voice-over: this is bbc news. we will have the headlines for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this programme. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. of all the potentially existential threats to life as we know it, from climate change to nuclear armageddon, here's one you may not have considered — a catastrophic collapse in the human birth rate. there's been a long—standing fear that a growing global population would outstrip our planet's ability to sustain it,

but now, data scientists and demographers, like my guest today, stephen shaw, say we're actually facing a disastrous spiral of de—population. why have birth rates declined dramatically and how much does it matter? stephen shaw, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. let's start with a basic fact. the world's population is still rising. at some point later this century, it's going to get to about 9.7 billion. and we can see the immense

strain that our planet is already under in terms of resources, in terms of fragile ecosystems. and yet you seem to be saying that we as a species need to focus on having more babies. why? well, just to be clear, the reason the world's population is still growing has got nothing to do with births. births peaked in the planet around ten years ago, at around 143 million. today, that's down to around 135. we're already past peak birth as a planet. so, why is, confusingly, this total population increasing? it's because, thankfully, people are living out their lives. people are not dying the way they would have done before — particularly in poorer, less developed parts of the world — 30, 40, 50 years ago. so we're an ageing planet. so we're really entering the final days, the final few decades of population growth, as older people simply live out their lives.

but... ok, so sticking with the data for a little while, are you saying that it is possible to define a point in the not—too—distant future when the world's population will start to decline and decline quite radically? the only thing that would stop that would be some medical discovery that enabled us to live an extra 20, 30, 40, 50 years. that would be the only way. but in terms of births increasing, there's no statistical evidence anywhere. even in africa, we're still seeing rapid birth decline, albeit from higher levels. birth rates are falling everywhere. but as i said at the very beginning, we can see the strains that the current level of global population is putting on our planet, on its resources, on ecosystems. we could factor in climate change and the degree to which it's man—made climate change as well. in light of all of that, is it not good news that birth rates are declining and that we will see a fall in the overall numbers of human beings on the planet? well, i took it as good news eight years ago when i saw this

data for the first time, because at that point i assumed there was no hope for the planet's environment because of population growth. it's only from looking at the data and realising, actually, the narrative we've been receiving, frankly, tells a very different story. and, you know, whether it's good news or not, my view is... well, let me ask you, who would we take away? i mean, who is it that we're going to say should have fewer children or should have no children? that's a deeply upsetting moral question, i think, for many individuals who simply want to have the number of children they want to have. well, nobody�*s suggesting, i think, in this debate that governments should intervene and be very specific about how many people...how many babies people should have. i mean, that's been tried in various countries, including china, but they've abandoned that by and large. so, again, just to be clear about the data, before we get to sort of ethical and moral questions, i think we've known for a long time that the reproductive rate which gives us a stable population is 2.1 children for every woman. right?

right. now, in many countries, it's falling way below that. you could look at south korea, japan, taiwan, where it's barely above one, and in some instances below one. what does that do to a society and to its population? just to be clear, below replacement level, countries now represent 75% of... 75% of people are living in countries already below that rate. below 2.1? below 2.1. even india, which surprises people. and when you look inside india, you have, i believe, 35 states — only five of those are above replacement level right now. so, the perception we have that this might be only affecting south korea orjapan or italy is long outdated. what does it mean? it means that over a certain time span, births will halve. people don't usually think of it this way. but for example, right now in south korea, with a birth rate of 0.7 children per woman, births are going to halve every 20 years.

so someone born today in south korea, by the time they get to college age, only half the number of kindergartens would be needed. 20 years later, ao—year—old korean will only need... ..will see a society with a quarter of the number of kindergartens. this is a shocking level of decline. and the overall population in south korea, but as you say, many other industrialised countries too, is going to halve, more than halve, by the year 2100. overall, for many nations, that's absolutely... unless people end up living longer. but we shouldn't be distracted by that. it's the working population that actually is the most important thing for economies, notjust from a point of view of production, but also the taxes take care of the older people. yeah. so it's a question of a massively shrinking workforce, massively shrunken tax revenues for governments to spend on things like welfare and pensions. i guess also a complete change of society in that it's dominated by elderly people.

there are very few, relatively speaking, young people, and young people are generally the people who come up with the new ideas, the fresh way of doing things. so, societies are going to be radically different. radically. and it's notjust the shrinking number of new people. when you invest in any new product or idea, a new business, you expect there to be customers there, and you expect those customers to remain there for decades. you've invested a lot of sweat and equity to make this happen. who would really be quite so interested in investing in something where the population is continually shrinking? so i can see general appetite for investments rapidly reversing compared to what we're seeing today. the question, of course, is, why? why is this happening in disparate societies and cultures, from europe to asia and beyond? you have released a documentary, birthgap, which alights on one particular phenomenon, and that is childlessness amongst young women. please explain.

