WE recently went to a family celebration of a granddaughter’s wedding, and it was clear that the family was flourishing, as the dance floor was teeming with small children. Lovely, but on second thought, oops!

My great grandparents were born around 1860, when the world population was just over one billion. It took until 1930 to reach two billion, and it was three billion by 1960 and gaining pace. Then my children began to appear and in just fifty years the world population has more than doubled. It’s now on target for eight billion by 2025 and nine billion before 2050. That’s about 9,000 extra people every hour!

That was thought to be the peak but recent research suggests otherwise. Now there’s a 70 percent chance it will be 11 billion by 2100 because the number of children is not dropping as fast as expected despite a strong link between this and education, income, contraception and television, especially soap operas.

My own mother had fourteen siblings, and I had just one. However it’s not all good news as we are living longer, and by 2070 there will be at least 500,000 in the UK reaching 100, compared with 15,000 now, and that raises other problems.

Apart from getting older it seems that much of the increased growth will be in Africa, south of the Sahara. It’s suggested that there will be over three billion people by the end of the century as cultural customs will keep fertility higher than in secular Europe.

It’s most unlikely the planet can sustain these eleven billion with our wasteful habits. There’ll be little oil left, food shortages will be normal, the climate will be wetter, drier, hotter, windier, and sea levels will have risen a metre. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions will be seeking water and food, and powerful countries will be defending their borders, and fighting for oil. We are good at self interest, greed and killing, but poor at anticipating the future and if there’s a time to put that right, it’s now. This means unprecedented support for Africa and similar areas, to raise the educational standards, particularly for women.

Internationally, we pull together reasonably well in the face of immediate dangers, as with Ebola in West Africa. However it will be much harder to address the long term challenges of an increasing population and rising CO2 levels, and this must mean less emphasis on our own desires and comfort and more on the future needs of the world.