About 622 million people, and still growing

North America, the full continent from the Arctic to the Caribbean, is home to about 623.7 million people in 2026. The UN expects that to keep climbing to roughly 679 million by 2050¹.

That growth increasingly comes from somewhere other than births. Both of the continent’s two largest, wealthiest countries now depend on immigration to grow at all.

Growing on immigration, not births

Canada’s population grew by nearly 1.3 million people between January 2023 and January 2024, and almost all of it, 97.6%, came from international migration rather than births and deaths².

The United States is leaning on the same lever, just at a much larger scale: net international migration made up 84% of its population growth over the same period, the fastest annual growth the country had logged since 2001³.

Neither country can blame babies for this. Canada’s fertility rate has fallen to around 1.25 children per woman, among the lowest ever recorded there⁴, and both nations now sit well below the 2.1 needed to hold a population steady without migration.

That matters beyond their own borders. The US and Canada together hold well over half of North America’s population, so a shift this large in how they grow tends to set the tone for the continent’s own trajectory, even if it hasn’t caught on everywhere yet. Mexico and Central America, still younger and still gaining people the older way, through births, are the reason it hasn’t.

One country, more than half the continent

The United States alone outweighs Canada, Mexico, and every Central American and Caribbean country combined:

Mexico is next at around 133 million, then Canada at around 40.5 million, with the rest of Central America and the Caribbean adding roughly 99 million more between them¹. It’s a similar concentration to South America, where Brazil alone holds close to half the continent’s people. Two very differently shaped continents, both effectively defined by one country.

Water and carbon, held in trust

The Great Lakes, sitting on the US-Canada border, are North America’s biggest environmental story. Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario together hold about 21% of the world’s surface freshwater, more than any other lake system on Earth, and their basin is home to over 30 million people: roughly 10% of the US population and more than 30% of Canada’s⁵.

Further north, Canada’s boreal forest holds a different kind of reserve. It’s the largest intact forest left on Earth, and its soil, peatlands, and permafrost lock away about 12% of the world’s land-based carbon, roughly 36 years of current global fossil-fuel emissions held underground⁶. That’s the paradox worth holding onto before the footprint numbers below: this is a continent that holds an outsized share of the planet’s freshwater and carbon storage, and still manages to be its biggest per-person consumer.

What 622 million people cost the planet

If everyone in the world lived like the average North American, humanity would need 4.75 Earths to keep up, the highest of any continent and close to three times the world’s own current footprint of 1.70 Earths⁹.

Carbon drives most of it: about 62% of the continent’s per-person footprint, well ahead of cropland and forest products combined⁹. The average American alone produces 14.2 tonnes of CO2 a year⁷, and the reasons are structural: car-dependent cities, large single-family homes, and an economy still built substantially on fossil fuels.

There’s a real crack in that story, though. US coal-fired electricity generation is forecast to fall 18% between 2023 and 2025, while solar output grows 75% and wind grows 11% over the same two years, and renewables passed coal in total US generation for the first time back in 2022⁸.

Unlike South America or Brazil, North America’s own land can’t keep up with what its population uses domestically: its biocapacity per person is smaller than its footprint, making the continent a net ecological debtor rather than a creditor⁹. The Great Lakes and the boreal forest above are the deposits. The rest of the continent has been spending faster than it saves, which is a fair way to describe a place that holds a fifth of the world’s freshwater and still needs almost five planets to sustain its own habits.