Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to another geography lesson.

I'm Mr. Hutchinson, and I can't wait to get started with another lesson exploring population.

We've been looking at population at a global level, a local level, how populations change, what factors affect population, and in today's lesson, we're going to be focusing on ageing populations, populations at different levels, where there are a greater proportion of older people, and some of the reasons that that can happen, some of the benefits that that might bring, and also some of the challenges that it presents, and I can't wait to get started.

So, our lesson's going to look something like this.

To begin with, we're going to look at the ageing world, about how across the whole world we have ageing populations.

Then we'll look at some of the challenges that an older population can bring, and we're going to dig into one particular place, Japan, and look at Japan's ageing population, because Japan's a little bit ahead of some other nations in terms of their population ageing at a greater rate, and then there'll be a chance for you to do your end-of-lesson quiz to lock everything in.

If you haven't already, make sure that you pause the video, and do your pre-knowledge quiz.

It's a good chance just to recap those key facts, keep revisiting them, keep them fresh so that all of this knowledge that you're learning connects together in a way that's nice and easy for you, and you can apply it in agile and flexible ways.

Make sure that you've got a nice, quiet place, so you can get through this whole lesson without being disturbed or distracted, and you'll need a pen or a pencil, and you'll also need something to write on, like a notebook, or a piece of paper.

Let's get started.

So, first of all, an ageing world, okay, so we're going to look at how populations age.

Now, you'll see that ageing there is spelt age, and then the suffix I-N-G.

In this next infographic I'll show you, it's spelt differently.

It's spelt without the E.

Can you see the difference there? That's just because there are two ways to spell this in English.

In England, commonly, in the United Kingdom, it's spelled A-G-E, like this, A-G-E-I-N-G, but this infographic is from the United States, so they choose a different spelling, so that's okay.

So, have a look at this infographic here.

Now, this infographic, I want you to pause the video, and look closely, because the different colours show you the percentage of the population of those places where more than the population, where the population are over 65.

So if, for example, it is a light yellow, like here, then it means that less than 7% of the population are aged over 65.

If it is one of these sort of turquoisey colours, this sort of turquoise colour here, well, that matches up with here, this, so it's 14 to 21%, or 14 to 20.

9% of the population, so somewhere between one in five and one in six of the population will be aged over 65.

So, have a look at this map of the world now.

Look at the different locations that you know.

Look at the different countries, and continents, and regions, and areas that you know, and see what percentage of the populations of those places are aged over 65.

This data's from 2015.

Pause the video, and take a good close look at that now.

Excellent, so at the bottom here, it tells us that across the whole world in 2015, 8.

5% of the population was aged over 65, and that varies from country to country and from region to region, so have a look at the different continents.

So, let's just recap those.

What's this continent here called? Say it out loud, North America, good.

This continent here is called, say it out loud, South America, good.

I know it feels a bit weird, but saying it out loud will help.

This continent here is called Africa, good.

This continent here is called Europe, good.

This continent here is called Asia, good, and this continent here is called Australia, very good.

Sometimes it's known as Australasia, or Oceania.

There are different names for it, but we're going to use the word Australia, the continent Australia, which can be used as a country, but also as a continent for including New Zealand, and some of the other Pacific Islands nearby.

So, we have our different continents.

The question is, which of these continents has the most youthful population, the youngest population, so not many people aged over 65? Going to need to do a bit of analysis, so take your time.

Look at the whole continent.

Well done if you said Africa.

So, we can see across Africa here, it's almost all less than 7%.

One or two nations above 7%, but almost all below 7% aged over 65, whereas in Europe, already, a large proportion of the population, between seven and 21%, are already aged over 65 years old.

Another question for you, looking at this map, which countries have over 28% of the population aged 65? So, here a dark purple means that over 28% of the population, more than 28%, almost 1/3, more than 28% of the population are aged over 65 years old.

Which countries or regions can you see that have that population over 28% aged over 65? Can you see any? I'm looking really closely.

In 2015, I don't think that there are any countries with over 28% aged over 65, that's interesting.

So, now let's have a look at a comparison of what experts, what geographers predict the numbers will be in 2050.

So, here's the map we were just looking at, 2015, with all the numbers, and if we look at the projection, so a projection is thinking about what it's going to be like in the future using lots of different data, so using graphs, and using the data that we have available to make projections, to make predictions.

Geographers can predict that the number of people aged over 65 will increase hugely.

