Demography and Geopolitics

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Demography increasingly impacts global geopolitics - What you have to be aware of

The outlook for world population growth over the next 40 years is significantly different from the past 40 years we have just lived through. Between 1970 and 2010, humanity’s numbers rose roughly from 3.7 billion to nearly 6.9 billion—a 90% increase. Medium variant projections for 2010-2050, for their part, envision a rise from less than 7 billion to more than 9 billion—an increase of about one third. In both relative and absolute terms, global population growth has been decelerating, and further deceleration looks in store.

But if we are heading out of an era of a global “population explosion”, we still face worldwide challenges from more localized demographic “cluster bombs”. Virtually all of the world’s projected population growth until 2050 comes from the “less developed regions”—and 800 million of this increase is set to accrue from the “least developed countries”, where populations are on course to double by 2050. This is to say that continued rapid population growth is the prospect for the world’s poorest and most fragile states—the places that are least capable of coping successfully with rapid social changes. If these states fail to cope with the demands of their rapidly growing citizenries—including the needs of education and employment for their burgeoning youth and working-age populations—the consequences will be seen in poverty, hunger, and instability—with reverberations that may extend internationally.

For reasons both humanitarian and strategic, the developed countries should be ready to help these societies to make preparations that will help them bring inclusive prosperity to their growing populations: including efforts in health, education, and family planning. To the extent that voluntary population policies can also help slow population growth and thereby affect the “scale” of the challenges facing the least developed countries, such efforts may bring an additional developmental and security benefits. There could be environmental benefits as well: for while future stresses to the global environment will largely be shaped by the consumption patterns of countries which no longer have high fertility, rapid population growth will place mounting and perhaps critical pressures on local environments through water scarcity, deforestation, desertification, misuse or destruction of grasslands and arable land, and other kinds of ecological damage.

The next four decades will also see increasing demographic “differentiation” across the globe—with pronounced population aging and stagnation or decline in working-age manpower for the “more developed regions”, contraposed with robust manpower growth in many low-income countries where the population structure will remain quite youthful. In such a world, the economic potential from migration flows may become increasingly important. Devising successful international policies may consequently become a matter of increasing practical important.

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