Oh baby, what will the future hold for us?

WHEN you are raising kids, it’s all about milestones. The first tooth, the first word, those first tentative steps. Last week, on Tuesday to be exact, Mother Earth reached a milestone of her own. There are now eight billion people sharing this planet and I’m responsible for adding two to the total.

After a slow start from our cave dwelling days to around 230 million by the time of Cleopatra’s death, we reached two billion around the time of the Great Depression when clearly the cheapest thing to do was reproduce. Since then, the population has been rising by another billion or so every 10 to 15 years.

The last time we marked such a significant increase in the world’s population was 12 years ago when we reached seven billion people.

This week’s total of eight billion is significant because it’s all downhill from here, and not just in terms of global warming and food supply.

While the world’s population will continue to rise, the rate of increase is slowing. In other words, we have reached “peak kid”.

There will never be as many children on the planet as there are now. Back in the days of drive-ins and hula hoops in the 1950s, women were, on average, having five children each.

Now, we’d be lucky to squeeze out two and that’s probably plenty.

For my hubby and I, the decision to stop at one boy and one girl was more about our own resources and mental bandwidth than the Earth’s dwindling supplies but when you see doomsday headlines like the ones we saw last week, it feels like a very sensible choice.

By the time we reach nine billion people, it will be the year 2037. My daughter will be 18. My son will be 15. I will be 54.

What kind of planet will we live on by then? Will annual talkfests like the Climate Change Conference in Egypt this week translate to actual action?

Will we have enough food to support the developing world?

Will David Attenborough documentaries become less about the living world and more of a moving history?

In a short 15 years, we will know the answers.

For the sake of our kids, let’s hope for a best-case scenario.