The Black Death – the pandemic of bubonic plague which swept Europe and Asia for about five years in the mid-1300s – is widely believed to have reduced the global population by one-third.
But almost 700 years after this infamous pandemic became the last worldwide phenomenon to reduce global population levels by such a huge amount, a new report has warned of the “staggering social change” posed by plummeting fertility rates which could also see the number of humans on our planet, currently standing at more than eight billion, fall within decades.
