As the United States’ leading grassroots organization seeking to stabilize global population through education about population challenges and advocacy supporting U.S. investment in voluntary domestic and international family planning programs, Population Connection will launch a project aimed at illuminating the link between empowering women and girls and addressing climate change while mitigating its harmful effects on the world’s most vulnerable populations.

A generous pool of donors, led by James R. Bennett of Arkansas, has stepped forward to provide initial funding for this project. Major activities will include a speakers series; outreach on campuses and through digital media; and the addition of new, downloadable college-level materials available to those interested in the links between population growth, reproductive health, social justice, and environmental challenges—with a particular focus on climate change.

Growing Populations, Growing Carbon Footprints

Global warming poses unprecedented threats to humanity. Little has been done to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions despite 40 years of scientists’ warnings, with C0₂ emissions soaring from just over 10 gigatons per year in 1979 to nearly 35 gigatons per year today. While wealthy nations must account for historical emissions and the highest current per capita emissions, research indicates that slower future population growth “could reduce global emissions by 40% or more in the long-term.”

As people in low-income countries achieve improvements in standards of living, those countries’ carbon footprints will grow—both from a necessary rise in per capita emissions and from population growth.

Nearly half of the world’s pregnancies are unintended, and 214 million women in the developing world want to prevent pregnancy but aren’t using modern contraceptives. To lessen the impacts of global population growth on carbon emissions and biodiversity loss, we must implement human rights-based policies to extend family planning and reproductive health care to people worldwide—including in the high-emitting United States, where 45% of pregnancies are unintended.

Now is the time to ensure voluntary family planning options for all, and to provide universal education for girls. Together, these interventions to ensure the full autonomy of girls and women could have a greater impact on carbon emissions than any other, single tactic.

Population Connection draws the links between global population growth and the countless environmental challenges facing us—we educate people of all ages and motivate them to take action. We’ve made steady progress over the past 50 years, educating young people on population concepts and advocating for expanded access to voluntary family planning programs for people everywhere. Nearly 100 countries have achieved replacement rate fertility since our founding in 1968—up from four countries at that time.

But we must accelerate our progress to solve the climate crisis.

Population Connection’s campaign will bring population stabilization into the public discourse about climate change mitigation and adaptation, adding momentum to achieve a dramatic increase in access to family planning and reproductive health care programs for people around the world. In this way, we can lessen the impacts of global population growth on C0₂ emissions and biodiversity loss, while increasing vulnerable populations’ capacity for climate change adaptation and resilience. For more information on this project, please contact Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) Specialist Hannah Evans.

Shauna Scherer, Vice President for Marketing and Development

The post EFFECTS OF POPULATION GROWTH ON CLIMATE CHANGE appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

1. You have suerely heard it a lot to consume less, because the Earth is overburdened. Well, who thinks that the overshoot is caused by too high individual consumption (and refers to Overshoot Day as „overconsumption day” for this reason), doesn’t understand ecology!

2. The ecological footprint of the average person is the same as it was in 1970.[1] Moreover, there are positive changes behind this unchanging average: the ecological footprint of the well-off countries is decreasing, and that of the poor countries is increasing, which allows for a higher quality of life.[2]

3. If the ecological footprint of the average person hasn’t increased, then why do we overburden the Earth by 170% now, which only started in 1970? Has the Earth shrunk by 40% in half a century? In a way, it has…

4. Before anyone would think about some cosmic catastrophe, let’s be clear: the „per capita Earth” has shrunk by 40%. And the reason is that human population has more than doubled since 1970.[3]

5. Today, there is only 1.63 gha biocapacity for a person, which is little more than half of the average global per capita ecological footprint.[4] Moreover, there is less and less each year due to the ongoing population explosion.

The eco-dictators (if there would be such) who don’t care about population could only end the global ecological overshoot by forcing everyone into global destitution.

6. Those who hope that the scientific-technological development will solve everything, will be gravely disappointed: in half a century, all science and technology could achieve was that th per capita biocapacity of Earth only decreased by 40% and not more.[5] (They couldn’t stop its decline, and are far from turning it into growth, even by relying on nonrenewable resources)

7. Humanity overburdens the Earth, today at a level of 170%. This means that we have used up its yields by July 29. In other words, from this day till the end of the year, we will use up the natural capital that has bee accumulating over millions of years. This is why the forests, soils and wildlife is disappearing, freshwater is dwindling, the climate is going nuts, and poison and filth floods the waters and the lands.

8. If everyone on Earth lived like the Hungarians, for example, then the humanity would have come out of the ecological crisis by the turn of the century. If everyone followed the consumption and reproductive pattersns of the Hungarians since the very beginning of the calculation of ecological footprint (1961), then there would only be about 3 billion people on Earth, which wouldn’t be overburdened by everyone living in decent prosperity.[6]

9. So the ecological crisis is caused by overpopulation, which is worsening with the ongoing population expkosion: every year, the human population of Earth increases by 80 million. It’s not that people consume too much individually, it’s just that the „per capita Earth” is shrinking below the level of global destitution.

