already facing a ‘baby bust’, where there are insufficient children to maintain the population size.
