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. 

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.

In a meeting with business leaders in Lahore in late October, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pointedly warned of the potential economic impacts of Pakistan's rapidly growing population: "There has to be...in any plan for your own economic future, a hard look at where you're going to get the resources to meet these needs. You do have somewhere between 170 and 180 million people. Your population is projected to be about 300 million as the current birth rates, which are among the highest in the world, continue," she said.

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.

Esraa Bani is the Advocacy 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.

When I graduated from high school in San Antonio, Texas, I can remember at least two dozen girls (out of a class of 600) pregnant or already with babies. It may seem astonishing now, but it was fairly normal in 1991: so normal, in fact, that our high school had responded with an academic track geared toward expectant and young mothers.

Based on this history, I wasn't totally shocked to learn that President Bush's abstinence-only program led to a 57 percent rise in student pregnancy in the Lone Star state.

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.