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The world is still growing, just more slowly every year

العالم لا يزال ينمو ولكن بوتيرة أبطأ كل عام

2026-07-26

The global growth rate peaked around 2.3 percent in the late 1960s and has drifted down ever since; it now sits below one percent. The world still adds roughly 70 million people a year, but the curve is bending.

The action has moved. Europe and East Asia are flat or shrinking. India passed China. Africa supplies an increasing share of all growth, and Sudan sits squarely in that story.

UN projections see a global peak somewhere past ten billion late this century. Projections that far out deserve humility, but the direction of travel is not in dispute.

The shape of the slowdown

Growth peaked in percentage terms in the late 1960s at about 2.1 to 2.3 percent a year, and in absolute terms around the late 1980s, when the world added roughly 93 million people annually. Both measures have declined since. The world still gains about 70 million people a year, but each year's addition is a little smaller than the last.

Where the remaining growth lives

The geography has narrowed dramatically. Two-thirds of humanity now lives in countries with fertility below the replacement level of about 2.1 children per woman. China is shrinking. Europe would shrink without migration. India, the new number one, is itself below replacement. The remaining engine is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South and Central Asia; by the 2050s, more than half of all global growth is projected to come from just eight countries, several of them African.

What peaking actually means

The UN's central projection sees world population cresting somewhere past 10 billion in the 2080s, then drifting down. Other respected models, using faster education and urbanisation assumptions, put the peak earlier and lower. Nobody serious disputes the direction, only the timing. For most readers the practical takeaway is stranger than either number: within the lifetime of children born today, humanity will probably experience something it has not seen since the Black Death — a sustained global population decline, arriving not through catastrophe but through billions of private decisions to have smaller families.