In the News, September 2025
Written by Olivia Nater, Communications Manager | Published: September 8, 2025
New Population Connection survey: Americans are poorly informed about population sizes and trends
Declining birth rates are all over the news. In June, we worked with polling firm YouGov on an online survey of 2,000 US adults to find out to what extent this is shaping public knowledge and perception of demographic trends.
Survey respondents were asked to guess the sizes of the US and world populations. Only 16% were within 5% of the actual US population of 342 million (in other words, between 325 and 359 million), and 20% were within 5% of the global population of 8.2 billion (between 7.8 and 8.6 billion). For both population sizes, the majority of respondents made guesses that were more than 50% higher or lower than the actual population.
When asked whether the US population is growing, shrinking, or staying the same, only 61% knew it is growing. Knowledge was slightly better regarding the global population, with 72% saying it’s growing.
Respondents were also asked if they had seen any headlines about declining birth rates or global population growth in the past month. Close to a third (31%) said they had seen declining birth rate headlines, while just 11% said they had seen headlines about global population growth.
Then they were asked how concerned they are about declining birth rates and global population growth. Only a third said they were very to somewhat concerned about global population growth, while 42% said they are not at all concerned. Concern over declining birth rates was even lower, with just a quarter saying they are very to somewhat concerned, while more than half (53%) said they are not at all concerned. For those who expressed concern about global population growth, the top reasons were “more people living in poverty” (24%) and “depletion of natural resources” (22%). For those concerned about low birth rates, by far the biggest reported reason was “erosion of traditional family values / fewer people getting married and having children,” with 29% of respondents ranking this as their number one concern.
UN report inspires misleading headlines about the “real fertility crisis”
The 2025 edition of UNFPA’s annual publication, State of World Population (SWP), received a lot of media attention when it was released in June, with multiple articles claiming that low fertility rates present a crisis and that people around the world are having fewer children than they desire.
While this was not a comprehensive representation of the report, SWP 2025 does argue that people having fewer than their ideal number of kids is a “crisis.” This was the aspect that media stories highlighted, while sadly neglecting the more serious problems of persistent reproductive rights violations and rapid population growth. The publication notes that around half of pregnancies worldwide are unintended, while an estimated 44% of women and girls do not have decision-making power or bodily autonomy regarding sexual relations, contraceptive use, or reproductive health care.
Wealthiest 10% are driving the climate crisis
A new paper by researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), published in Nature Climate Change, links emissions inequality to climate warming and extreme heat.
They found that nearly two-thirds of global warming between 1990 and 2020 is attributable to the wealthiest 10% of the global population, while a fifth of warming was caused by the richest 1%, and 8% was caused by the richest 0.1%.
In 2019, the richest 10% included everyone earning more than €42,980 (roughly $48,000) — below the US national average of nearly $52,000 that year. The study showed that if the entire world population had emitted at the same level as this top 10%, the Earth would have warmed by 2.9°C — an increase considered catastrophic by climate experts. If everyone lived like the top 1%, the temperature increase would have been an unthinkable 6.7°C, while everyone emitting like the richest 0.1% would have led to a planet-killing 12.2°C of warming.
The paper provided a sobering demonstration that at our current population size, there really is no “space” for billionaires and that we need to drastically reduce consumption across the Global North, even among those not considered “wealthy” by US standards.
Escalating drought is pushing millions to the brink of starvation
Some of the most damaging droughts in recorded history have taken place over the last two years, according to a new report by the US National Drought Mitigation Center and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
The drought events, “fueled by climate change and relentless pressure on land and water resources,” have led to more than 90 million people across Eastern and Southern Africa facing acute hunger. In Somalia, where an estimated 43,000 people died in 2022 due to drought-linked hunger, 4.4 million people faced crisis-level food insecurity in early 2025.
While the crisis is worst in Africa, other parts of the world are not spared. In the Mediterranean, water shortages negatively impacted domestic supplies, agriculture, and tourism, while the Amazon Basin saw record-low river levels in 2023 and 2024 that led to mass die-offs of fish and endangered dolphins, and disrupted drinking water and transport for hundreds of thousands of people.
The authors explain that the 2023–2024 El Niño event created “a perfect storm,” which amplified already dire climate change impacts in areas affected by extreme warming, population pressure, and fragile infrastructure. As with all crises, the most vulnerable people, in particular women and children, faced the worst impacts, such as acute malnutrition and more forced child marriages due to families seeking dowries to survive.
Olivia Nater: onater@popconnect.org