Sustainable Development in a Changing Climate - International Development Committee Contents


Written evidence submitted by the Population and Sustainability Network (PSN), and Marie Stopes International

  Population and Sustainability Network has been established to clarify and communicate the importance for sustainability of both population and consumption factors. It aims to bring together development, environment and reproductive health NGOs, government departments, academics and others, to increase leverage on population issues.

Marie Stopes International works through a partnership of agencies in 40 different countries working to improve sexual and reproductive health. Together, the partnership has almost 30 years experience of providing maternal health services in developing countries across four continents.

  This paper reflects the joint position of both organsiations. We welcome this inquiry as an important opportunity to highlight the role of population growth issues and include them into the discourse and policy response to climate change.

I.  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  I.I  This paper aims to provide an overview of the ways in which demographic trends interface with climate change, in both impacts and drivers.

I.II  It explores the ways that rapid population growth and high fertility exacerbate vulnerabilities to the impacts of climate change. It seeks to illustrate with the use of examples, how high population growth, high fertility and poor sexual and reproductive health in Less Developed Countries (LDCs) undermine coping capacity on two levels:

    1. By compromising robust environmental systems upon which many people depend for their livelihoods and survival.

    2. By impacting on human well-being and human capital thus sustaining vulnerability.

  I.III  While adaptation is at the heart of this discussion, we also explore some of the research about how population growth is understood to impact on GHG emissions and to what extent population growth should be considered in climate change mitigation policy.

  I.IV  A key resource for this paper is a series of reports entitled National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA), submitted by 38 of the least developed country governments outlining their country specific priorities for climate change adaptation. The NAPAs were submitted to the UNFCCC, and are valuable for the contribution they make to improving local stakeholder participation, as they were intentionally developed in a consultative way to include the voices of the poorest and most local groups. Many identify rapid population growth as an issue that exacerbates the impacts of climate change.

  I.V  The policy recommendations for this paper are as follows:

    1. LDCs characterised by rapid population growth should be supported to integrate family planning into their programmes of adaptation to climate change.

    2. In this context family planning should not be perceived as inherently driven by "population targets", but as a beneficial, relatively inexpensive policy intervention in its own right with likely ensuring favourable effects on demographic trends.

    3. The Department for International Development should coordinate their policy response to climate change in such a way that fully integrates all development sectors, including the sexual and reproductive health department. A coherent policy response that combines harmonised efforts and a horizontal approach would have reinforcing benefits, for both mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

1.  CLIMATE CHANGE, THE ENVIRONMENT AND POPULATION GROWTH

  1.1  Climate change as an internationally recognised phenomenon is happening beyond all reasonable scientific doubt. The earth is warming as a result of anthropogenic activity, which is impacting on the earth's natural systems of positive and negative feedback processes, causing dramatic alterations to the global ecosystem. During this period it is predicted that we will see a period of unprecedented environmental change, including increased frequency of floods and droughts, storms and cyclones, pests and diseases, sea level rise, land use changes and loss of biodiversity, to name but a few.

1.2  The case to be made here is not how, why or whether climate change will impact on the environment and human populations; for the purposes of this paper this has been taken as a given. Instead, the aim is to show how population growth as it happens in the Least Developed Countries asserts an additional pressure on top of these changes and also contributes to them.

  1.3  According to the UN 2006 Revision of the World Population Prospects, world population is likely to increase from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total number of people living in the world in 1950 and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, where population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050. There are numerous ways in which population growth is relevant to climate change policy planning. However so far the phenomenon of population change and demographics has largely been absent from the international climate change discourse.

  1.4  Three likely reasons why population does not feature as in climate change policy planning have been advanced by John Bongaarts, a leading demographer at the Population Council and Brian O'Neill, a climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research. These reasons are that (1) the real problem is consumption, (2) not much can be done about population and (3) strengthening population policies leads to coercion (Leiwan Jiang 2008).

