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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Happiness planning (contraception) is the most efficient way of protecting the environment and the climate, helpint the emergence from poverty, improving public safety, achieving peace and gender equality, ensuring the happiness of children, and preventing unemployment and mass migration. Still, only a fraction of the aids for developing countries goes for this, primarily due to the ignorance and prudery of the public opinion. So the money is already there, we just need to realize our own interests, which is one with that of the poor, as everyone wins with providing the right, know-how, and means of happiness planning. The global education of BOCS Civilization Planning Foundation facilitate this.

The BOCS Civilization Planning Foundation since 1975 for a sustainable civilization. – President: Gyula I. Simonyi

Its main goal is promoting a sustainable love-civilization, supporting environmental protection, the peace movement, and poor countries, as well as global education in Hungary, Africa, India, and other poor countries.

In 1998, Gyula I. Simonyi, the president of BOCS was invited to the Balaton Group, the annual meeting of the global network of sustainability researchers that started out in 1982. The BOCS Civilization Planning Foundation acquired the qualification of public benefit in 1999, for its environmental protection and informative activity. Our projects, global education, Indian and African partnerships help Hungary to fulfill its international obligations to support poor countries, the Cairo Programme of Action, and the Millenium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, thereby contributing to enforcing human rights, and protecting nature.

Since 2006, the BOCS Civilization Planning Foundation is a member of the EuroNGOs.org European network that supports the Programme of Action of the UN’s 1994 International Conference on Population and Development that is still in effect. It is the Hungarian member of the European network of eurASP.org. In 2009, BOCS received the MTA’s (Hungarian Scientific Academy) MÖTE (Scientific Association of Hungarian Ecologists) award for popularizing Ecology.

BOCS is the first Eastern European member of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize winner ICBL (since 1995).

Gyula I. Simonyi president, mathematician, economist, catechist, IT, system analyst, sustainability researcher and lecturer The BOCS already appeared in 1993 in this address database compiled by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center:

Kinga Kirinovics board member, horticulturist, medicinal and aromatic plants	Andrea Kováts sustainability expert, humanities	Gábor Rozsics board member, engineer	Beáta Szabó board secretary, international relations specialist, childfree advocate, English teacher

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