yes. so when i started the documentary, it was part of a research programme that i took on to find out a connection between why birth rates were falling at the exact same time in places like japan and italy and germany and spain. no—one had answered that. it was being blamed on local issues. so, high youth unemployment in italy, work—life balance injapan, cost of childcare in some countries. and we still hear those voices today. those are all important, aren't they? they�* re all very important. but it would be very unusual if, at the same moment in time, disparate reasons caused the same trend. it would be like saying for some pandemic that's happening at the same time across the world, that actually it was all different viruses causing it. it was obvious to me there'd be a common connection. and what i started to do was, first of all, interview 230 people in their homes around the world, and childlessness kept coming out. and then when i looked at deep

data, deep granular data, remarkably, mothers in all these countries have been having the same number of children as 50 years ago. if you go back to 1970, in the us and the uk and japan, in italy, mothers today are having the same number of children, or even a little bit more in some cases, as 50 years ago. prior to that, family sizes were larger, but that was the �*50s, �*605 and prior. so, there was a transition. but motherhood has been incredibly stable across all of this time. when you look at childlessness, the rise in childlessness across, again, all of these countries was explosive. it wasn't a gradual trend of people... it's clear to me from the data, it wasn't people catching on to some new way of living over time. it didn't happen in urban areas and then moved to rural areas. it didn't kind of slowly take on, a cultural trend. it was overnight. and to give you an example, injapan, but also italy, uk too, birth rates went from... sorry, childlessness went from less than 5% to around 25% within three years. i mean, we've never seen anything like this

in demography. what's important, though, and it comes out in your film, is that you characterise the vast majority of these women who remain childless, as childless not from choice but from circumstance. yes. you suggest, and you interview a whole number of women in different parts of the world who are grief stricken and deeply saddened in their late 30s and 405, and full of regret that they didn't have children earlier. they had intended to, but then they delayed and deferred the decision. and your message seems to be, these women and their...the next generation of women need to reassess their decision making and they need to understand that having children is something you need to do earlier than is the received wisdom today. i would want to refine that

only to say that i don't think we can blame women for delaying this. i think we blame society because, as a society, men and women haven't had the awareness that actually... let me give you another statistic. half of women turning 30 without a child across all of these countries have less than a 50—50% chance of ever becoming a mother. and that's not predominantly because of biology. that is actually predominantly because of not having the right partner at the right time, or any partner, or going through a divorce or break—up. so, the reasons for this are complex, but yet the data is very clear. this does not support the idea that overnight, suddenly in 1973, that, you know, 30% of women overnight decided not to have children. see, a lot of women, particularly young women, i think have a problem with the fact that you, as a male data scientist, a demographer, have waded into this and developed some really strong opinions about what is happening to young women and why they are doing the things they are doing. i mean, you seem so sure that

most young women haven't chosen not to have children, when many young women, including my own daughter, would tell me, "you know what, dad? "i'm really not sure i want children because... "and here's a whole bunch of reasons. "society isn't equal. "if i have children, i will be expected to do most "of the work. "i will lose out on my career. "society doesn't offer me economic support in the way "that it should." a whole host of reasons why young women may choose to be — and again, the language is important — child—free rather than childless. i was hoping you weren't going to use that word. so, we'll come on to that in a second if we can because the term "free" in connection to children, i think, is wrong. why? we use "free" for universal things that societies don't like — disease free, stress free, mortgage free, debt free. all of those things are universal. it's a reference to a notion of liberty and freedom, isn't it? yes. but it's assumed that at a societal level that that's what would be beneficial

for everybody. but this is about each individual having a right to make their own decision, each individual woman. that point is correct. and to be clear, i call myself a pan—natalist. i will be an even bigger supporter of your daughter, or anyone who decides it's not right for them to be a mother or a father. we don't talk so much about men, unfortunately, we don't have much data. in fact, part one of your film, the birthgap, doesn't include any male voices at all. and surely, again, that is a point young women would make that the problem here is that they don't find young men ready to offer the kind of equal child—rearing relationship that so many young women from south korea, to taiwan, to japan, to italy, to spain, to the uk want. i actually do include men in the first documentary. but you're right, most of the people who opened up about their grief were women. these are the people it happened to be in the early days. by part three of my documentary, i did find a group of men in a support group who...

