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China’s population is shrinking at a pace not seen in decades — a stark reversal for a country long defined by its sheer demographic scale.After losing its crown as the world’s most populous nation to India in 2023, official figures show that in 2025 China recorded its steepest annual drop in population since the Great Famine of 1960 under Mao Zedong, as falling birthrates and an ageing society converge — despite the end of its one-child policy.The shift raises pressing questions about how much scope Beijing has to alter the trajectory that has far-reaching economic consequences. What’s happening to China’s population?A drop in the number of births and an increase in deaths left mainland China with 3.39mn fewer people in 2025 than a year earlier, according to data from the National Statistics Bureau.China recorded 7.93mn births in 2025, the lowest level since at least the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Births have fallen every year since 2016, aside from a brief uptick in 2024.Despite the end to China’s one-child policy a decade ago, a longstanding preference for sons led some Chinese families to abort female fetuses, skewing the sex ratio at birth in earlier decades. Although that ratio has stabilised at around 104 boys per 100 girls in recent years, there is still a shortage of women of child-bearing age today.China’s fertility rate, or the average number of lifetime births per woman, fell to 1.3 in 2020, far below the 2.1 needed to keep the population stable, excluding migration. Outward migration by Chinese citizens appears to have increased in recent years, further weighing on population growth.The country’s demographic problem is also visible in the workforce. The working-age population — those aged between 16 to 59 — has been contracting for years and in 2025 fell to about 60.6% of the total population, down from more than 70% a decade earlier. Projections suggest that 30% of the population will be 60 or older by 2034. What’s the impact?A shrinking population could erode China’s long-term growth potential and diminish the likelihood that its economy will overtake the US in size — especially as the US population is expected to continue growing.If China’s overall population — and working-age cohort — keeps declining, fewer people are likely to be employed, which could push up labour costs and raise the price of manufactured goods.Raising the retirement age could ease some of that pressure. For more than four decades, China kept the retirement age at 60 for men and 55 for female white-collar workers, even as life-expectancy rose. In 2024, Beijing adopted a plan to gradually delay retirement by as much as five years over a 15-year period — a move that promptly triggered public discontent.Fewer people starting families would also weigh on long-term housing demand, with potential knock-on effects for construction activity and China’s iron ore industry. At the same time, a shrinking workforce would make it harder for the government to finance its underfunded national pension system, as fewer workers pay into the system while the number of retirees continues to rise.There could also be ripple effects beyond China. A smaller cohort of young people would likely reduce the number of Chinese students studying in the US, Australia and other countries, with implications for universities and local economies that depend on them. What’s being done about the birthrate?In 2016, China’s top decision-making body, the Communist Party’s Politburo, ended the one-child policy to allow couples to have two children. In 2021, the rules were revised again to permit up to three children.The 2016 rule that allowed couples to have two kids worked at first: The number of newborns that year rose to 17.9mn, more than 1mn higher than in 2015. But births have fallen each year after that, except for in 2024.China began rolling out childcare subsidies last year. Couples are offered about $500 a year for each child born on or after January 1, 2025, until they reach the age of three. Some regions have also extended parental leave and offered tax rebates for parents, though such incentives are widely seen as too modest to meaningfully boost birthrates. Where did the one-child policy come from?After the creation of the People’s Republic and the end of the civil war, the government trained tens of thousands of “barefoot doctors” to bring healthcare to poor and rural areas. The mortality rate plummeted and the population growth rate rose from 16 per thousand in 1949 to 25 per thousand just five years later.This prompted the first attempts to encourage family planning in 1953. Even so, China’s population expanded to more than 800mn in the late 1960s. By the 1970s, China was grappling with food and housing shortages. In 1979, leader Deng Xiaoping decided to limit most couples to a single child, with exceptions for rural farmers, ethnic minorities and certain circumstances, such as when a first child was disabled.Enforcement was often coercive. According to Human Rights Watch, women were forced to have abortions. Children born outside the state plan were denied a hukou — a government registration required to access public services and other benefits. How else is China trying to fix the problem?Beijing it trying to lower the financial and time costs of raising children, as many couples say they can only afford to have one child — if any. The government has taken steps to shut down the for-profit, after-school tutoring industry to rein in education costs and has issued guidelines aimed at reducing abortions while providing more support for women raising children.Still, if the experience of developed nations such as Japan or South Korea is any guide, it’s extremely difficult — if not impossible — to radically raise birthrates, even with subsidies, free childcare and generous parental leave. 