  1.5  This paper seeks to illustrate why these three barriers to including population issues into climate change dialogue are unfounded. These are as follows: (1) the case to include population issues into climate change policy is not to divert attention from the immediate and urgent necessary reductions in GHG emissions from energy intensive consumption, mainly in the minority and rich world, but to perceive it as a synergistic intervention with virtues in its own right. (2) Population growth projections are often based on assumptions that fertility decline to date will continue. In many places the family planning programmes that have been responsible for this decline are crumbling, due to decreased investment over the past 15 years. (3) Population policies have led to cases of coercion in the past which means today every effort must be made to upholding the highest quality of woman centered service delivery offering a wide range of culturally acceptable, non-coercive and temporary forms of contraception.

2.  ADAPTATION AND DEFINITIONS OF VULNERABILITY

  2.1  A useful understanding of "vulnerability" is offered by the UN Environment Programme in their 4th Global Environment Outlook report:

    "[Vulnerability] is defined here as a function of exposure, sensitivity to impacts and the ability or lack of ability to cope or adapt." (UNEP 2007)

      2.2  Vulnerability might be an exposure to changes in the natural environment, disrupting the way people use or depend on it, which is a primary concern in the context of climate change. Also important to note is exposure to forces like extreme price fluctuations, underlying socio-economic, institutional and environmental conditions.

      2.3  "Vulnerability is useful to describe places, people and ecosystems that suffer the most from changes in environmental and/or human induced variability or change, and identifies the underlying causes." (UNEP 2007)

      2.4  The precursors of vulnerability are most often linked to instances of poverty in as much as this reduces people's capacity to adapt to or cope with sudden or unexpected changes. In this respect it is crucial that all sectors of development programmes are streamlined with climate change adaptation policies. At the very least it demands that the programmers and policy makers are well versed in the new dynamics expected to arise due to climate change.

      2.5  It is well known by now that while the majority of the activity driving the causes of climate change stems from the rich north while the people that will be disproportionately affected by climate change will be in the global south.

      2.6  The world's poorest are the most vulnerable to climate change for more than one reason. While at times the existing and often difficult climatic conditions of a developing country may be exacerbated by further temperature increases and weather variability, the people in developing countries often depend more acutely and directly on the natural environment for subsistence and livelihood. This relationship is further compounded by numerous ancillary stressors and low adaptive capacity, often characterised by poverty, underdeveloped economies, poor health, and limited scientific and technological capabilities (IPCC 2007).

      2.7  The purpose of this paper is to illustrate some of the ways that population growth interfaces with climate change. Here we look at how population growth, characterised by high fertility acts as an extra stressor exacerbating capacity to cope or adapt to climate change and weather variability. Additionally this paper explores work already completed around the relationship of population growth to future emissions scenarios.

      2.8  Our key conclusion is that increased investment in voluntary family planning services can make a significant contribution to both adaptation and mitigation strategies and programmes.

    3.  POPULATION GROWTH AND VULNERABILITY

      Two kinds of coping capacity:

    3.1  The relationship between high population growth and its impact on the environment is not undocumented. What is less apparent is the way that population growth, characterised in developing countries by high fertility and very often accompanied by poverty, affects coping capacity to climate change or human induced environmental changes. In this case we are concerned with two kinds of coping capacity:

      1. Robust and healthy environmental systems (eg agriculture, biodiversity hot spots, fisheries and forests,) that are resilient against increased weather variability predicted from climate change.

      2. Human well being; the coping capacity of people and communities is characterised by good health, secure and adequate livelihoods, personal security and good information and knowledge about the expected direct and indirect impacts of climate change.

      3.2  The causal chain by which high population growth interacts with these two kinds of vulnerability follows different pathways.

      3.3  In relation to point one; UNEP, in their 4th Global Environmental Outlook Report (2007) use the drivers- pressures-state-impacts-responses (DPSIR) framework in analysing the interaction of environmental change. At a local level population growth is identified as a key driver of environmental degradation.

      3.4  Degradation means that environmental systems are weakened to the possible impacts of climate change, hence compromising their capacity to cope and increasing not only their vulnerability but also that of the people that depend on them. Other key drivers are consumption and production patterns, scientific and technological innovation, economic demand, markets and trade (UNEP 2007). "Demographics" most often meaning high population growth but also spatial distribution patterns and migration, asserts pressure on water resources, land use practices, biodiversity, fishery management and forests.

