population by Brian Swichkow

Maternity wards are shuttering in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in China. Hundreds of thousands of properties in Germany have been leveled and the land turned into parks.

The world’s demographics are changing, pushing toward more deaths than births. Though some countries’ populations continue to grow, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else as women have gained more access to education and contraception. Demographers now predict that toward the middle of this century, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time. Above, a couple in Acciaroli, Italy.

A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow climate change and reduce burdens for women. But the data also points to changes that are hard to fathom: Fewer workers could upend the ways societies are organized and our ideas about family and nation.