Lola Heavey's List: Population

• “Family planning is to maternal survival what a vaccination is to child survival,” said Johns Hopkins professor Amy Tsui, quoting Khama Rogo of the World Bank, at the Woodrow Wilson Center event Maintaining the Momentum: Highlights From the Uganda International Conference on Family Planning on March 16.

• Even without climate change, population growth by itself may result in several billion more people living in areas of more limited water availability. Around one-third of today’s global population live in countries experiencing moderate to high water stress, and 1.1 billion people lack access to safe water.
• The impacts of climate change, coupled with population growth in developing countries, will exert significant pressure for cross-border and internal population movement. There is already evidence of the pressure that an adverse climate can impose for migration.
• The effects of climate change - particularly when coupled with rapid population growth and existing economic, political, ethnic or religious tensions - could be a contributory factor in both national and cross-border conflicts in some developing countries.

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• It is unrealistic in many cases to argue for no population growth at all, certainly in the short run.

  However there is a rate of increase, varying with circumstance, above which key development goals of poverty alleviation, per capita productivity and investment in healthcare and education become significantly compromised.

  The economy at local level is unable to support such increase, with high resultant unemployment, emigration to towns, urban deprivation and breakdown of traditional community structures. At the same time, there is a strong correlation between large average family size and instance of poverty.

  An equally relevant aspect of the population growth factor, requiring clearer definition, relates to its impact on sustainability in a finite physical environment by contributing to degradation of land, pollution and loss of biodiversity.

• Highlighting the links between population increase and climate change has emerged as a key area of activity for PSN.

• When we look at population on a global scale, we’re seeing an increase of about 78 million people every year, a pretty substantial number.

• We know from studies that women are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change in the developing world. The kinds of shifting temperatures and precipitation patterns that we are seeing with climate change have significant effects on water supplies and agricultural production. Women have to walk farther to get water, for instance. They’re more likely to go hungry because, when food is limited, they will feed their family first and themselves last. Addressing a woman’s needs for reproductive health and family planning enables her to make decisions about the number and spacing of her children. It gives a woman greater control over the natural resources and financial resources in her life. It contributes to her family’s ability to survive the impact of climate change.

   

  Demographers at the United Nations tell us that world population, 6.8 billion people today, could grow to 9.2 billion by 2050. That’s actually a middle-range projection. It could be as high as 10.5 billion or as low as 8 billion. The path of future population growth will depend in large part on the access women have to contraception. A really important part of how population is going to grow in the future is fertility, the number of children born per woman. Universal access to reproductive health and family planning is an important goal called for in the Millennium Development Goals and during the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. What’s interesting about that medium projection is that when U.N. demographers released those projections, they made it very clear that to achieve the 9.2 billion by 2050 requires greater access to and use of family planning services around the world than we’re seeing today.
• In many parts of the world, there is a cultural preference for larger families. But what we find in most places is that women want to be able to make decisions about when to have children. Around the world, 215 million women would like to avoid a pregnancy but lack modern contraception. It’s not simply access to health services that determines the size of a family. There are other important factors like gender equity, access to education, and access to economic opportunities. In addition to promoting universal access to reproductive health care and family planning, there are important programs that lead to greater gender equity, things like ensuring that girls stay in school, for example, and have greater economic opportunities. These are things that help bring people out of poverty and also have relationships to family size.
• We need smart policies all around in order to achieve the kind of sustainable development that would allow for increasing the well-being of the poorest and most vulnerable around the world while at the same time protecting the global atmosphere for all of us. When education and economic opportunity improve, fertility will decline if women have access to contraception. In order to truly achieve sustainable development, we’re going to have to address energy poverty. Is there electricity in schools or paved roads for people to use to get to a market to sell goods? That kind of energy poverty is not something we want to see as a perpetual condition for the poorest people around the world. That means that emissions that come from those activities, for some people, will have to increase. We need to be working on all fronts to ensure that renewable energy sources are tapped into and available, that green technology is spread and shared worldwide, that we find other ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere.

• Where we see population growing most rapidly is in some of the poorest countries of the world. Right now, those are countries whose environmental footprint is very, very small. Population growth in Ethiopia right now is not contributing in a significant way to greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. We wouldn’t want that very low per capita energy consumption in Ethiopia to be a perpetual condition for Ethiopia. At the same time, population growth in a country like the United States has a much, much greater impact in terms of contributing to greenhouse emissions. It’s critical that we think about how we reduce energy consumption in the United States and that we do everything that we can to ensure that the highest energy-emitting countries are putting some strong policies in place to bring their greenhouse gas emissions down, that we work towards an equitable international agreement, while at the same time sustainable development can proceed.

   

  We believe that meeting the reproductive health and family planning needs of women and families around the world could contribute to those solutions. It’s not the silver bullet, for sure, but if we’re able to really look at the reproductive health and gender dimensions of sustainable development, we’ll be able to cope with the impacts of climate change and also enable a greater prospect for sustainable development globally.

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