I’M FINDING it increasingly difficult to watch the news on TV.

Ever more depressing stories about politics, economics and the environment make bulletins torture. Radio and newspapers force-feed the same misery.

Let me give you a moment of relief from news laden with anxiety to bring you recent encouraging global news that was not widely disseminated. The frightening increase in the world’s population is now forecast to end sooner than expected.

Researchers are concluding that the world is getting richer and that as a result of that women are having fewer babies or no baby.

That is the trend. The regions where the trend is strongest are Europe and America, where for years females have been having too few babies to make up for the number of people dying.

In the UK, the birthrate has been declining steadily since 1991, and the decline has been even steeper in Germany and other prosperous EU nations, where women are increasingly prioritising career and lifestyle over reproduction.

With birthrate decline linked to prosperity, it is inevitable that our birthrate here in Hampshire is falling, because we are part of the UK’s prosperous south-east.

But Hampshire people may wonder how the birthrate can be falling when they see thousands of houses being built in the county.

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The reason is that the population of the county council area, already over 1.4 million, is going up steadily because of immigration. ONS estimates indicate that the year to mid-2023 saw the UK’s biggest population increase for 75 years. Over a million people moved to this country and less than half a million left.

The good news about the population of the whole world came earlier this month from the United Nations. Its World Population Prospects report claims global population will start to go down before the end of the century. In a similar report two years ago, the UN said the global total would merely be stable by 2100, rather than going down.

Not only does the report say the peak will come sooner than hoped. It also thinks the peak when it comes will be lower, at 10.3 billion rather than it’s earlier prediction of 10.4 billion. Current world population: 8.1 billion.

Already population is going down in Europe. The peak came in 2020. The UN calculates that by the end of the century Europe’s population will have reduced by a fifth.

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Leaving out migration, theoretically for population to be stable the birthrate needs to be 2.1 babies per woman. In the UK it is 1.6.

A quarter of Earth’s population now live in countries where the birthrate is below 1.4, including China.

Regions of the world where population is still soaring tend to be poorer regions, particularly, sub-Saharan Africa. If the trend continues there for more than a century, Africa could end up with more population than all the rest of the world.

South Asia currently has about two billion people, twice that of sub-Saharan Africa, but, as South Asia’s wealth continues to increase, I expect its speed of population increase to reduce until it is overtaken by Africa in about a century.

Why population growth is inversely related to wealth has been put down to several factors, including deciding not to have kids, deciding too late to have kids, and difficulty finding a partner away from family and roots.

Falling population can cause economic problems because it leads to a surplus of retired workers and a shortage of current workers, who end up struggling to pay the taxes needed to support the retired. Economics is important but the planet more so. Lower than expected population growth raises hopes of eliminating the doomsday threat of temperatures spiralling. Fewer people means fewer tonnes of carbon being burned into the atmosphere, and fewer square miles of deforestation making way for agriculture and buildings.

So less global population is encouraging. Pity it wasn’t on the news.