By Suzanne Ehlers and Elizabeth Becker
Originally published on Grist.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced an important new climate change financing group last week, but out of the 19 people named, no women were included. This is unfortunate because women will bear the brunt of the effects of climate change and are key to any climate solutions.
As the Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) convenes in Copenhagen for its 15th meeting, all eyes are on targets to reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, the irony of climate change is that people in countries that have had the least to do with growing emissions are likely to experience the greatest difficulties in adapting to the impacts of climate change. Discussions and agreements in Copenhagen will include how best to plan for and fund long term adaptation strategies for countries affected by changes in climate.
As countries negotiate climate change solutions in Copenhagen, family planning and reproductive health should be among the adaption strategies on the table. At the same time, the world should not shy away from addressing population as a factor related to carbon emissions. Over 200 million women around the world are having more children than they say they want to have, partly because they do not have access to contraception. Giving women the means to have the number of children they prefer will help them and their families prosper, which is good for women, for the environment and for climate change.
Originally published on RH Reality Check
The old adage, think globally and act locally, should be heeded in discussing solutions to climate change. While changes in industrialized country consumption patterns and technological solutions are needed to help stop the flow of dangerous greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and rendering the planet hotter and hotter, they will be insufficient to address the other side of climate change - helping the most vulnerable people adapt to its effects. Adaptation requires community-based and integrated approaches to help people cope. Involving communities and devising solutions based on local environmental and social conditions is the only sustainable approach.
by Suzanne Ehlers
The 5th Asia and Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights (APCRSHR) is currently underway in Beijing, China. Today, I am moderating a session co-hosted by the Asia Pacific Alliance (APA) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The session, titled Meet the Donors, explored resource mobilization and Millennium Development Goal 5 (improving maternal health) through the lens of a theme raised in the day's opening sessions: In a climate of continuing financial gloom, how is it that an intervention as cost effective as family planning and reproductive health is still having difficulty mobilizing adequate resources?
by Clive Mutunga
In spite of all of the uncertainty leading up to the Copenhagen climate talks in December, one thing is clear: Adaptation needs are the most urgent in the least developed countries. These countries are expected to feel the brunt of climate change impacts: drought, floods, extreme weather, changing disease vectors, declining agricultural production - despite having contributed the least to it. For people in countries most affected by climate change, finding and supporting adaptation strategies that strengthen people's resilience and ability to cope with the effects of changes in climate is critical. My colleague Karen Hardee and I explored these issues and how population fits in our recent study, Population and Reproductive Health in National Adaptation Programs of Action for Climate Change.
by Kathleen Mogelgaard and Karen Hardee
This is a big week in the march towards the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, where world leaders are expected to hammer out a new global treaty to address the problem. Today, President Obama and other heads of state will meet in New York with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to discuss climate change; the subject is also likely to be high on the agenda at the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh later this week.
Much of the focus this week and leading up to the meeting in Copenhagen in December is on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change: who should have to cut, by how much, and in what time frame. We hear a lot about cap and trade, clean energy, promoting energy efficiency, and other technological solutions. For years, reducing emissions has been the focus of efforts to address climate change. But we know now that reducing emissions is not enough: millions of lives are being upended by the effects of changes in climate - food scarcity, water scarcity, vulnerability to natural disasters and infectious diseases, and population displacement. Women and children are the most vulnerable groups to climate change.
"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.
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.
"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.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.
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.
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?"
Carolyn Vogel is PAI's Vice President of Programs.
Examining linkages between population and climate change through many different frames leads to important research and policy questions -- and it also allows the reproductive health community to discuss these linkages in a productive and positive way. If we leave the debate unframed, and the research questions unanswered, we leave space for harmful discourse and inaccurate facts to take center stage. The following series of blog posts, written by staff at Population Action International, will look at population and climate change from different angles, and provide an initial review of some of the broad frames.
Dr. Karen Hardee raises many of the difficult ethical issues that arise when population and climate change are linked. She examines these linkages from a women's rights and empowerment frame. She encourages people, both those comfortable and uncomfortable with the linkage between population and climate change, to discuss the issue in order to come up with the best solutions and avoid mistakes of the past.
Dr. Leiwen Jiang approaches the issue from a demographic perspective, highlighting our need to understand the extent to which increasing population size, age structure and urbanization affects climate change. Research on demographic variables and their relationship to climate change show that population does indeed matter. Moreover, increases in population size, whether through migration or fertility, in regions vulnerable to the effects of climate change (such as coastal areas) mean more total people at risk.
Karen Hardee is PAI's Vice President of Research.
Discussions of global climate change and environmental degradation are putting "population" back in the spotlight. Population stabilization has been noted by respected climate researchers, such as Brian O'Neill and PAI's Leiwen Jiang, as a potential strategy in the race to keep carbon in check (although more research is needed to determine how much it might contribute). Clearly, consumption and emissions in the West are the major contributors to global warming, but how important is population to climate change in the short and long term? Does it make any difference to the atmosphere if the world's population is six, nine or 12 billion people?
Work by Brian, Leiwen and other colleagues shows that the relationship between population and climate change is complex and that age structure, household composition and urbanization are important demographic factors, in addition to population size. Within this complexity, members of our field (broadly defined as those working on family planning, reproductive health and sexual and reproductive health and rights) are discussing the pros and cons of engaging in the discussion on population and climate change.
In her work on developing a justice framework for addressing population and environment issues, Laurie Mazur, who is currently editing a book titled Population, Justice and the Environmental Challenge, has noted that some colleagues, "even those concerned about the carrying capacity of the planet - want to silence the talk about population and the environment, for fear of what it might unleash." She called the space between the reproductive health and rights and environmental movements "something of a demilitarized zone."
Leiwen Jiang is PAI's Senior Demographer.
Two landmark conferences of the 1990s really seemed to get the links between human population and the environment. The 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development noted that "human beings are the centre of concern for sustainable development." Building on this two years later, the Cairo Programme of Action included the objective "to reduce both unsustainable consumption and production patterns as well as negative impacts of demographic factors on the environment in order to meet the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
But in the following years, population started to fall off the map. In 2002, after several preparatory meetings for the Johannesburg Summit (the UN's World Summit on Sustainable Development), population as a key component of sustainable development was still absent from the agenda. As a response, Wolfgang Lutz of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and 34 other distinguished scientists from various disciplines and regions organized the Global Science Panel on Population and Environment, calling for population to be included at the core of the agenda. Though the panel successfully got the message out, participating governments eventually decided to leave population out of the negotiation process.
Population was at the center of public discussion, many national policies, and almost all international conferences and agreements from the late 1950's to the early 1990's. The sudden shift away from this issue was unexpected for many people, and just as population, family planning, and reproductive health were left out of the Millennium Development Goals, population has been largely absent from the response to climate change, potentially the greatest environmental threat we have ever faced.Malea Hoepf Young is a Research Associate at PAI.
It's apparent from recent news that climate change is finally getting the attention it deserves, even if the United States is still dragging its heels on addressing the issue. But even that may change -- a recent poll commissioned by the Presidential Climate Action Project found that 66 percent of American adults want the next president to take strong action on climate change. Many think of this in terms of reducing consumption and greening our energy. But what about the other side of climate change? People -- particularly women and poor people -- will bear the brunt of a changing climate.
Climate change is causing more severe and more frequent storms and drought, resulting in changes in timing and amount of rainfall that damage agricultural production. Added to other environmental degradation, such as deforestation, erosion, and desertification, these changes have significant impacts on the health and livelihoods of people around the world. This particularly affects poor countries, where, ironically, people emit the least per capita, but pay the highest price for the emissions of wealthy, high-emitting countries.
