The Population-Climate Change Link: Opportunity and Danger
The debate about population growth and climate change is heating up. First, researchers at Oregon State University showed that having fewer children is among the best ways for Americans to limit their carbon footprint. Then the UK’s Optimum Population Trust (OPT) came out with a report claiming that contraception is five times cheaper than conventional green technologies as a means of combating climate change.
The new attention to population growth and climate change presents an opportunity—and also a danger.
On the opportunity side, it could generate new support for family planning and reproductive health services, girls’ education, and other ethical means to slow population growth—the long neglected “Cairo agenda,” which the world’s nations endorsed at a UN conference in 1994, then promptly forgot.
The danger is that it could revive calls for numbers-driven “population control.” In the past, those programs trampled people’s rights and health in pursuit of lower birthrates. Where the focus is on numbers, abuses of human rights are common. There are, of course, the notorious examples: China’s one-child policy and the forced abortions used to implement it; and the sterilization camps of India’s emergency period in the 1970s, where thousands died of botched operations.
And there were seemingly more benign policies of incentives and disincentives, which actually punished the poorest and most vulnerable. In India, children were expelled from school if their parents refused to be sterilized. Other policies forced the poor to make a Hobbesian choice between fertility and survival. In Bangladesh in the 1980s, flood victims who refused sterilization were denied emergency food aid.
The family planning/reproductive health movement has come a long way since then. While some abuses persist (notably in China), the movement as a whole has been revolutionized from within. As Michele Goldberg recounts in her wonderful book, The Means of Reproduction, a new generation of feminists rose through the ranks of the family planning movement and shifted the focus from fertility control to sexual and reproductive rights and health.
Reproductive health advocates understand that when a woman has a 1 in 6 chance of dying in childbirth; that when her kids are getting sick and dying of preventable disease, she needs more than an IUD. They understand that the same woman is more likely to visit a clinic that addresses her full range of needs, and treats her with respect. And they showed that a broader approach to reproductive health and rights can improve maternal and child health, prevent STDs and lower fertility.
This was a paradigm shift in population and family planning, and it formed the basis of a new global agreement at a 1994 UN population conference in Cairo. At that meeting, environmentalists, feminists, and other civil society groups from around the world helped produce a plan of action that was endorsed by 179 nations.
The Cairo agreement says that choosing the number and timing of one’s own children is an inalienable human right. It acknowledges that slowing population growth is one of the things we need to do to build a sustainable future. And it shows that the best way to slow population growth is not with top-down population control, but by making sure that all people have the means and the power to make their own decisions about childbearing.
Where the Cairo agenda has been implemented, the effects have been dramatic. Where reproductive health services are available, where couples are confident their children will survive, where girls go to school, where young women and men have economic opportunity, couples have healthier–and smaller—families.
But governments haven’t kept the promises they made in Cairo. While developing countries are spending about half of what they promised in Cairo, developed countries have delivered less than a quarter of the promised funding. The cost is not huge: the developed countries’ share of the cost to provide reproductive health services for every woman on earth is $20 billion—about what the bankers on Wall Street gave themselves in bonuses last year. The US share is $1 billion—about a fifth of what we spend in Afghanistan each month.
Now we are at a crossroads. We can move forward on the path charted in Cairo; or we could head back to population control. There are ominous signs: Time Magazine, in a teaser for an article about the OPT report, writes: “As the global population increases, it gets harder to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Simple answer: Control the population.”
Knowing the history, you know it’s not simple. Slowing population growth is but one of many things we must do to avert catastrophic climate change. That does not justify a return to the abusive population control schemes of the past. It does, however, provide another reason for the US and other developed countries to make good on the promises they made in Cairo.
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Comment by Amanda — December 2, 2009 @ 3:53 am
We need to act on the MUNICIPAL level with municipal environmental contraception funding to reduce both pollution and school taxes. Also, when we fund contraception on the local level, most of us are funding contraception for members of our own race, rather than funding contraception for members of other races which leaves us so vulnerable to eugenics charges. Ferthermore, sane people are clearly a helpless minority on the national and global levels, but we may be in the majority in some towns, as gay rights supporters discovered they were in Massachusetts and some states.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/childfreetown/
http://www.projectprevention.org/
http://www.thebigsort.com/maps.php
Comment by Alan — October 31, 2010 @ 4:41 pm
In search of science leading to the restoration of balance and sustainability……
Where are the experts? A deafening silence has vanquished science when it really matters. We are witnessing crimes against science and humanity, I suppose.
Would professionals with appropriate expertise please examine the extant science regarding human population dynamics and human overpopulation of Earth? How can this knowledge be used to move the human community from the dangerous and patently unsustainable ‘trajectory’ it is on now to sustainable lifestyles and right-sized corporate enterprises?
http://newsecuritybeat.blogspot.com/2010/08/uk-royal-society-call-for-submissions.html#comment-form
—–Original Message—–
Sir John Sulston, Chair
People and the Planet Working Group
UK Royal Society
March 31, 2011
Dear Sir John Sulston:
Your recent comments regarding the review of research on the human population and its impact on the planet we inhabit by a high level panel of experts give rise to hope for the future of children everywhere. Thanks for all you, the Planet and the People Working Group and the UK Royal Society are doing to protect biodiversity from massive extirpation, the environment from irreversible degradation and the Earth from wanton dissipation of its finite resources by the human species. I am especially appreciative for two quotes from you,
…… “we’ve got to make sure that population is recognized… as a multiplier of many others. We’ve got to make sure that population really does peak out when we hope it will.”
…….”what we want to do is to see the issue of population in the open, dispassionately discussed…. and then we’ll see where it goes.”
Inasmuch as you and an esteemed group of professionals with appropriate expertise are examining scientific evidence regarding the unbridled increase of absolute global human population numbers, please note there is research that has been summarily dismissed by many too many of our colleagues regarding human population dynamics and human overpopulation which I would like to bring to your attention. For the past ten years I have been unsuccessfully attempting to draw attention to certain evidence that to date remains both unchallenged and ignored by virtually every top-rank professional. They appear unable to refute the evidence and simultaneously unwilling to believe it. Their unexpected conspiracy of silence has served to conceal certain research by David Pimentel and Russell Hopfenberg. How else can it be that so many established professionals with adequate expertise act as if they are willfully blind, hysterically deaf and electively mute in the face of scientific evidence of human population dynamics and human overpopulation? The conscious denial of what could somehow be real about the growth of the human population in our time is not doing anything that can be construed as somehow right and good for future human wellbeing and environmental health, I suppose. It appears as if we could be witnesses to the most colossal failure of intellectual honesty, moral courage and nerve in human history.
Peer-reviewed professional publications, letters to the editor, slideshow presentations et cetera can be found at the following link, http://www.panearth.org/
Thank you for attending to this request for careful, skillful and rigorous scrutiny of research from two outstanding scientists. Please know I am holding onto a ray of hope that the research of Hopfenberg and Pimentel is fundamentally flawed; that human population dynamics is different from, not essentially similar to, the population dynamics of other species; and that human population numbers are not primarily a function of an available supply of food necessary for human existence. That would be the best news.
Sometime soon, I trust, many scientists will speak up with regard to apparently unforeseen and unfortunately unwelcome science of human population dynamics and human overpopulation the way people in huge numbers in the Mid-East are calling out for democracy now.
Respectfully yours,
Steve Salmony
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
Established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — April 10, 2011 @ 8:24 am