The world is failing children. Sign on for the most effective action.
Urge the COP28 to support just and sustainable family planning to ensure an equitable
and safe future.
Helping those millions with unmet need of Human Right of Contraception (UN, 1968) helps to avoid unintended pregnancies, i.e. avoid significant CO2e emissions. This very effective climate protection can be measured e.g. by the Quality Family Planning Standard (QFPS TM), and ensuring demand, access and use of contraception and other health services can be improved with the birth equity entitlements described below.
We call on the President and Delegates of the COP28 to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning to address human rights obligations, rising global inequality, gender inequity, ecological overshoot, and the climate crisis.
Governments, NGOs, and major foundations are failing women, children and future generations. There is a lack of a multilateral agenda for population policies in the midst of a climate emergency, especially affecting the vulnerable majority in the global south. Without a universal effort towards equitable and sustainable family planning, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), FP2030
commitment, and Human Development Index benchmarks cannot be achieved, and human rights will continue to suffer. Already the MDG5b (“Achieve, by 2015, universal access to reproductive health!”) justification stated: “Unmet need for family planning undermines achievement of several other goals.”
However, current political, religious, economic, and cultural pressures to increase births, and obstruct family planning programs, are driving our biggest crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril.
Today, almost half of all pregnancies are unplanned. The United Nations declared contraception a human right already in 1968. The ICPD Cairo Programme of Action (1994), MDG5b (2005), SDG 3.7 and 5.6 (2015) all call for contraceptive access for all. Nevertheless still hundreds of millions of women are without access to contraception.
Worsening inequality, in large part driven by children born into unplanned and unjust conditions, is a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe. The severe consequences include psychological trauma, lack of education and health care, high maternal and infant mortality, poverty and vulnerability to violence.
Avoiding unintended pregnancies also means avoiding significant CO2e emissions. The emissions avoided can be measured e.g. by the Quality Family Planning Standard (QFPS TM). This standard is based on data from UNFPA, IPPF, MSI and the Guttmacher Institute. There are billions more humans on this planet than Earth can support in an ecologically sustainable way. Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, contributes to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation.
Nearly half of the world’s children are at an ‘extremely high risk’ of the impacts of the climate crisis.
– UNICEF
For the past two years we have been collecting sign-ons for iterations of a letter to the COP. We are making progress. The COP27 made a historic move to establish a Loss and Damages Fund. Such climate reparations are what we need but they are insufficient if they do not improve the birth and development conditions of vulnerable children.
The most effective way to protect the communities and regions who will be most harmed is by ensuring all children a Fair Start in life.
The current COP model externalizes the true costs of wealth on women and children. This is a call to pay them back.
- The fundamental policy model leadership is using is killing innocent people.
- That model violates human rights because it does not ensure all children minimum levels of wellbeing.
- Leadership misled those at risk about the efficacy of their fundamental policy model. A better model can save millions of lives, and is simply based on prioritizing loss and damage payments as ecosocial birth equity entitlements – the first and overriding human right.
- This correct model is already being practiced and is effective.
PLEASE SIGN to take powerful action by adding your organization’s name here.
Cute Native African Women Carrying healthful Water in a village
