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Human populations are set to decline in countries from Asia to Europe – and an unusual form of rewilding is taking placeFor many years it seemed that overpopulation was the looming crisis of our age. Back in 1968, the Stanford biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich infamously predicted that millions would soon starve to death in their bestselling, doom-saying book The Population Bomb; since then,...

€180m-a-year scheme launched in response to projections of ageing and shrinking populationAs the new year dawned, Maria Pardalakis was in the throes of labour. The clock had barely struck midnight when she delivered a healthy boy in a clinic on Crete.With her son’s birth – the first in Greece this year – Pardalakis and her husband, Christos, became the first people eligible for a...

A small but growing number of investors are hoping to reverse the slow-motion decline of rural areasThe decade has not been kind to Manteigas. Nestled in the mountains in the Portuguese interior, this pretty town has suffered a familiar kind of slow-motion decline.“Once the factories started closing, then the schools closed, the shops closed, even the chapel closed,” says Maria José Santos Salvado, a...