      3.5  This model is further supported by analysis carried out on the National Adaptation Programmes of Action reports (NAPA). These are reports submitted by the governments of 38 of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to the UNFCCC. NAPA reports provide a process for LDCs to identify priority activities that respond to their urgent and immediate needs with regard to adaptation to climate change. The NAPA reports take into account existing coping strategies at the grassroots level, and builds upon these to identify priority activities. In the NAPA process, prominence is given to community-level input as an important source of information, recognizing that grassroots communities are the main stakeholders. While their shortcomings have been identified these relate to the functionalities between countries and implementing agencies, for instance the difficulties with affecting follow up activities and securing funding (Ayers 2008). They are however hugely valuable for the purpose of this argument due to the input from the local stakeholders themselves.

      3.6  A large majority of the 38 NAPA reports identify rapid population growth as a factor that exacerbates the detrimental impacts of climate change. Over half of NAPA reports cite population growth as a main driver for environmental damage, land degradation and soil erosion; thereby sustaining food insecurity and poor agricultural yields. Just under half of reports cited population growth as a key driver of some of the key consequences of climate change, including fresh water shortages, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, and shortages of grazing land per capita. The key implication here is that the governments of many LDCs believe that the harmful affects of climate change can be better mitigated by addressing rapid population growth as a component of the overall programme to adapt to the affects of changing climatic conditions. This is perhaps an unsurprising finding given that the population growth rate of many LDCs exceeds 2% a year and hence will lead to a doubling or tripling of their populations by 2050.

      3.7  Five of the most frequently mentioned factors that the country reports show to worsen synergistically due to high population growth and climate change are:

      —  Population pressure on fresh water availability

    National studies have shown that soil moisture would decline under future climate change. When coupled with high consumption, increased population growth, high variation in rainfall and high rate of evaporation, a looming water crisis appears likely.

    Sudan. p.19 2007

    —  Population affecting soil degradation/ erosion- implications for agriculture

    Loss of biodiversity, herbal plants, life and physical injuries are most prominent in the highland areas. This is mainly die to high population density leading to pressure for arable land (over cultivation), deforestation and soil degradation resulting in frequent landslides.

    Uganda. p. 48. 2007.

    —  Shortage of land per capita/ over grazing

    "Vulnerable regions receive more and more migrating populations from regions with high density of population and where natural resources have reached a critical level of degradation."

    Rwanda. p. 37. 2006

    —  Deforestation

    "..many gazetted/ closed high forest and mangroves are threatened by deforestation, the major causes being encroachment due to high population pressure and over- utilization."

    Sierra Leone. p. 78. 2007

    —  High population density/ migration to coastal areas

    A doubling of the coastal population is expected in as little as 12 years.. coastal areas are most vulnerable to climate change due to the anticipated rise in sea level, floods and other consequences. Unfortunately, the effect of sea level rise is already being experienced in Coast region, in Bagamoyo District. In this region sea level rise has resulted into inundation of some traditional water sources. This process has resulted into salinization of shallow water wells, the only source of domestic water supply.

    Looking at this trend, there is an immediate need to take action to curb the situation, otherwise if unchecked; people living along the coast will be forced to migrate to other areas, something which may cause social conflicts and other environmental degradation due to overpopulation and utilization of resources.

    Tanzania p51 2007

  3.8  "Population pressure" in this context should be understood as a phenomenon that compounds human vulnerability to climate change, and exacerbates pressures on the environment exerted by a rapidly changing climate system. At the same time, it also significantly compromises the aspirations of LDC governments to feed, clothe, house and educate their populations.

  3.9  Conversely, however, traditional adaptation efforts have been criticized as being dominated by "technical" sector responses often overlooking more "people focused" aspects of human vulnerability. The NAPA reports, for example reflect this sectoral, and largely technical area of focus as they tend to emphasise agricultural or other technical adaptation responses. Reforestation, education programs, drought resistant crop varieties and seasonal climate forecasts are frequently mentioned adaptation strategies.

