Background: Population, Reproductive Health and Biodiversity
In encouraging USAID to initiate this funding, Congress recognized and acknowledged the importance of the complex connections between population, reproductive health and biodiversity worldwide. Roughly one-sixth of the world’s population – probably now approaching 1.3 billion people – lives in ecological “hotspots.” These are the planet’s land areas that are richest in biodiversity – and most threatened by human activity. While these hotspots comprise just 12 percent of the planet’s land surface, they hold nearly 20 percent of its human population. And that hotspot-based population is growing nearly 40 percent faster than that of the world as a whole.
In many biologically rich areas, there is little or no access to the health services that allow women and couples to put into effect their own aspirations to manage the timing of childbirths. Unmet demand for family planning is often highest in the same remote rural areas where the richest and most unique arrays of plants and animals are clinging to a precarious and threatened existence.
Many aspects of population influence the survival of biodiversity, including the consumption of the 1.25 billion people who live in the world’s industrialized countries. Another major influence is the flow of migrants toward tropical forests where land can still be cleared for subsistence farming or to coasts where artisanal (small-scale, non-commercial) fishing can support families. Among the biodiversity conservation factors USAID and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can address most directly is reproductive health and, through this, potentially fertility-related population growth in communities in and around forests and in coastal areas.
A troubling paradox of population’s impact on biodiversity is that worldwide, couples’ interest in postponing and planning pregnancy has never been higher. Greater access to family planning and reproductive health services has combined with a revolution in childbearing aspirations.
Family size and population growth itself are falling worldwide – except, notably, in many of the world’s poorest and most marginalized communities. Typically, these are areas where women have little access to desired health services, despite their growing awareness that managing their own childbearing is possible. Where environmental and development NGOs have been willing to address women’s self-expressed need for help in managing pregnancy, project experience demonstrates that the use of contraception has increased significantly and community health has improved.