in one case, you know, opened his heart in a way i'd never heard from anybody, about how he'd got to his mid—sos as an academic without having settled down to have children. it's just that women express this more readily. see, what i find interesting in a country like south korea is that it's notjust about young women not having children, it's about young women choosing not to get married, which is a different point. and it brings us back to this perhaps not being so much about decisions about child rearing as about the differing nature of young women and young men. and there's a lot of social scientists now saying that young women in so many different societies around the world are naturally and instinctively showing signs of being progressives, of being liberal with a small l. and many young men in those same societies are showing signs of becoming more conservative, more in tune with traditional values and a traditional view of what women should do. there's one more piece of data

i think we need to put on the table, which comes from large—scale surveys in the uk and us and other countries too, which shows that somewhere around 92%, 93% of women in their fertile years either have or want children. so, we're talking of a small proportion of women who just never get the desire. and in my documentary, there are five women i interview later on, who, now in their 405, 505, have zero regrets about not having children. they never wanted them, they never had the desire and they�* re contented. so, i think it is a case that for those women who think they might want children, they absolutely do need to think about this earlier. now, in terms of... sorry. no, i'm sorry to interrupt you, but i'm looking here at a quote from alison gemmill, who's a professor of population, family and reproductive health in the us atjohns hopkins university. i don't know if you have worked alongside her, but she says she thinks it is most unlikely that women, young women in industrialised societies, will ever go back to routinely having kids in their 20s.

she says, "i just don't see that happening because people," and by this she really means women, young women "just want time to grow and develop." so, there is no going back. and i wouldn't want that. i have a daughter and two sons, and i would want them equally to have every opportunity in life. but here's the problem. unless we have... ..from the data, around 80% of women starting families in their 20s, no society can get back to replacement level. this is existential. we will never get to that point of ever getting back to that average. and that's because mothers today typically want around 2.3 children, 2.4. you can then have around 20% of childlessness which is actually more than, you know, the level that women would choose naturally. but yet there's this point, at age 30, very clearly in the data, that women only have a 50—50% chance from that moment. so, unless as a society we ask ourselves, what is it we need to do? if there's anything, because there might not be,

we might have to accept this. many societies have been asking themselves that question and governments have put forward various... ..and they're usually called pro—natalist policies. that is, different ways to persuade, with carrot rather than stick, persuade young people, but particularly young women, to have children and have them earlier and have more of them. and it doesn't work. and it hasn't worked. and that shouldn't surprise us, i think, because giving people money to have kids, i mean, really, when you think about it, why...why would that ever work? now, it may be a good thing to make life easier... it's notjust necessarily about plain old money, is it? it's much better childcare options forfamilies... yes. ..which really matters. also telling women that you can take perhaps a year out of the workplace and genuinely not lose out in terms of your career. and countries that do exactly that, like denmark, like finland, have incredibly low birth rates. so, those are good things and we should do them, but we shouldn't expect the birth rate to increase

because of it. no. so, you've identified the problem. so, you know, come on, what's your fix? so... well, to be really honest with you, it took me seven years to research and make the documentary, and until the point it was finished, i had really no hope. i thought i'd be on shows like this saying, "we need to prepare." what has changed is showing the documentary to young people, as young as 12 years old, in high schools injapan, to college students in the us and here in the uk. when young people see that they may end up living a life that leads them to not having the children they might want to have, you can see alarm bells going off, and you can see conversations starting between students in a way i don't think societies have enabled before. and if i do have hope, it's simply through the awareness amongst younger people because this will affect them socially and economically more than any other group. my hope lies there. do you worry that the work you have done and the conclusions you've drawn have chimed

with a very clearly identifiable ideological, let's call it populist, conservative, generally right—wing wave of opinion in many different societies? i'm just going to quote you one example of it in the united states. senatorjd vance, who's a republican on the right of the party, a trump supporter, he's warned in recent months of the dangers posed by the, quote, unquote, "childless left and its clear rejection "of the american family." and you could find quotes from viktor 0rban supporters in hungary and a whole bunch of other politicians using that kind of language. and your work is quoted by some of these people, and certainly your conclusions echoed by them. my concern is why other forms of government, other ideologies, are ignoring this issue. this affects everybody. this isn't affecting only

right—wing younger people. we're now looking at societies with 30—40% childlessness, the majority of which is what i call unplanned childlessness, left, centre and right. so, therefore, why is it that the left cannot address this issue? and, you know, i would say it was heartening to hear president macron a few weeks ago, for the first time within france, at least, stand up and say he's now worried about france's birth rates. i think many on the left would say that they care, too. they certainly care about, for example, offering better childcare support, offering women career progression, ensuring that child rearing doesn't affect them in a negative way. but they would say they don't want to draw it into a culture war. are you embracing a culture war? what worries me across potentially all of these ideologies, if we look at women, purely from their potential economic output, and if we're trying to get women back to work as fast as possible, if that's the reason for childcare, rather than it being in the best interests of the mother or of the child, i think that's concerning.

