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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Two hundred and twenty-five million women in lower-income countries say they want the ability to choose whether and when to become pregnant, but lack the necessary access to contraception – resulting in some 74 million unintendedpregnancies each year. The need persists in some high-income countries as well, including the United States, where 45 percent of pregnancies are unintended. Securing the fundamental right to voluntary, high-quality family planning services around the world would have powerful positive impacts onthe health, welfare, and life expectancy of both women and their children. The benefits for social and economic development across all genders are myriadand, unto themselves, merit swift and sustained action. Family planning can also have ripple effects on drawing down greenhouse gas emissions.

In the early 1970s, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren developed the now-famous equation known as “IPAT”:

Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology.

In simplified fashion, it argues that the impact human beings have on the environment is a function of number, level of consumption, and the kind of technology used. Much of the work to address global warming has focused on the technology piece of the equation and the shift away from fossil fuels. Some has zeroed in on affluence, aiming to reduce consumer appetite for things, particularly in rich countries. Addressing the third factor, population, remains controversial, despite widespread agreement that greater numbers place more strain on the planet, though not equally so. Each person consumes resources and causes emissions throughout a lifetime; those impacts are much greater for someone in the United States than in Uzbekistan or Uganda. Carbon footprints are a common and comfortable topic. How many feet are leaving their tracks is not, due largely to concerns that linking family planning with environmental health is inherently coercive or cruel – Malthusian in the worst sense. However, when family planning focuses on healthcare provision and meeting women’s expressed needs, empowerment,equality, and well-being are the goal; benefits to the planet are side effects.

Challenges to expanding access to family planning range from basic supply of affordable and culturally appropriate contraception to education about sex and reproduction; from faraway health centers to hostile attitudes of medical providers; from social and religious norms to sexual partners’opposition to using birth control. Currently, the world faces a $5.3 billion funding shortfall for providing the access to reproductive healthcare that women say they want to have.

The success stories in family planning, however, are striking. Iran put a program into place in the early 1990s that has been touted as among the most successful such efforts in history. Completely voluntary, it involved religious leaders, educated the public, and provided free access to contraception. As a result, fertility rates halved in just one decade (from 5.6 to 2.4). In Bangladesh, average birth rates fell from six children in the 1980s to two now, as the door-to-door approach pioneered at the Matlab hospital spread across the country: female health workers providing basic care for women and children where they live. These and other success stories show that provision of contraception is rarely sufficient. Family planning requires social reinforcement, for example the radio and television soap operas now used in many places to shift perceptions of what is “normal” or “right. (The Population Media Center deals with this, specifically.)

After being silent on the topic of family planning for more than twenty-five years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included access to reproductive health services in its 2014 synthesis report and pointed to population growth as an important factor in greenhouse gas concentrations. Growing evidence suggests that family planning has the additional benefit of building resilience – helping communities and countries better cope with and adapt to inevitable changes brought by global warming. That too has implications for women and girls, who, because of existing inequities, suffer disproportionately when impacts, from disease to natural disaster, hit. Still, this topic continues to be taboo in many countries and institutions, hemmed in by the persistent belief that raising the issue of population, or approaches that reduce it, is inherently draconian and an affront to the worth of human life. It may be the other way around on a warming, crowded planet: To revere human life it is necessary to ensure a viable, vibrant home for all. Honoring the dignity of women and children through family planning is not about centralized governments forcing the birth rate down – or up, through natalist policies. Nor is it about agencies or activists in rich countries, where emissions are highest, telling people elsewhere to stop having children. It is most essentially about freedom and opportunity for women and the recognition of basic human rights. Currently, family planning programs receive just 1 percent of all overseas development assistance. That number could double, with low-income countries aiming to match it – a moral move that happens to have meaning for the planet (and by that, for the survival of humans).

Source: Drawdown – Paul Hawken

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Russia is perhaps the life on earth – and thus the last refuge of humanity: is the only large area that is not yet overloaded and has a dwindling human population.		Russia is perhaps the life on earth – and thus the last refuge of humanity
Carbon quotas should not be confused with carbon credits. A quota is a free political atmospheric pollution (emissions) permit, of which there are fewer and fewer every year.		Should we get a heat stroke or starve instead?
Statement on cuts in UK contribution to UNFPA		Family planning aid cut betrays women and undermines Prime Minister’s climate change claims
		Saving Us From Ourselves
		An open access, peer reviewed, interdisciplinary journal exploring all aspects of the relationship between human numbers and environmental issues.
Having Kids is an international human rights organization dedicated to improving family planning systems worldwide with a simple idea:		Open Letter to Joe Biden’s Administration: The Most Effective 3 Changes for 2021
A new study highlights the importance of ensuring universal access to modern reproductive healthcare to achieving the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.		Reproductive Healthcare: The Missing Link
Hats off to Paul Hawken, the environmentalist behind Project Drawdown. Three years ago, he published a best-selling book, ‘Drawdown: the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming’.		Drawdown: a review of the Review
Carbon offsetting is a widespread tool in efforts to achieve net zero emissions.		Oxford launches new principles for credible carbon offsetting
Among women wanting to avoid a pregnancy in LMICs, unmet need is much higher for adolescents than for all women aged 15–49 (43% vs. 24%).		Investing in Adolescents’ Sexual and Reproductive Health in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Where has the highest rate of male sterilisation? How many people in sub-Saharan Africa are on the pill? Explore a world of contraception data.		Contraception and family planning around the world – interactive
Short birth intervals are associated with chronic malnutrition, which contributes to about 50% of all child deaths. Additionally, one woman a minute dies from pregnancy, childbirth or unsafe abortion.		Return of the Population Growth Factor
YaleGlobal Online		Addressing Population Challenge Is Not Impossible
Chinese Journal of Population Resources and Environment		Discussing why population growth is still ignored or denied
State avoided spending nearly $70 million to care for babies of low-income teens, study says.		Taboo breaking makes health system better and cheaper
(Ecological Overshoot Day: live as you wish to, just help those who lack contraceptives!)		July 29 is Earth-Overshrinking Day, not „Overconsumption Day”
Towards Prosperity		Why voluntary Family Planning programs are the investment?
Sustainability		What is sustainability, actually?
Family Planning for Climate Protection		Investing in Family Planning is the most efficient and most potent Climate Protection Strategy
Scientists warn about Climate Emergency and the swelling population		More than 11.000 scientists issue a warning about Climate Emergency, and address six key areas for critical changes, including addressing the planet’s swelling human population
The issue of Population in the Environmental Movement		How the issue of (over)population first galvanized the environmental movement into a global political force, then slowly became a taboo, rendering all other environmental efforts futile
The 2019 Nairobi Statement		The 2019 Nairobi Statement – The road to Zero unmet need for family planning information and services and Zero preventable maternal deaths
Global Population Control		It is a tragic measure of how far the world has changed – and the infinite capacity of modern man for taking offence – that there are no two subjects that can get you more swiftly into political trouble than motherhood and apple pie.
Boris Johnson: Global overpopulation is the real issue		The last time I tentatively suggested that there was something to be said in favour of apple pie, I caused a frenzy of hatred in the healthy-eating lobby.

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