Watch the world stop growing
150 years, one map: every country lights up the year its population peaks. Red spreads from Europe and East Asia across the planet until, around 2084, the world itself tops out.
What you are watching is the slow end of the fastest growth spurt in human history. The animation begins in 1950 with almost every country growing. The first flickers of red appear in Europe decades ago, then spread through Eastern Europe in the 1990s, reach Japan in 2010, and hit their biggest milestone yet when China peaks in 2021. By the time India tops out around 2062, most of the planet is already past its maximum. The countries still growing in 2100, shown in bright green at the end, cluster in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East and Central Asia, joined by a few immigration-driven exceptions like the United States, Canada and Australia.
The static version of this map, with every country’s exact peak year on hover, lives at the population peak map. The why behind the animation is covered in our article When will world population peak? All figures are the UN World Population Prospects 2024 medium-variant projection; see the methodology for how we process it.