In fact, it will almost double.

So, by 2050, they think 16.

7% of the world's population will be above the age of 65.

So, have a look, have a look at the different populations, at the different areas, at the different regions, and start to make a little bit of a comparison.

You can do as many comparisons as you like of different areas, different localities, and that's different regions, and that's what great geographers do, they take a close look at the different comparisons.

What do you notice about the differences in population in terms of 2015 and 2050? Pause the video, and write down any differences that you notice.

Okay, excellent work.

Hopefully you've already started to notice that across the world, right across the world, the populations are increasing.

So, they tend to move up in terms of the proportion of people aged over 65, so the number of people aged over 65 compared to the rest of the population is moving up across the population.

So, let's zoom into 2050.

We looked at 2015 already, now let's zoom into the predictions for 2050.

Now can you name any countries which are predicted to have over 28% of the population aged 65 or over? So, it was none in 2015, but now take a look, and see if you can notice any countries in which over 28% will be aged over 65.

This is testing your country knowledge as well, but you'll notice that many of the countries in Central Europe, as well as Spain, and Portugal over here, and Japan over here have populations, predicted populations, of more than 28% aged over 65.

Okay, so there are some benefits to having people, having an older population.

There are many people that argue that the population of the world is too large at the moment, and so having an older population, so fewer people being born, and more people living longer will reduce the population of the world, and that'll be good for the environment, because people think, many people think that there are too many people living on the world and so we need to slowly start to reduce the number of people being born into the world to reduce the numbers of the population.

We've seen in previous lessons how the population has been rising quite dramatically over the last 200 years or so.

There are other things.

So, if there are fewer people working in the workforce, because people are retiring as they get older, and there are fewer people coming into the workforce, then wages will go up.

People will earn more money, 'cause there's less competition.

If there's fewer people trying to get the jobs that you're trying to get, then you can get more money for it, so that's another benefit.

It might also be that there's less pollution, as there's less people on, as there's fewer people on the roads, and maybe there's more space around, because places are less crowded, especially if the older population go out and about less.

So, there are benefits to an ageing population.

We're going to focus on some of the challenges though.

We're going to focus on the challenges, because these are the things that governments, especially, but everybody needs to think about.

How do we solve these challenges? How do we make sure that we prevent any difficulties with what looks like is going to happen? So, first of all, let's look at what some of these challenges can be.

Read through these different bullet points.

Pause the video, and read through these different bullet points to see if you can notice some of those challenges.

So, these are just some of them, some of the challenges that an ageing population might present, not necessarily, but it might present to a country, or a region, or even the whole world.

So, for example, if elderly people live on their own, then they might get lonely.

They might be more lonely if they're living on their own, if there's more people that are living on their own, and they might get a bit lonely.

They might be more likely to have physical difficulties, physical disabilities, perhaps, or mobility difficulties, in terms of getting around.

Older people are more likely to be affected by different kinds of diseases, and have healthcare difficulties.

Older people are less likely to be working.

They're more likely to have already retired, and so they won't be working.

That means that they're not paying taxes.

They're not paying any money towards the government.

They've worked for their life, or they may have worked for their life, and paid taxes into the system, into the government, but once they've retired, once they're not working anymore, no more taxes are paid.

However, when countries spend money on welfare, on looking after people, elderly populations, lots of the welfare money goes to looking after elderly people, which is, of course, incredibly important to do, looking after elderly people, people that looked after us when we were younger, and now us looking after them, the country looking after them, means that there's money that needs to be spent from the government in terms of things like pensions, or also things like healthcare, and social care, and looking after them.

So, these are some of the challenges that an ageing population can present.

Have a go at listing down the different sorts of challenges, now that we've explored them together, the ageing populations presents to countries across the world, and there are some keywords at the bottom there about health, and loneliness, and welfare, and employment that you might like to include in your answer, so stop the video, and write your best answer, maybe a paragraph, and then I'll show you my version so that you can compare.

Super, welcome back.

So, hopefully you've got a really nice piece of writing there where you've put all of those different challenges together.

We know that there are benefits to having an ageing population as well.

We're just focusing on the challenges for now.

Here's my answer.

Here's what I put.

Across the world, populations are ageing, which can create different challenges for governments and communities.

An ageing population means that fewer people will be of working age.

Additionally, more people will require pension payments and healthcare.

Lastly, elderly people are more likely to live alone, and may become more lonely if they're isolated.

