Since 2001, the U.S. Congress has encouraged the U.S. Agency for International Development – USAID, the agency that dispenses foreign development assistance – to implement family planning and related reproductive health programs in areas where biological diversity is threatened and where species are endangered. Congress has never specified a funding level for these activities, which are supported by funds appropriated for international family planning programs, amounting to more than US$400 million annually in recent years. Over the past few years the agency has allocated between $1 million and $2 million annually to fund such projects and to explore the implications of the population-environment linkage as it applies to the conservation of critical ecosystems and the biodiversity they shelter.

How many people will live on the planet 20 years from now? Where will they live? Where will population grow, and where will it decline? Researchers at PAI and Columbia University used new methods of mapping population density and projected populations changes to create an innovative map.

Nature's Place discusses how humans can preserve Earth and all its living species through the implementation on conservation programs. Questions raised in the report include, Does human population growth really matter to species loss? And Can policies and programs significantly influence human population trends, and can they do this while upholding the basic human right of couples and individuals to make their own decisions about reproduction, free from interference?

The interactive maps and data tables presented on these Web pages chronicle this growing scarcity in many of the world's countries. In each of the natural resource categories-water, land, forests, fisheries, carbon dioxide and biodiversity-a paragraph summarizes the global situation and leads to tabs that can be clicked to view an interactive map for that resource, along with one or more illustrative charts or world maps, a complete set of country data and a search engine that allows queries about specific countries and their natural resource availability or use.

The accelerating loss of the world's forests presents one of the major environmental challenges of the next century. The growth of human population-from a few million people in prehistory to 6 billion today-looms large among the factors contributing to this loss. Yet many analyses of forest decline despair that population growth is an inevitable force that must be reckoned with but cannot be influenced. This publication challenges that view. Its purpose is not only to examine population's role in forest loss, but also to highlight the value of population policies that simultaneously improve human well-being and brighten the prospects for conserving the world's remaining forests.

In recent years, dozens of environmental and development projects in developing countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia have attempted to integrate or otherwise link community-based activities related both to natural resources and to reproductive health. This publication profiles 42 such projects for which Population Action International (PAI) was able to document both natural resource conservation and reproductive health activities that included improved access to family planning services.

Profiles in Carbon highlights the neglected linkage of population and climate, and illustrates the contribution that sound population policies could make to international efforts to slow climate change.

Revised Data for the Population Action International Report, Sustaining Water: Population and the Future of Renewable Water Supplies

Population growth around the world affects Americans through its impact on the economy, the environment, and safety and health, and the habitability of the world our children will inherit. While tracing cause and effect is difficult the evidence is accumulating that current rates of population growth pose significant and interacting risks to human well-being and are a legitimate concern for Americans.