46 million people, and the growth is almost over

Argentina is home to about 45.9 million people in 2026, the third-largest population in South America after Brazil and Colombia. It is still growing, but only just. The UN’s medium projection adds about 2.4 million people by 2050, reaching 48.3 million, and has the population starting to fall soon after¹.

Even that may be too high. The UN built its projection on about 507,000 births in 2024, but Argentina actually registered 413,135, nearly a fifth fewer¹⁴. So 48.3 million is best read as a ceiling, and the peak could come sooner and lower.

Births have nearly halved in a decade

For about two decades Argentine women had around 2.4 children on average. Then the number dropped off a cliff: to 2.1 in 2017, 1.4 in 2022³ and just 1.27 in 2025, according to INDEC, the national statistics institute². Registered births fell from about 777,000 a decade ago to 413,135 in 2024¹⁰, a drop of almost half.

A big part of that is fewer teenage pregnancies. They fell by about 65% over the past decade, and reporting on the decline credits part of it to a national programme to prevent unplanned teen pregnancy, launched in 2017 and wound down in 2024¹⁰.

One in six Argentines will be 65 or older by 2040

With fewer children being born, Argentina is ageing. People aged 65 and over made up 10.6% of the population in 2010 and 12.0% in 2022³, and INDEC projects 16.4% by 2040². That’s about one in six people, up from one in ten.

Each year now adds fewer children at the bottom of the age pyramid, so the people already alive make up a growing share. With fertility this low, 2040 is unlikely to be where the ageing stops.

The Gran Chaco, cleared for soy and beef

Argentina’s biggest environmental story is in the north. The Gran Chaco is a dry forest covering more than a million square kilometres across Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, one of the largest remaining dry forests on Earth. Over the past two decades more than 13 million hectares of it have been lost, an area larger than England¹¹.

The clearing is speeding up again in Argentina. The country lost 149,649 hectares of Chaco forest in 2024, up from 134,700 the year before⁵. Most of it makes way for farms and ranches: the Chaco now produces 16% of Argentina’s soybeans and 20% of its beef⁶, feeding both the country’s appetite for meat and its exports.

Argentina’s population is barely growing, yet the land it uses keeps expanding, because much of the extra soy and many of the cattle go to markets abroad. Here the global rate of deforestation tracks trade far more closely than headcount.

A big footprint on a country with land to spare

If everyone in the world lived like the average Argentine, humanity would need 1.87 Earths⁹. Carbon from fossil fuels is the largest slice, 0.81 Earths, the forest that would be needed to absorb the carbon dioxide from oil, gas and coal. Cropland adds 0.40 and grazing land 0.36, the land behind Argentina’s big soy and cattle sectors⁹.

But Argentina has plenty of land to draw on. Its ecosystems renew about 4.91 global hectares per person a year, while each person uses 2.81, so the country is an ecological creditor⁹. The catch is that the Chaco is part of that surplus. Clearing it for beef and soy boosts output today while shrinking the very reserve that keeps the account in the black.

Jaguars return to Iberá, and the grid gets cleaner

There is real good news, too. In the Iberá wetlands of the northeast, where jaguars had been wiped out, Fundación Rewilding Argentina reports that at least 50 now live in the wild, alongside reintroduced giant anteaters, Pampas deer and red-and-green macaws⁷. It doesn’t make up for the Chaco, but it shows lost wildlife can come back when land is protected.

Argentina’s electricity is getting cleaner as well. Wind and solar made 16% of it in 2025, and clean sources together made 42%⁸. That chips away at the carbon slice of the footprint, though not at the grazing and cropland behind the Chaco clearing.

Where Argentina is heading

On current trends, Argentina’s population is likely to peak below the UN’s 48.3 million and start shrinking sooner, perhaps well before 2050 if births keep falling at anything like recent rates. That is a rough expectation rather than a forecast; INDEC’s own projections only run to 2040.

A smaller, older population won’t on its own take pressure off the Chaco, though. As long as soy and beef exports keep growing, the forest’s future depends far more on what the world buys from Argentina than on how many Argentines there are.