10. Why is there a population explosion? Well, it’s not like anyone wanted it, it’s just a taboo, so misconceptions are rampant in this topic. Almost half of the pregnancies are unintended by the couples.[7][8] Every day, 100.000 children are born whom their parents didn’t want. At least 214 million fertile wives would desperately want to use contraception, but they don’t have the rights, knowledge and means to it.[7]

11. The UN has alredy declared contraception a human right back in 1968,[9] and on the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo, 179 countries signed a Programme of Action. It was supposed to be completed in 20 years, but unfortunately it wasn’t, so it was extended.[10] This was translated to Hungarian by the BOCS Foundation, which is the Hungarian member of the Inspire European NGO alliance since 2006. The ICPD+25 world conference to renew the Programme of Action will be held in Nairobi.[11]

12. Moreover, the goal of securing universal access to contraception to all was also among the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 5.B) The UN General Assembly declared in 2005 that „an unmet need for family planning undermines achievement of several other goals”.[12]

13. In 2015, the UN declared 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, where universal access to contraception is featured in the topic of health, and of women’s equality as well (SDG 3.7 and 5.6). Because even if there was no ecological crisis, overpopopulation, poverty, violence, so even in an ideal world, it is the right of every child to be conceived to prepared parents, as a result of a responsible decision.

14. Numerous examples prove that access to contraception leads to exceptionally fast reductions in birthrates. Globally, there is a huge umnet need for contraception, both in the developing, and developed countries.[7][8] Wherever women can have a word in ther fate, birthrates are low, even if they cannot study. And educated women plan even less children.[13]

15. So what’s the key to move the Ecological Overshoot day back to the end of the year? Compassion! To have mercy on those who lack contraception!

The reason is because the ecological crisis is caused by a humanitarian catastrophe: that the without the rights to-, knowledge about, and means of contraception, in every second, 3 women cry out desperately that „I’m pregnant!”.

16. This might be the only point where the interests of the poor and the rich are the same. Offer your help for the sake of yourself, for the sake of the poor, and most importantly, for the sake of the children to be born, whom would otherwise be dragged out to Earth before their time, in a forced march, unprepared, as an accident, or for thousands of other reasons.

17. According to the esimates of the UN’s Population Program, the sum needed for the solution can be collected even if only every 30th person helps those lacking contraception by 10 euros (spending it on programs making it available). Can you convince at least one of 30 of your friends? Who break the taboo of population as Climate Heroes, don’t just shave off a few percents of the ecological footprints by insignificant greening, but 100% of it. Because by continuously preventing an unintended pregnancy, they prevent a lifetime’s worth of ecological footprint (moreover, potentially multiple lifetimes’ worth of it).

18. The beneficial effects of sum that makes contraception available are 120 times more potent than conventional charity.[14] It is the most effective humanitarian aid, the most effective form of climate-, and environmental protection,[15] the key of getting out of poverty,[16] that of womens’s equality, the healthy development of children, and of peace and security.

19. The more unintended pregnancies we can prevent, the less people will suffer less; less people will be subject to destructive heat waves, starvation, epidemics and the increasing risk of wars, and the severity of these calamities will be lighter as well. Contraception is the best way to mitigate the climate crisis, and also the key to adapting to the worsening conditions.

20. Let’s push back the date of Ecological Overshoot Day to the end of the year! One of the points of the Global Footprint Network’s MoveTheDate campaign serves this goal as well. Join the Climate Heroes, carbon offset your lifestile using QFPC™, with which you can also help the hundreds of millions of women who lack contraception.

Live as you wish to, just break the taboo with compassion! Preventing a lifetime’s worth of ecological burden, you can float as an angel, not weighing down on the Earth. https://bocs.cf/

[1] https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/
[2] http://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/sustainableDevelopment?cn=all&type=BCpc,EFCpc&yr=2016
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.pop.totl
[4] http://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/
[5] http://footprintnetwork.org/
[6] https://climenews.com/a-wwf-vakon-hibaztatja-a-magyarokat
[7] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adding-it-up-contraception-mnh-2017
[8] https://www.contraceptioninfo.eu/node/71
[9] http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/rights/
[10] https://www.unfpa.org/publications/international-conference-population-and-development-programme-action
[11] https://www.unfpa.org/press/nairobi-summit-advance-icpd-programme-action
[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/l12kristof.html
[13] http://en.unesco.org/gem-report/sites/gem-report/files/girls-factsheet-en.pdf
[14] http://res.cloudinary.com/bocs/raw/upload/v1557231981/population_assessment_-_kohler_behrman_0_dumwz7.pdf (6.o)
[15] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
[16] https://afrika.bocs.eu

Gyula I. Simonyi

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