now, i would contend that, for example, things like the gender gap index, which we quote a lot, where we score women's presence, rightly so, in government and corporations in terms of income and health, we should have an extra column in that, which is cost. because if the cost is high levels of unplanned childlessness, people need to know about that. isn't there one element in this whole debate we haven't touched on yet, and that's migration? you know, as you say, in the industrialised world, we are going to see a dramatic fall off in population. there is a short to medium—term answer and that is to let more people in to join the workforce, certainly young people wanting to join the workforce, from those countries in the poorer parts of the world where they want a better future. well, i think you said that that's short term. i mean, there's no example of any country that has high levels of migration,

and there are many, having seen its birth rates rise accordingly. look at italy, look at germany. migration is not a long—term solution because what happens, you bring people in, and there may be good reasons to do that... i'm an immigrant myself, i've lived in the us and japan. if you bring in people, they will naturally get older and you will want to support them, so the number of older people in society will never reduce. so, therefore, you need more migrants and more migrants. and remember that birth rates are falling globally. in india even, right now, birth rates are below replacement level. so, the idea that this is a sustainable solution and then... but it may be a necessity, at least in the short—to—medium term. professor ibrahim abubakar, from the university college london, ucl, in london, says if your kinds of predictions on where demographics is going are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations, not an option. i mean, there are so many politicians in the western world who refuse to recognise that. but is he correct? well, it's not for me to tell individual countries whether high levels of

immigration are right or wrong. that's up to individual nations to decide. there will be economic impacts, as japan is finding right now, by having policies which generally are against high levels of migration. but we shouldn't imagine this is a solution. my actual worry is that those countries that are looking at migration as a solution are actually turning a blind eye to the suffering that's going on in their own communities, amongst young women in particular, who want to have children. we have to end injust a moment. i am just very mindful that there have been many other demographers and economists over the years who've made hugely sort of doomsday—style predictions about what's happening to the global population. paul ehrlich, back in the late �*60s, wrote a book, the population bomb, where he said, if we go beyond, i think, a couple of billion on planet earth, we are going to doom ourselves to long—term extinction, such would our resource demand be on the planet. aren't you in danger of being the other kind of doomsday predictor? you know, this idea that

a catastrophic population decline might threaten our species? it could actually be very good for our species and good for our planet, and our relationship with our planet. when paul ehrlich�*s book was brought out, we already knew that birth rates were slowing down. yet he, still today, as a 90—year—old, still tells the same story. from the point of view of falling birth rates, the crisis here is that we don't have a solution. no country in history has been known to ever get out of this situation before. the crisis for us, is not worrying about what level we should end up with in terms of population, it's how we stop birth—rate decline. stephen shaw, it's been fascinating. thank you forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you.

hello. thanks forjoining me. the weather this bank holiday weekend has been a little hit and miss. this is what we had earlier on during the course of saturday — storms breaking out quite widely across england, parts of wales, some across the irish sea as well, and outbreaks of rain in scotland. now, further showers are expected notjust on bank holiday monday but, indeed, the rest of the week. temperatures will be near normal — nothing spectacular — but at least by the end of the week, it does look as though these low pressures should finally pull away as we see high pressure building. but the winds will still come in from the north, so there's certainly no major warm—up in the forecast. ok, let's have a look at the forecast, then, for the short term. so, by the end of the night through the morning, we will have had some clearer weather in the south.

further north, always more cloud and some showers first thing. and these are the temperatures around 7am — typically double figures in most of our major towns and cities. so, clouds will be bubbling up through the morning, there'll be plenty of sunshine in most areas right from the word go but storms will also develop, particularly across northern and eastern parts of scotland. now, the showers will be very hit and miss. as far as the temperatures go, no real change compared to what we've had in the last few days, so typically mid or high teens — a little on the cool side. now, the thunderstorms may continue into monday evening across parts of northern and eastern scotland. elsewhere, the sky should turn clear before the next area of low pressure rolls in first thing on tuesday morning. and you can see outbreaks of rain crossing the country as the weather fronts sweep in. i think the air�*s going to be quite close. temperatures on tuesday, despite the cloud, still getting up to about 18 degrees in some spots and, actually, later in the day, we'll probably see sunshine developing — or at least a little bit. now, wednesday midweek, we're expecting showers to develop almost anywhere but more especially across eastern parts of the uk. one or two rumbles of thunder can be expected.

i think come the late afternoon, the skies should clear out towards the west and it should be a fine, sunny end to the day, for example, in cardiff, plymouth and along the south coast of england. so, here's the summary for the week ahead — plenty of shower clouds most days and those temperatures hovering near normal, perhaps a little below at times. that's it for me. bye bye.

live from london, this is bbc news. israel carries out further air strikes in the rafah area and the hamas—run health ministry said dozens of displaced people were killed. the uk's general election campaign continues. labour leader sir keir starmer is expected to make a keynote speech to voters later today. rescue teams are running against time in papua new guinea, where a major landslide swept away a village. the un says about 670 people could have been killed. the raf pilot who was killed in a spitfire crash in lincolnshire has been named as squadron leader mark long.