Is global fertility really plummeting? How population forecasts are made

Brienna Perelli-Harris, Professor of Demography, University of Southampton and Jason Hilton, Lecturer in Social Statistics and Data Science, University of Southampton
·5 min read
Is global fertility really plummeting? How population forecasts are made

When the BBC reported on the results of a new study on global population in mid July, the tone was alarmist. The study by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation (IHME), published in The Lancet, projects that global population will peak at 9.7 billion around 2064 and then fall to 8.8 billion by 2100. To predict how global population will evolve over the next century, we must make predictions about two key components of population change: mortality and fertility.

Continue reading