  3.10  Alternative adaptive strategies, to the sector, impact driven ones as described above might promote complementary adaptation measures that would centre on personal well being; both physical and emotional. Fssel and Klein (2006) describe health measures such as vaccination against climate sensitive vector born diseases and improving nutritional status as examples of alternative adaptation strategies. These kind of adaptation strategies would bolster the second kind of coping capacity described above; human well being.

  3.11  In a case study seeking to include the voices from those most at risk of climate change, fieldwork was carried out with communities living and working as pastoralist herders in the Sahelian zone of Senegal. In a relative degree of severity they listed factors they considered most aggravating to daily life so that these could be lineated with those stemming from climate stress. They listed health as the number one concern with lack of money and poor quality food coming closely behind (Tschakert 2007).

  3.12  The health impacts of climate change are compounded by rapid population growth and high population density. It's possible to see this relationship operating at both the societal and household scale.

  3.13  In an LDC at societal level, a rapidly growing human population can put enormous stress on an already struggling healthcare system. Uganda's NAPA report describes where climate change imposes increased burden on the health services in Uganda such as floods that lead to increased incidences of cholera and diarrhoea:

    "The high population and growth rate of Uganda is not matched with growth in health services and wealth| the high population puts additional stress on the natural resources and weak health infrastructure."

    Uganda NAPA, p 11

  3.14  At the household level, high fertility acts as a proxy for rapid population growth. Absent family planning services and poor sexual and reproductive health result in high and often risky fertility patterns. The concurrent health impacts of absent or poor quality family planning and reproductive health services are numerous. It is estimated that if the needs of the 200 million women who have expressed a desire to either delay or prevent pregnancy were met with high quality, voluntary family planning programs then these could prevent 23 million unplanned births, 22 million induced abortions, 142,000 pregnancy-related deaths (including 53,000 from unsafe abortions) and 1.4 million infant deaths a year (UNFPA/ Guttmacher 2004). One third of the global disease burden amongst women of reproductive age derives from ill sexual and reproductive health (UNFPA/ Guttmacher 2004).

  3.14  High fertility and lack of family planning also means that a girl is less likely to complete secondary education or develop her own economic autonomy. In Sub- Saharan Africa, between 8% and 25% of girls who drop out of school do so because of an early pregnancy (IPPF written evidence to the APPG hearings).

  3.15  Health and education make up the cornerstones of human capital, which is fundamental for coping capacity and reducing vulnerability (UNEP 2007). Hence poor or absent family planning services and sexual health programs significantly disadvantage many of the world's poorest women facing the growing challenges of climate change. The cost of providing the voluntary family planning services that address these problems could be one of the most significant investments made to improve the wellbeing of women and girls in the poorest countries.

4.  WOMEN'S VULNERABILITY IS UNIQUE

  4.1  An increasing amount of work is being completed exploring the gendered dynamics of climate change. In developing countries women are amongst the most vulnerable groups to climate change; not only do they account for larger proportions of the agricultural workforce but they also have fewer alternative income opportunities, crucial at times when climate variability affects agricultural yields and food security. Women are responsible for managing the household and reproductive and care giving duties, which in turn limits their mobility and renders them vulnerable to natural disasters and other locally specific sudden changes.

4.2  Dwindling natural resources also disproportionately affect women, as they have to walk further to find fire-wood and collect water. Worldwide women and girls spend about 40 billion hours collecting water- equivalent to a year's labour for the entire workforce of France (UNDP 2006 p. 312 UNEP), and in some countries women and girls spend more than two hours a day collecting water (UNICEF 2004 p.312 UNEP). As water resources become increasingly unstable with the progression of climate change the demands on women's time and workloads are likely to increase.

  4.3  Efforts, hence, by policy makers and programmers interested in minimising the adverse impacts of climate change should ensure that policies address issues of women's empowerment or at the very least are highly sensitive to the gendered dynamics.

  4.4  Many benefits like health and human capacity, including education, produce wider benefits for a woman's family and community and are more easily attainable with good reproductive health. In particular the opportunity for a woman to space and time her births, and the provision of obstetric and post natal care, will dramatically improve a woman's health and resilience.

