A newborn baby’s first cry has just marked a world record – the seven billionth person living on our planet was born.

Each new life is a new hope. And yet, all too many hopes get crushed by poverty and conflicts. So is reaching the seventh billion a reason to celebrate or to pause and think about our future?

I, for one, go for the latter. My job as humanitarian commissioner puts me face to face with starving children in countries with record high population growth and fragile ecosystems. There food security is an unachievable dream for millions of people.

Take for instance the Horn of Africa, where drought places 13 million people in the grip of hunger. The population of the affected countries has increased 5 times since 1960. Kenya in 1960 had almost the same population as my native Bulgaria – 8.1 million people, against Bulgaria’s 7.9. Today Kenya has to feed 40 million people while Bulgaria faces the opposite demographic problem: it shrunk to 7.5 million. I admit, I can not imagine what my country would look like if its inhabitants were to quintuple in just 50 years; what toll would this take on agriculture and water resources, healthcare and public budgets? The impact is visible and acute in Kenya, where large areas of the country are at a very high risk of drought, and climate change is expected to intensify these droughts.

Seven billion people magnify the pressures which already bite hard – more people than ever are at risk of extreme weather (be they floods or droughts or random disasters), hunger (which still plagues a billion people every day), extreme poverty, and wars. These push up child mortality, stir refugee waves and make our world even more fragile, even more insecure.

The humanitarian community is braced for the challenge but as we strive to deliver assistance to more people in the most dire need, it is clear that urgent response is only a small part of the solution to a rising population.

For a long time, development policy-makers have been shy to discuss demographics or to factor it into their strategies. This has to change if we are to offer the promise of a decent life and respect for human dignity to all of our seven billion fellow citizens – and the next to come.

The task is complex: it requires boosting crop yields, improving education for girls (which decreases the number of children a woman has and boosts their chances of survival), improving health services for all, ensuring more equitable growth, and investing in disaster risk reduction. But the task is also urgent, because the next billions are coming fast – according to the UN population bureau, we will be eight billion by 2025.

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Tags: 7 billion people, Climate Change, demographics, disasters, Horn of Africa, Humanitarian Aid, hunger, refugees