(LifeSiteNews) — The United Nations has claimed that predictions of population reduction offer a “hopeful sign” for the planet, without addressing the expected full-blown population collapse from which some demographers say the world will not recover.

According to The Guardian, new UN projections estimate that the world’s population will peak earlier and at a lower number than expected — 10.2 billion, which is 6% less than that expected a decade ago — giving UN officials “hope of reduced pressure on the environment.”

More than half of the world’s countries now have fertility rates at below replacement level, including the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, with “nearly a fifth” of countries at an “ultra-low” fertility rate of under 1.4 births a woman, according to the UN. The current world fertility rate is 2.27 births per woman, fast approaching below-replacement fertility .

Li Junhua, the UN undersecretary general for economic and social affairs, said that the lower, earlier population speak “could mean reduced environmental pressures from human impacts due to lower aggregate consumption,” and yet still called for a reduced environmental impact of the “activities of each individual person.”

The idea that the world’s population must be restrained in order to sustain its existing people is hotly contested, and studies on the earth’s carrying capacity vary widely in their estimates. While 20 studies say it is 8 billion people or less (the current world population is about 8 billion), 14 studies peg the world’s carrying capacity at twice that amount, 16 billion, and 18 other studies notch that number way up, with seven studies estimating the earth can sustain as many as 64 billion people, and one study estimating it at 1,024 billion people.

Moreover, the recent UN report entirely fails to address the coming population collapse that demographers anticipate after 2100, which will have a devastating effect on economies and likely on quality of life. It also fails to address the morality of desiring a world with less people. 

Dean Spears, an economist at the Population Research Center of the University of Texas, has noted that “if the world’s fertility rate were the same as in the United States today,” which is about 1.66 births per woman, “then the global population would fall from a peak of around 10 billion to less than two billion about 300 years later, over perhaps 10 generations. And if family sizes remained small, we would continue declining.”

Spears co-authored a paper rare for its estimation of world population projections beyond 2100, showing that in any of 3 scenarios in which the world population remains below replacement rate, the number of the world’s inhabitants would rapidly plummet to a “very small” number. Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson, authors of the book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, have asserted that once global population decline begins, which they say will occur in three decades, “it will never end.”

“Even if below-replacement fertility is sustained only for a few centuries, the size of the global population could become very small,” Spears and his fellow authors maintain. This means that a whole slew of harmful effects to society will follow population decline, likely including a decline in basic services and infrastructure; unemployment; a decline in innovation; insufficient end-of-life care for the elderly; and a decline in mental health.

Even the World Economic Forum (WEF) has admitted that the effects of population collapse will be “severe.” 

Jordan Peterson has noted in an interview with podcaster Chris Williamson that “dire predictions” about the state of the world by the year 2000 made by the globalist Club of Rome based on ideas of overpopulation have not only been way off the mark, but are the inverse of what actually happened. Peterson explained that the Club of Rome predicted “riots and mass starvation … and all the things you hear about climate change, because there’s too many people on the planet.” 

Peterson continued, “That just didn’t happen at all … it wasn’t just wrong, it was anti-true. It was absolutely wrong. What happened instead was that everyone got way richer and the [poorest] section of the population … got lifted out of poverty.”

Eric Metaxas has noted that such false predictions were built on Thomas Malthus’s “iron law of population,” an idea cited by Charles Darwin, which states that population increases must of necessity outstrip food production.

According to environmental scientist Erle C. Ellis, history shows that populations have always been sustained that were “well in excess of what a strictly Malthusian calculation would have predicted,” due to technology. Ellis maintains that “there is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity” due to existing technologies, and that there “really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity.”