More pets than children? A look at Taiwan’s superaged future by Julia Janicki

“More pets than children? A look at Taiwan’s superaged future” is a visual essay exploring the aging population of Taiwan, which is so extreme that in 2021 there were more pets than children under the age of 14.

We visualized Taiwan’s population pyramids over time, showing historical estimates from 1950 to 2023, and UN World Population Prospects’ median projections until 2100. In 1950, the average number of children a woman gave birth to over the course of her lifetime in Taiwan was 7. Taiwan became an aging society in 1993 and aged society in 2018, and by 2026 it’s projected to become a super-aged society.

We also wanted to investigate how Taiwan’s elderly population stack up against other countries. It follows a similar trend to some high-income nations in East Asia and Europe like South Korea, Japan, and Italy, where the proportion of people aged 65 or older make up more than a third of the total population. In contrast, Nigeria and many other lower / lower-middle-income countries, in particular in the African continent where populations are growing rapidly, have much younger populations. We decided to visualize the changing age distribution across various countries, and in order to compare the trend over time across countries, we attempted a 2D-3D visual form.