The Weldon Cooper Center Center's population projections for 2050 were released back in July, but they're receiving new attention.
Retired Appalachian journalist Jim Branscome took a look at Southwest Virginia's coal counties, which are expected to decline drastically.
"The population trends are pretty devastating. The Weldon Cooper Center at UVA projects Buchanan County will lose 47 percent of its existing population in the next 25 years," Branscome says. "The numbers are similar across Dickenson and Russell and the other counties there."
Branscome saw similar projections for coal counties in other states like Kentucky and West Virginia, and penned an op-ed headlined "The Alarming Depopulation of Appalachia’s Coalfields: A Quarter Century of Projected Decline." He's calling for regenerative agriculture, outdoor recreation and other industries to help reverse the trend. But the Weldon Cooper Center's Hamilton Lombard noted an IRS dataset on new business applications shows there's hope.
"Southwest Virginia has some of the strongest numbers in Virginia coming out of the pandemic," Lombard says.
The data shows that, starting with the millennial generation, Southwest Virginia has retained about 70% of its young people. That's on par with localities in Northern Virginia. But they need to do a better job of attracting additional young people to counteract an aging population.
"An aging population meaning more deaths, fewer births. That imbalance is causing most of the decline," Lombard says. "In the past, decline in a lot of areas was from people leaving. That's increasingly not the case."
Lombard says the combination of new business growth and retaining its young people may eventually slow and even reverse the region's population loss, but it will take years to see the results in estimates and projections.