So, these just some of the challenges that we want to help solve.

Japan has an ageing population, okay, and Japan has had an ageing population for a number of years.

In fact, I'll show you exactly what Japan's population has looked like over the last few years.

We're going to go right back to 1955.

So, here's a population pyramid, and we've looked at these before.

This population pyramid shows how many people are aged zero to four.

The ages along the side, going right up to age 100, and the percentage here in terms of what percentage of people are in that age group.

So, if the bars at the bottom are larger, then it means a great proportion, a greater percentage are younger.

Look at what's happened to Japan's population over the last 70 years, and what it's projected to look like over the next 30 or 40 years.

So, here you can see in 1950, this is Japan in 1950.

It's a youthful population.

There's more younger people than older people, and this is aged 65.

There's not that many, 1% of people are over 65, plus some of these, so only a few percent.

Now let's go forward in time, and you can see that fewer people are being born, but that larger population from 1955 is growing up, and moving up through the population pyramid, and people are living longer as well, so they're going up towards age 100, and much more people are living much longer.

Now, this is projected, so it's not what it's like now.

It's in 2050.

This is what people, this is what scientists, and geographers think the population will look like in 2050 in Japan.

So, not many people who are young and working-age, but a large number of people aged over 65.

So, this is Japan's ageing population, and this is one of the challenges that Japan is facing.

So, a quick multiple-choice quiz question for you here to see if you can analyse and explain Japan's population.

Which of these answers best describes Japan's population? Has it been declining in number, and becoming younger overall? So, has it been declining, the overall population been getting smaller and younger overall? Has it been rising in number? Has the overall population of Japan been getting larger, but becoming older overall? Has it been rising in number and becoming younger, or has it been declining in number and becoming older? So, lots of different things there, lots of older and younger, and smaller and larger, so take your time, read through each one carefully, and put your finger, ooh, put your finger on the one that you think is the correct answer.

Well done if your finger is on D.

So, overall, since 2010, Japan's population has been declining in number, but becoming older overall, so let's go back and have a look.

Here we can see Japan's population growing.

It's going up in number through the 1970s and the 1980s, and it's up to 126 million, 127 million until we get to 2010, when it's at 128 million, the population of Japan.

That's larger than the population of the UK, but the population here after 2010 starts to decline, as fewer people are being born.

Fewer people are being born, which means that the population, more people are dying than are being born, so the population is naturally decreasing, and so by 2020 it's expected to have dropped, and it's expected to continue to drop, though it's getting older overall, and so experts predict that by 2050, the population will be around 105 million.

So, in 2017, for the second year in a row, Japan saw fewer than 1 million babies being born.

The number of deaths, the number of deaths, though, had increased, so there's a natural decrease.

We talked about before with population of natural increases and natural decreases in population.

This means that because there was falling birth rates, and rising death rates, that meant that there's a natural decrease in population.

So, there are lots of different challenges that this creates for Japan.

Here are a few of them.

The government needs to spend more money on healthcare to support that elderly population.

There are fewer people working and paying taxes to be able to pay for that healthcare, and with fewer young people, the workforce, the number of people who are working, is shrinking, it's getting smaller, and so there are fewer people to look after the elderly.

There are fewer people who are doing the job to look after the elderly people.

So, what do we do? What could be, we've got some challenges here, we've got some difficulties.

Let's problem-solve.

What could be some of the ways, imagine if you were perhaps in the Japanese government, what could be some of the ways that you could hope to address these challenges? What measures could you put in place that might help to solve of these difficulties? Pause the video, and jot down what your measures would be, how you would try and solve these problems and difficulties.

Awesome work, I wonder what your interesting ideas are.

I'm sure you've got some really fresh ideas, so well done.

Here are some of the things that Japan has done.

Here are some of the measures that Japan has put in place.

First thing is they've made it easier for people to have children, so there are things like financial incentives, where you can get more money, you pay less tax, if you are having more children to encourage people to have children.

They make childcare easier so that people, if they're working, for example, and they have more children, somebody can look after their children more easily, so the Japanese government has made it easier to have children.

They're also encouraging more people to enter the workforce.

Remember they said there wasn't enough people going into the workforce.

If there were people who previously weren't working, then they make it, they're trying to encourage those people to take up jobs and enter the workforce.

