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SRHR/Population/Climate Change/ Environment
In the 1990s, a series of global conferences – including the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), the Fourth World Conference on Women, and the World Summit for Social Development (Social Summit) – raised awareness of the interconnections between population, poverty and the environment. These conferences led to a consensus on how to bring about environmentally sustainable and equitable development, which has since been taken up in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
As climate change and environmental issues have moved up the global agenda in recent years, there has been a revival of the debate about possible links between population growth and health, socioeconomic development and environmental degradation. Much of the current debate suggests that slowing population growth in developing countries would automatically have a positive effect on poverty reduction in those countries and would also reduce environmental degradation or climate change. However, there is little evidence to support this assumption. In fact, determining cause and effect when it comes to population, poverty and environmental degradation is highly complex, involving a multitude of factors, such as access to family planning, agriculture, economics, governance, human rights, and technology, to name just a few.
Clearly, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and family planning influence and are influenced by population demographics and trends. But the re-emergence of discussion about ‘overpopulation’ as the root of poverty and environmental degradation is more than just erroneous: it threatens to undermine hard-won rights to sexual and reproductive autonomy for people around the world, particularly women, and to waste resources on ineffective programmes.
SRHR and family planning organizations have, until now, remained largely neutral or silent in the global discourse on population, environmental degradation and climate change. Yet the issues continue to dominate media and political agendas, highlighting the need for SRHR organizations to bring their expertise and experience to the debate. The EuroNGOs has taken up this issue to stimulate discussion about the linkages between population, environment and climate change from a rights-based perspective; and to help organizations working on SRHR and family planning to begin to build the foundation for a cohesive, unified advocacy approach to population, environment and climate change issues.
Within this framework, the EuroNGOs organized two timely events in 2008, a strategy workshop as well as an international conference.
- For information on EuroNGOs International Conference entitled "The Interface between Population, Environment and Poverty Alleviation", held 2nd October 2008 in Lyon/France, and to access the presentations given during this conference, go to http://www.eurongos.org/Default.aspx?ID=16767.
For more information, go to:
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Resources
Population, Development and Climate Change
Reviews on 3 groundbreaking books on Population, Environment and Climate Change, Wilson Center, USA
Reviews of: 1. “Population and Environment: Methods of Analysis” , ed. Wolfgang Lutz, Alexia Przkawetz and Warren C. Sanderson, 2002, 2. “Population and Climate Change”, by Brian O’Neill, E. Landis MacKeller, Wolfgang Lutz, 2001, and 3. “The Crowded Greenhouse: Population, Climate, Change and Creating a Sustainable World”, by John Firor and Judith E. Jacobson, 2002.
Blog on Population and Climate Change, Population Action International (PAI), USA, here, see also contribution by Dr. Leiwen Jiang, PAI, Combating Global Warming Brings Population Back to the Agenda, July 2008
Resources on "Population, Health, and Environment", |
