Originally published in Grist

"The main driving forces of future greenhouse gas trajectories will continue to be demographic change, social and economic development, and the rate and direction of technological change," according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Emissions Scenarios. Two of these drivers - development and technology - have been the focus of a great deal of discussion among the international community as they continue to work toward a new international climate change agreement in Bonn this week. The third, demographic change, has been conspicuously absent.

Published in Grist

It's the fourth day of climate negotiations here in Bonn, and at 4:30 in the afternoon, there is a lull in the action before the start of early evening "contact groups" - official meetings of negotiators that are sometimes open to observers. Looking for a quiet place to sit down with my laptop, I have landed in the main plenary hall, sitting in the seat with a placard that reads "GEF" (Global Environment Facility, the agency charged with managing a portion of funds for international adaptation efforts). Hopefully no one will mind my brief trespass.

Originally published on Grist

This is the second dispatch by Population Action International from global climate change talks in Bonn, Germany.  Read the first.

One of the under-reported issues about climate change is its dramatic affect on women.  A side event I attended this afternoon, organized by the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA), included speakers from all around the world, representing men, women, government agencies, NGOs, North and South. But their messages were unified: women's historic disadvantages--limited access to resources, restricted rights, under-representation in decision making--has made them disproportionately vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Originally published on Grist

Kathleen Mogelgaard is Senior Program Manager of the Population and Climate Change Program at Population Action International.

At the opening of the international climate change talks in Bonn, Germany, today, representatives from governments around the world shared their opinions on a newly released draft of a global climate treaty that will be debated and (perhaps) finalized when they meet again in Copenhagen in December.

First published on RH Reality Check

"Canada has pulled away from Africa," remarked Canadian MP Dr. Keith Martin during the House of Parliament screening of The Silent Partner: HIV in Marriage in Ottawa, "and it is appalling."  Though it was buried beneath Canadian coverage of H1N1, the Conservative Canadian government quietly announced that it would slash funding for Canadian International Development Agency (also known as CIDA) programs "that don't align with government priorities."  

First published in The New Security Beat

Every day it seems the headlines bring new worries about the future of Pakistan. But among the many challenges confronting the nation--including a growing Taliban insurgency--one significant problem remains largely undiscussed: its rapidly expanding population.

"Africa is under populated." Those were the shocking words of Dr. Strike Mkandla, the head of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in a provocative response to a presentation I gave on the links between population and climate change at Ethiopia's first celebration of Earth Day on April 22. Dr. Mkandla continued that Africa has lots of land that can contain many more people. I discussed the benefits of slower population growth for adaptation in African countries that will be the hardest hit by the impacts of climate change. The audience was surprised that the head of a United Nations agency would make such a statement, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including from the UNEP itself and sister UN agencies. Dr. Mkandla left before I could respond or the audience could ask questions.

Originally published in The Huffington Post

Have you seen the ads? They seem to be everywhere -- from the Washington Metro system's billboards, to the New Yorker and Roll Call.

"9 billion people to feed. A changing climate. NOW WHAT?"

While focused on biotechnology, the ad (sponsored by Monsanto) does point to a key challenge in the years ahead: namely, the need to double agricultural output by 2050 to feed a rapidly growing world.

Amber Kirtley is a graduate of Furman University. She is serving as Communications Intern at Population Action International for the Spring 2009 semester.

Somewhere along the way "go green" stopped just being a phrase I would snap at my mother when she took too long to enter an intersection after a light or the adamant suggestion my sorority would chant to rush hopefuls during Greek recruitment. Now, "go green", to me, refers to the persistent voice chirping in all of our ears, encouraging us to alter our lifestyles and do our part to save the world.

Jasmine Wilkins is a graduate of the College of William and Mary . She is serving as New Project Development Intern at Population Action International for the Spring 2009 semester.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer you're assigned to work with a particular sector, be it community health, small business development, food security, etc.  You receive countless hours of sector-specific training - culture, language and technical - and inevitably bond with other volunteers in the same sector.  After all, for the first three months in country they're usually the only Americans (besides select Peace Corps staff) with whom you have contact.  

by Suzanna Dennis & Susan Anderson

Writing from the United Nations

"I am honored to be here today to express the renewed and deep commitment of the United States Government to the goals and aspirations of the ICPD Program of Action." With these words, Margaret Pollack, head of the US Delegation to the United Nations Commission on Population and Development (CPD) ushered in a new era of US engagement on reproductive rights at the UN. The US CPD statement is another signal of the new course the Obama Administration is steering America's policy on reproductive health. Finally we are heading in the right direction again.