They're also using technology to increase productivity, so if it's just one person doing a job, and there's a piece of technology that can make it feel like five people are doing the job, 'cause they're much quicker, then that's a way of solving the workforce problem, and so they're using technology to help with that as well.

They're improving education, so a bit more of a longer-term aim, but improving the education of children means that when children get to 16, or 18, or 21, when they're ready to enter the workforce, they're going to have more people ready to enter the workforce, and ready to get great jobs, because they've got really good education.

Another measure here can be to raise the pension age, so the pension age is different in different countries, and this is the age when people are allowed to retire so they can stop working.

They might've been working for 40 or 50 years, and then they stop working, and then they'll receive a pension, so they'll receive a little bit of money from the government each week, or each month for them to live on.

Now, if that pension age is raised, then it means that people have to work for a little bit longer, and it can save the government money, because they have to pay less.

They have to pay fewer people the pension.

They can also say, "If you've already got a lot of money, if you're really, really wealthy, then we won't give you the pension.

You don't need it, and so we won't give you that money." And one of the last things is that they can, the government can promote good health in old age.

So, if people are looking after themselves more, staying fit and healthy, they're less likely to get physical disabilities, or difficulties.

They're less likely to need health services and healthcare, which, again, can mean that some of those challenges are met.

So, let's look a few of those.

Let's look at a few of those in a little bit more detail.

Let's dig in, and get a look a little bit closer.

So, have a go at evaluating these.

So, evaluating is a really important geographical skill of thinking about what the strengths and what the weaknesses are of different kinds of measures around human geography, and especially around things like population.

So, what are the strengths and what are the weaknesses? That's what evaluating means, okay, so that's what we're going to have a go at, and that will help you to think, will these things be effective? I'm going to show you, 'cause this is a quite difficult skill, so I'm going to model for you how we will do this, but this is what we're going to do for our task.

We're going to try and evaluate some of these measures.

So, let's take one of the measures, making it easier to have children.

We talked about the different financial incentives there.

The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to explain how that will help, then I'm going to explain what a strength of that could be, how it could be beneficial, how it could help, and then I'll explain a weakness, because there are normally, there's normally an upside and a downside.

So, here's what my answer would look like.

First of all, describing what it is in pink, in the first sentence there.

One measure used by Japan is incentivizing.

That means making it attractive, making people want to do it, incentivizing having more children by making childcare cheaper and easier.

So, I've explained what that is.

Now I'm going to say why that's a strength, why it would help.

This would mean that the birth rate increases, and in time, the workforce would grow.

If birth rate's increasing, there's more children, more people growing up to go into the workforce.

What's a weakness though? However, this is a long-term strategy, as Japan would need to wait at least 18 years for the children to grow up and be working-age, so although it could be a measure that does increase the workforce, they would have to wait quite a long time for that workforce to grow up and be ready to work.

So, you can see that I thought about what a strength there could be, and I thought about what a weakness could be, and that's what you need to do to evaluate now.

So, I know that you can do it.

This is hard, but I know that you're really smart, and you can do it.

Pick one of the measures, or you can pick all the measures, and evaluate these different measures from Japan.

Amazing work, that's a really tricky task, but it's a really important geographical skill, so well done for practising it, and there are strengths and weaknesses of all of these different measures, and it's important to acknowledge that raising the pension age is quite controversial.

People, will say, "Well, hold on a second.

This was like a promise that I was given.

If I worked for this amount of time, I'll be able to retire at this age, and then I would get my pension.

If you're changing the deal, that's not fair, 'cause I planned to retire at that age." Increasing productivity through technology sounds like a really great idea, but it can be more difficult.

Whether the technology is reliable, it could be expensive to put in place to begin with, and it could even end up putting people out of work, so there are strengths and weaknesses of all of these, and it's really interesting to debate the strengths and weaknesses, and how effective they would be, and there are other measures that are not included on here that Japan hasn't considered, but other countries might.

So, for example, encouraging migration, encouraging immigration into the country can increase the workforce, can mean that there's more working people able to work and to pay taxes, and that can be another measure, so there's other measures not included in here as well.

However, we have got a good sense of some of the challenges that an ageing population presents, and some of the ways that Japan has thought about meeting them, and some of the ways that other countries, because we've seen that across the world the population is ageing, might be looking at to think maybe that's the way that we'll try to solve these, some of these difficulties as well, and you already know about some of those, so well done.

I'll see you for our next lesson on population.

Thanks for working so hard, and I'll see you next time.