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?"

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."

Allison Palser is PAI's 2008 summer communications/website intern.

This afternoon, I stopped by the Wilson Center to attend the launch of UNEP's Africa: Atlas of a Changing Environment. Due to a lengthy wait for the metro train, I arrived a few minutes late, and was immediately disappointed that I had missed lunch and had to sit in the overflow room. Crud. I knew I would have a lot of important questions, and I just love the humiliation of standing up in a crowded, climate-controlled room with a microphone. Consider it my fifteen seconds of fame. Little did I know that my spot in overflow would provide me with an interesting opportunity later on.

UNEP's Atlas is the first in an expanding project that measures visual changes in the environment as related to climate change, land degradation, deforestation, and water scarcity. The atlas used satellite imagery from the USGS LandSAT as well as from the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) group to place before and after shots of environmental changes in the hands of policymakers. For the first time, agents of government in Africa and around the world can see the process of environmental change, and, with that information, do something about it.

Elizabeth Leahy is a Research Associate with PAI.

CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden’s recent identification of population growth as one of three top destabilizing trends currently facing the world has received extensive media coverage. The director’s comments seem to have taken many by surprise by singling out demographic trends, rather than religious extremism or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as meriting a top spot on the intelligence community’s radar screen.

Speaking in the Landon Lecture Series at Kansas State University, the same forum where Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last fall advocated for increasing the use of “soft power,” Gen. Hayden highlighted the challenges that will be faced by some of the poorest and weakest states in the world—among them Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Yemen—in providing for the needs of their citizens, particularly young people, in the coming years. The populations of these countries are projected to double and in some cases triple by mid-century, magnifying already heavy demands on health care, education facilities and the job market.

Carolyn Vogel, Vice President of Programs, and Karen Hardee, Vice President for Research, report on the Strategic Workshop "SRHR-Population-Environmental Degradation-Climate Change" in Istanbul, Turkey.

We met in Istanbul for two more or less unstructured days of discussion around the emerging issue of population, environmental degradation and climate change. Coming together as like-minded organizations in support of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), including voluntary family planning, we struggled to get our heads around the complicated linkage between these pressing and timely issues. That we all felt compelled to talk and needed to voice our ideas, confusions, and brainstorms was evident when at the end of each and every session, facilitators struggled to close and wrap-up (we wouldn’t stop talking). Those discussions then dominated our “out of meeting time” in local restaurants and cobbled streets of the Sultanahmet. In Istanbul, every conversation and presentation was completely new territory for many of the participants.

There are always complicated issues around mothers. Being one, having one, not having one, wanting one, losing one, not being one.

Personally, we love our mothers even when we don't. Culturally, we revere them. Globally, we say how important mothers are, but still a woman dies every minute of every day from a pregnancy-related cause. Each of those deaths is preventable and at very little expense. There's been little help for those young women -- dying to be mothers -- over the past two decades. It's not just bad, it's sinful!

Read more of Amy's second blog entry for The Huffington Post!

Last week's Earth Day celebration reminded me of the first one. As a college kid responding to the passionate calls to action punctuated by pounding music, I came away thinking that if I hadn't already decided to work for women's rights, I would choose to work on environmental causes as a career.

This came to mind recently as I bumped along a dusty road in Northern Ethiopia. I was distressed by the lack of trees and by the many young women trudging along the road bent under the weight of huge piles of branches tied to their backs. Many of them never attended school or had dropped out because of the time required to travel long distances in search of wood that their families need for cooking and heat in the winter.

Read more of Amy Coen's blog at The Huffington Post.