The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs released the 21st round of its official global population projection, the 2008 Revision, on March 11, 2009. The 2008 Revision suggests that under a medium variant assumption, in which the total fertility rate (TFR) will decline from 2.56 children per women in 2005-2010 to 2.02 in 2045-2050, the world population will likely increase from 6.83 billion in 2009 to 9.15 billion in 2050. If TFR were 0.5 higher than in the medium variant - as in a high variant assumption - world population would reach 10.5 billion. If TFR were 0.5 lower than in the medium variant - as in a low variant assumption - world population would still increase to 8 billion. Therefore, global population growth seems inevitable even if fertility decline accelerates. The trend that all additional global population growth will occur exclusively in the developing world has not changed.

Crossposted from the Huffington Post

Monrovia, Liberia, March 7, 2009. The "International Colloquium on Women's Empowerment, Leadership Development, International Peace and Security 2009" is about to get started. Presidents Johnson-Sirleaf (Liberia) - The first woman president in Africa! - and Tarja Halonen (Finland) are hosting us. It's International Women's day tomorrow. This is a good place to spend it. Even sitting in my warm clothes from cold USA weather (luggage still in transit) and a bit sticky in this tropical weather, I'm nonetheless excited, expectant and hopeful for the two days ahead. About 500 of us are sitting in the middle of the sunny football field. There is no convention hall in Monrovia - this stadium works well, has nice rooms for breakout sessions and safety barriers to protect the four Heads of State here. We don't notice the distant empty stadium seats surrounding us. We're enjoying the shade created by the attractive thatched roof of palm leaves with bamboo poles - creating an "open air tent," the plastic chairs are comfortable, the music is fun. We're waiting for the Heads of State to arrive. One organizer tells us that there were no tents big enough in Liberia for this event - it was a woman's ingenuity that came up with our protective and sweet smelling roof of palm leaves. By the end of this colloquium, I realize not much stops Liberian woman and the good men that work by their side.

I have just concluded a nine day visit to Uganda to research the connections between population dynamics and development. This connection has been made by PAI and others on the global level but we have yet to discern how this plays out in individual countries. Uganda has one of the fastest growing populations in the world and 50 percent of its population is younger than 15 years old. How do you educate all these children? On paper, the intentions are very good. The government has supported free primary school for quite some time already and more than two-thirds of the population is literate. Recently, a bill that will allow free secondary education was passed by the Ugandan parliament.

Jennifer Johnson is Writer/Editor at Population Action International.

"One seething trembling sea of women." These were the words Russian revolutionary and feminist Aleksandra Kollontai used to describe the one of the first International Women's Day celebrations in 1911. The first events were organized by German socialist Klara Zetkin to call attention to the plight of the female worker. As the year wore on, a whole series of marches and strikes were organized as news of these demonstrations spread across Europe like wildfire.

Odunola Ojewumi is a student at Howard University. She is serving as List Management Intern at Population Action International for the Spring 2009 semester.

On February 21st, I attended a meeting sponsored by Friends of The Congo. "It is our call to action to save the Congo" stood as the message and slogan for this conference. The meeting offered a great amount of information about the devastating tragedy in the Congo. There were four key speakers including a Congolese speaker who fled from the violence there.

Esraa Bani is an Administrative Assistant in the International Advocacy and U.S. Government Relations departments of Population Action International.

A little four year old lay in bed wrapped in blankets. Her teeth were chattering and her body was warm with fever because she lost too much blood. She laid still in her bed as tears rolled down her face. Days passed by without her sleeping or eating because the pain was too much for her frail body to bear.

Amber Kirtley is a graduate of Furman University.  She is serving as Communications Intern at Population Action International for the Spring 2009 semester.

I am privileged to live in a time and place where I can view the everyday world for women in the U.S. with a "glass half full" perspective. Because of the hard work of so many women who have come before me I see International Women's Day as a day to smile, look at the world in comparison to what it was 100 years ago, and feel a sense of satisfaction.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post on January 4, Neil Howe and Richard Jackson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) sound the alarm about the "massive disruption" the world may face in the 2020s due to population aging. Howe and Jackson co-authored The Graying of the Great Powers (see New Security Beat review), a 2008 CSIS report that elaborates on the supposed "political warfare" that will break out as a result of aging in the developed world, accompanied by turmoil in developing countries with young populations.

