Beyond the Headlines: How many children is too many?

In the last century, the global population has exploded.

It took until 1800 for the number of people in the world to reach 1 billion. Today there are 7.7 billion people on the planet and that number is rising at the pace of another billion every 12 to 15 years.

Scientists say this is simply unsustainable.

Not only are there issues of providing food, shelter, water and goods for the ever expanding number of people, there is the major concern of the impact that number will have on attempts to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.

In this week’s Beyond the Headlines, we’re asking, how many children is too many when it comes to climate change?

We hear from Emma Lim,18, an activist and creator of the No Future No Children pledge has vowed, along with over 5000 others, not to have children until governments around the world take substantive action on climate change.

We’ll also hear from Professor Corey Bradshaw, fellow in Global Ecology at Flinders University in Australia, who has been modeling population growth and looking at what methods could cause the global population to decline.

Then Robin Maynard, director of British-based campaign charity Population Matters, joins us to talk about why all this matters and whether he’s feeling optimistic about the future.