  4.5  A statement by the Department for International Development to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and RH claims:

    "The ability of women to control their own fertility is absolutely fundamental to women's empowerment and equality" (DFID 2007)

  4.6  Gender differences must be considered not just in terms of differential vulnerability, but also as differential adaptive capacity. During a natural disaster for example women play a key role in protecting managing and recovering lost household resources, and often develop innovative strategies to address climate change impacts (WEDO 2007). Case studies in Senegal, Bangladesh and Ghana demonstrate grass roots women groups developing coping strategies related to energy and forestry, agriculture, water resources and trade (WEDO 2007). Women thus must be perceived as powerful agents of change and should be fully integrated into climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies at all levels.

5.  FAMILY PLANNING

  5.1  Population growth projections are often based on assumptions that fertility decline to date will continue. In many places the family planning programmes that have been responsible for this decline are crumbling, due to decreased investment over the past 15 years.

5.2  It is not uncommon to hear policy makers disregard family planning as an unimportant aspect to fertility reduction on the premise that female education will be enough to stimulate reproductive preferences in line with demographic transition. This is a significant oversight; for a woman to have full control over her reproductive preferences she will need the means to prevent the pregnancies she has now decided are unwanted.

  5.3  Family planning is a relatively inexpensive intervention. It is estimated that to provide high quality family planning services to the 200 million women who would like to delay or prevent their next pregnancy, the costs would be in the margin of $3.9 billion a year (Guttmacher/UNFPA)—a fraction of the hundreds of billions, possibly trillions of dollars that are estimated to be the total cost of mitigation and adaptation to climate change. UNFPA/ NIDI resourceflows.org/ APPG, Return of the Population Growth Factor.


  5.4  The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo reached a consensus about the importance of reproductive health. Since that time, there has been a reduction in funding for family planning programmes, partly due to its replacement by HIV/AIDS as the global sexual and reproductive health and rights priority and partly because USAID funds under Republican administrations have been subject to the "GAG rule". This rule stipulates not that US tax payers money cannot be spent on "abortion related activities"6 (such a ruling, the Helms Amendment, has been in place since 1973) but that, in order to be eligible for USAID funding, an organization could not spend any other funding from any other source on such activities. This has led to an apartheid in sexual and reproductive health services in many countries, in which family planning and abortion services (where available) are offered by entirely separate organizations, so that the most obvious part of abortion aftercare—ensuring that the woman who has evidently had unprotected sex is given access to contraception—does not take place, principally because USAID contraceptive services must demonstrate that they have nothing whatever to do with abortion services.

  5.5  There are numerous and complex obstacles to family planning. Various "Population control" programs of the 20th century were well known for employing coercive methods to achieve desired population/ fertility reduction targets. These programs cast a long shadow since they were very far from protecting the rights of individuals and couples they worked with. Efforts must remain therefore firmly oriented towards upholding the highest quality of woman centered service delivery offering a wide range of culturally acceptable, non-coercive and temporary forms of contraception. LDCs that highlight population programmes as a part of adaptation strategy must be supported by the international community in this respect.

6.  POPULATION GROWTH AND CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION

  6.1  So far this paper has examined the relationship between high population growth, high fertility, poor sexual and reproductive health and vulnerability. The implications for adaptaon policy are thus apparent; namely increased investment in high quality voluntary family planning programs for those that are crumbling, and renewed commitment to sexual and reproductive health goals. The grounds for these interventions should be considered as central to helping individuals and women cope with changes in the natural environment, but perceived as leveraging wider benefits of population stabilisation.

6.2  In this context family planning should not be perceived inherently driven by "population targets", but as a beneficial, relatively inexpensive policy intervention in its own right with likely ensuring favourable effects on demographic trends.

  6.3  The so far little mention of population growth in respect to mitigation is because in the context of development and climate change what matters to the global poor is adaptation, but mitigation can not be ignored.

