As a result, the world has already passed ‘peak child’. According to statistics compiled by the United Nations, the number of children in the world peaked in 2017vi and is now falling. Take a moment to think about what that means: there may never be more children in the world than there were in 2017. Global population growth will peak when all these children reach old age. The United Nations projects this will happen in the 2080s at 10 to 11 billion people.19 From there, it expects the world population will start to shrink.