Briseida MEMA As Albania recovers from a summer of devastating wildfires, locals and experts are eyeing a long road back to save its shrinking forests from intensifying disasters.In some of the worst blazes to ever hit Albania, nearly 60,000 hectares (nearly 150,000 acres) -- or around two percent of Albania's landmass -- burned when blazes swept across parts of southern Europe earlier this year, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System.For the small, developing nation, the toll was hefty -- killing one person, destroying dozens of homes, and reducing vital forests to ash."Forests are very important, and they need time to regenerate," Armand Kisha told AFP, standing in the ruins of his carpentry workshop which was destroyed when fires ripped through the central Gramsh region in August.As he tries to rebuild after also losing his home and livestock, Kisha mourns the pine forest that had surrounded him since his childhood."We won't see green pines here like before. It's a catastrophe," he said.Even as the smell of charcoal lingers, the local fire department is warning of the need to rapidly restore the forest, ahead of the wet winter months."This natural disaster could lead to deadly floods," Ilir Llapushi, head of the Gramsh firefighting unit, said.For years, scientists have warned that the risk of damaging floods is dramatically increased after intense wildfires, as rain struggles to permeate the burnt-out forest floor and flows encounter little resistance from the remaining vegetation."We must act quickly to regenerate the forest," Llapushi said.'Compound and cascade'A 2024 World Bank report noted that Albania is one of the most at-risk European nations to climate disasters.Nearly all its regions had been affected by floods, wildfires, landslides or earthquakes in the last two decades, the report said.A boom in informal settlements across most of the Balkans during the 1990s, often built on flood-prone land, means disasters could "compound and cascade" as their frequency increases, the report stated.As Albania faces more extreme weather driven by climate change, it is essential to reform its forest management, said Abdulla Diku, a forestry engineer and researcher based in Tirana.Deforestation, reduced river flows from hydroelectric dams, and an exodus of people from rural areas were intensifying the country's wildfires and putting forests at greater risk, Diku said."The overall situation is such that we now have at least 30 percent less forest than we did 20 or 25 years ago."Earlier this month, Prime Minister Edi Rama announced an action plan to revive forests.His government banned construction on land affected by the blazes, and pledged harsher penalties for arsonists.Ten people were arrested in August, accused of lighting fires. They have since been released.But Diku said that Albania was a laggard in forest restoration projects, investing the lowest amount in Europe.'Fire-filled bombs'As replanting efforts continue, locals and experts are pushing to change the type of trees in their forests.When the flames swept through the Gramsh region, they devoured the pines, whose cones turned into "fire-filled bombs," said Kujtim Palloci, a resident of the hard-hit village of Skenderbegas.Efforts to make the forests more disaster resilient are underway, according to environmental non-government organisation PPNEA.Biologist Melitjan Nezaj said the NGO was working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature on implementing a restoration plan that includes mixing in tree types that better resist "extreme conditions like fires, floods, and landslides".In Gramsh, the municipality is exploring options to alternate pines with other trees, especially deciduous species.But for Palloci, the changes were too late to save his home. In less than 30 minutes, his house was reduced to ashes, his goats burned alive, and his family memories -- photos of his children -- consumed by fire."This house was all we had. This house is my love, my life, my family, my hard work. This house really is everything to me."

Like his father, Iraqi buffalo herder Watheq Abbas grazes his animals in Iraq's southern wetlands, but with persistent drought shrinking marshland where they feed and decimating the herd, his millennia-old way of life is threatened."There's no more water, the marshes are dead," said 27-year-old Abbas, who has led his buffaloes to pasture in the marshland for the past 15 years."In the past, the drought would last one or two years, the water would return and the marshes would come back to life. Now we've gone without water for five years," the buffalo herder said.This year has been one of the driest since 1933, authorities have said, with summer temperatures topping 50C across Iraq, which is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.The Unesco-listed swamplands in the country's south — where tradition has it that the Garden of Eden was located have sustained civilisations dating back to ancient Mesopotamia.But the unrelenting dry spell has reduced the mythical waterways to a barren land of cracked earth, stripped of the slender reeds that once dominated the landscape.Abbas and tens of thousands of Iraqis like him who rely on the marshes — livestock herders, hunters and fishermen — have watched helplessly as their source of livelihood evaporated.At the Chibayish marshes, scarce water still fills some channels, which authorities have deepened so that animals like Abbas's 25 buffaloes could cool off.For years, he and his herd have been on the move, heading wherever there was still water, in Chibayish or in the neighbouring province of Missan.'BATTLE FOR WATER' But it has become an increasingly challenging feat. Last year, seven of his animals died.Just recently Abbas lost another of his buffaloes which drank stagnant, brackish water that he said had "poisoned it".The drought has been brought about by declining rainfall and soaring temperatures that increase evaporation.But upstream dams built in Turkiye and in Iran have dramatically reduced the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq and exacerbated the effects of climate change.With the Iraqi government forced to ration water supply to ensure the country's 46mn people have enough to drink and to meet agricultural needs, the marshes appear to be at the bottom of their priorities."There's a battle for water" in Iraq, said environmental activist Jassim al-Assadi, from the Nature Iraq NGO.He was among a group of activists and engineers who two decades ago sought to re-flood 5,600 square kilometres of marshland.They were part of the areas that Saddam Hussein's government had drained in the 1990s to chase out militants sheltering there.Today, only 800 square kilometres of the marshes are submerged, Assadi said, with many residents leaving the dried-up region.The ecosystem of the marshes is also suffering irreversible damage, with turtles, otters and migratory birds among the victims."We used to have 48 species of fish but now only four remain, and from 140 species of wild birds we are now down to 22," said veterinarian Wissam al-Assadi.'WE HAVE NOTHING ELSE' In collaboration with a French agriculture and veterinarian NGO, he helps treat the buffaloes, which in summer typically need TO be in the water for 14 hours a day and drink dozens of litres to avoid heat exhaustion.But the reduced water flow means "the water does not renew, and salinity and pollution levels increase," the veterinarian explained."Animals that used to weigh 600 kilos are now 400 or 300 kilos, their immune systems weaken and diseases multiply," he added.The Mesopotamian water buffaloes now produce one-third of their usual output of milk, which is used to make cheese and geymar, a thick clotted cream that is a popular breakfast food in Iraq.A UN report issued in July warned that "without urgent conservation measures", the buffalo population was "at risk of extinction".Citing water scarcity as the cause, it said their numbers in the marshes have gone from 309,000 in 1974 to just 40,000 in 2000.Towayeh Faraj, 50, who has lived in the hamlet of Hassja in Chibayish for the past two years, said he has been wandering the marshes for three decades to find water for his buffaloes."If the livestock is alive, so are we," he said."We have nothing else: no salary, no jobs, no state support." He has 30 animals — down from the 120 he began his career with, selling many off one-by-one to buy fodder for the remaining herd.Faraj inherited the profession from his father, but the family tradition might end with him. His eldest of 16 children works for a Chinese oil company, and another is a minibus driver.