It is a huge breakthrough that before COP26, many NGOs and scientists joined forces to demand that the most effective climate protection, family planning, is finally put on the agenda of climate conferences. It is a historic crime against future children that hundreds of millions are deprived of the human right, knowledge and means of contraception. – Gyula I. Simonyi

 

UPDATE: The BOCS Civilisation Planning Foundation is one of the main signatories of a similar letter to COP28!

 

NEW COALITION OF ORGANIZATIONS CALLS FOR SUSTAINABLE FAMILY PLANNING IN FACE OF CLIMATE CRISIS

National organizations urge COP26 leaders to protect most vulnerable

San Francisco, CA – Dozens of leading NGOs are calling on the President and Delegates of the COP26 in this open letter to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning as the most effective solution to address the climate crisis, and rising global inequality, including gender inequity.

The global community has failed to inform and support a universal effort towards just and sustainable family planning, which:

• Is human-rights centered
• Ensures sustainable and equitable resources for greater investment in each child
• Enables communities and governments to protect children and future generations while upholding reproductive rights

On the contrary, pressures to increase births, or to obstruct family planning programs, are driving our biggest crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril. Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, is contributing to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation. Worsening inequality, in large part driven by our growing population, is also a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe.

Here are the facts:

• The most effective way to address many of the impacts on our environment and other species, like climate change, is by choosing smaller families. It’s up to 20 times more effective than changing diet or forms of transportation.
• By 2100 world population could vary by billions of people, depending on whether the average woman in the world today has one child more or one child fewer in her lifetime.
• Better family planning is the best way to reduce inequality. Other interventions alone are simply too late.

Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance says, “Our growth-driven policies are not only a cause of immense suffering for marginalised human and ecological communities, present and future, but they are premised upon oppressive power structures. Not only are reproductive, intergenerational, and ecological justice under attack, our current unsustainable growth-centred family planning policies are threatening all life on earth. We collectively need to acknowledge and address the urgency of this predicament.”

Fair Start Movement is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing growth-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model. 

Population Balance is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that provides education and solutions to address the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals.

Source: Fair Start Movement | Carter Dillard | 27 Okt. 2021

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