After two days of technical presentations on climate change and agricultural adaptation strategies, three farmers took the stage at the International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI) and Ethiopian Development Research Institute's (EDRI) workshop "How can African farmers adapt to climate change? Results and conclusions for Ethiopia and beyond." These men had personally experienced farming challenges related to the changing environment. Unlike the previous days' sessions, these men did not talk about the statistical significance of choosing one adaptation strategy over another, or present mathematical models detailing adaptation strategy decision-making. Instead, they talked about their real experiences of hunger, disease, and crop failure.  For me, this was the most important information presented at the workshop. I find that qualitative research has the potential to capture this lived experience in ways that quantitative analysis, for all its strengths, simply cannot.

"We farmers don't have access to family planning and we are moving more and more into poverty."

As the world focuses on the outcomes of the meeting on climate change that just concluded in Poznan, Poland, I am sitting in a workshop in Nazret, Ethiopia, listening to a panel of farmers talking about the effects of climate change on their lives - less rain, lower crop yields, malaria, no milk for their children. The farmers, from Amhara Region in the Rift Valley, talked about population pressure. They are acutely aware that farm sizes shrink with each generation and speak eloquently of the need for access to family planning so they can have fewer children. Rural Ethiopians currently have an average of six children.

"Pinch the tip of the condom and gently roll it down!" exclaimed the school nurse as she demonstrated how to put on a condom with a banana to my seventh grade co-ed health class.  She spoke with so much enthusiasm that I thought perhaps she had momentarily transformed into a six-year old at her own birthday party.  The entire classroom was silent with embarrassment -- consisting of being uncomfortable with the topic at hand and the performance on display.  Watching Mrs. Robinson's demonstration was like a train wreck, something horrific that compelled you to keep watching, unable to turn away.  The vision of the Juliet Louis Dreyfus look-alike with her banana is forever imprinted in my brain, for better or worse.

On a recent visit to Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana's (PPAG) Youth Center, I couldn't help but reflect on my own experience learning about the birds and the bees.  I found myself wishing my sex education experience would have been closer to the youth friendly services offered by the Youth Center rather than the banana experience I received. 

The large banner stretched across busy Langata Road near Nyayo football stadium in Nairobi, Kenya declares, "We CAN End All Violence Against Women" as the traffic jam below grinds on. It signals the annual "16 Days of Activism" campaign - from November 25 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women) to December 10 (International Human Rights Day) - against gender violence.  This two-week global advocacy campaign for women's rights aptly envelopes World AIDS Day, for the issues of gender violence and HIV/AIDS are inseparable.

Here in Kenya, HIV/AIDS prevalence has increased in both urban and rural areas in recent years and the alarm bells have sounded. There seems to be growing recognition among policymakers and program managers that HIV and AIDS cannot be viewed and acted upon as solely a clinical matter. Deeply entrenched social norms make women and girls highly vulnerable to HIV - the central tenet of PAI's newest documentary, The Silent Partner: HIV in Marriage, which premiered in Nairobi last week.

This World AIDS Day, Population Action International is exploring a different side of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, one that many people might not even realize is an issue - the prevalence of HIV in marriage.  Our new documentary, The Silent Partner: HIV and Marriage, explores this very issue.  It tells the stories of women from different backgrounds who were infected with HIV in their own homes, in their own beds, from their own husbands. 

Most people believe that if a woman makes it to marriage without contracting HIV, she is safe.  However, the reality can be quite different. Judy Atieno, one of the women profiled in The Silent Partner, found out she was HIV-positive while she was pregnant with her fourth child.  She says, "You have to depend on this man for everything -- the husband, he pays the school fees for the kids, he buys food for the house... you don't question where he walks, how many women he has outside - for the sake of these children."

The 2008 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference, held this year in Sacramento, California from November 16-19, described itself as, "A conference focused on understanding the behavior and decision making of individuals and organizations and using that knowledge to accelerate our transition to an energy-efficient and low-carbon future." So I wondered where, if at all, population would fit in. Indeed population did come up, and in some interesting ways, both formal and informal, during the conference.

William Ryerson from the Population Media Center, for example, spoke about his work promoting family planning through serial dramas in developing countries, in a talk entitled "Acting for Change." His presentation did not touch on either environment or climate change issues in any substantive way except for one quickly displayed slide:

"Saving a gigaton of carbon by reducing our 2050 population by 1 billion, through education for women and family planning information and services, would cost 1,000 times less than any of the other technical options - nuclear power, renewables, or increased car efficiency."

This is a significant point that was glossed over. Nevertheless, at least the linkage between population and climate change was addressed to some degree. Possibly one of the most important points that came out of Mr. Ryerson's presentation was a question at the end as an audience member raised her hand and asked, "In climate change, why aren't we addressing population control?"