Population Emergency: The 9 Countries Now Facing Full Demographic Collapse

Population Emergency: The 9 Countries Now Facing Full Demographic Collapse Key takeaways Powered by Yahoo Scout. Yahoo is using AI to generate key points from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate worldwide at 0.68 children per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1, leading to a national emergency and potential long-term economic recession. Japan's fertility rate has dropped to 1.2, with the number of births declining by 5.7% in 2024, signaling a structural crisis that could see the population fall to 87 million by 2070, posing challenges to the economy and national security. Ukraine's population has shrunk by 32.5% between 2000 and 2025, with a death rate outpacing the birth rate by nearly 3 to 1 in 2025, leading to a demographic crisis exacerbated by war, high mortality rates, and emigration. See more Something unusual is happening across large swaths of the world. Maternity wards are quieter than they've ever been. Villages are emptying not from disaster or plague, but from a slow, structural unwinding of the conditions that once made having children a natural default. Countries need a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman to sustain long-term generational replacement of the population. Dozens are now falling far short of that threshold, some by a staggering margin.