  6.4  The framing of population growth in the context of mitigation is altogether a more difficult relationship to explore. Not only in the ethical sense, given that it is simply wrong to claim that the high population growth mainly occurring in the south is one of the key drivers of climate change today, given that the poor account for a very small amount of GHG emissions, disproportionately less than their population share, but also because so little research has yet been dedicated to it. Growth in population has however been identified to be an important source of GHG emissions in the future (O'Neill). Nicholas Stern explains, in his seminal report the Stern Review, that per capita emissions growth in the developing world, where the majority of population growth is projected to take place, will rise significantly faster than in the developed world (Stern Review 2006).

  6.5  The current research that exists, seeks to feed population scenarios or variants (low, medium and high, produced by the UN) into emissions scenarios. Building upon the emissions scenarios produced by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Brian O'Neill, a climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Washington has adjusted some of scenario modelling to include more detailed analysis of the variables.

  6.6  The overall conclusion of this work is that in general you can associate a smaller global population with lower emissions, but it's not going to guarantee a low emissions scenario on its own (O'Neill 2008). While population is a major factor in emissions scenarios, reducing population growth on its own would not be the answer to emissions reductions. There are multiple other significant drivers behind growing harmful GHG emissions that cause climate change.

  6.7  O'Neill amongst others working in both the demographic, health and climate sectors argue that considerations of population issues, which start from individual well being and that respect rights should be part of climate policy dialogues, where as up until now they have remained absent. A likely reason for this absence is the dangerous misconception that linking population issues with climate change is being used to "hijack" the debate and direct attention away from the current key drivers.

  6.8  A larger global population at any level of consumption will inevitably make it more difficult to curtail emissions than a smaller one. This is exemplified in the Kaya identity published in the Stern Review.

CO2 emissions from energy=

Population x (GDP per head) x (energy use GDP) x (CO2 emissions/ energy use)

  Stern uses this equation to demonstrate the main drivers of energy related emissions growth, which he says are:

    "|economic growth, technological choices affecting carbon intensity of energy use and energy intensity of output, and population growth." (Stern Review 2006)

      6.9  Nevertheless a good deal of current global population growth will continue no matter how effective family planning programs are because so much of it is the result of high population momentum gathered from previous growth: there are always larger cohorts of people having children from one generation to the next. Additionally fertility has dropped in most parts around the world, and globally stands at 2.54 births per woman (UNFPA 2008). However where fertility is higher, namely in the least developed countries, which is as high as 7.16 in Niger for example, but stands at an average of 4.6 there is good scope for high quality voluntary family planning programs coupled with female education and health care to act not only as an adaptation strategy but also as mitigation against carbon emissions of the future.

      6.10  Outside of the scope of this paper but equally significant factors of concern are general population demographics encompassing large scale migrations (particularly cross border), spatial distribution (especially along coast lines and to urban centres), population/ age structure and household composition.

      6.11  The difficulty in framing population growth within the context of climate change mitigation policies is that there seems so much scope to undo the hard won victories achieved at Cairo. The fear remains that as soon as family planning is considered a population/ climate change policy, the purpose for which is to explicitly reduce population sizes this will compromise the integrity of such programmes, which are fundamentally based on Cairo principals. In a situation such as this, the consequences for reproductive health and family planning might be at best; lower quality services or at worst grave infringements of human rights. The other anxiety is that if "population policies" are adopted aggressively by governments seeking to address climate change it is likely that they will be taken over by departments or ministries that would not normally address these issues thus throwing open huge opportunities for ill practice.

      6.12  Many argue that family planning coupled with education and efforts to address underlying drivers of high fertility offer a high cost effective investment option. O'Neill points out that if you have a fixed long term policy goal for climate change, for instance a targeted emissions reduction—"how much less costly would it be to achieve (through changing the energy system) to reach that goal if you had a lower population path rather than a medium one?" (O'Neill 2008)

    7.  CROSS SECTOR ENGAGEMENT

      7.1  We need to support reproductive health as a basic right in itself not as an explicit motive behind population targets. With this in mind it is easy to see the benefits of a cross sector framework simultaneously addressing population-health- environmental (PHE) issues. A policy response across multiple domains would ensure that programmes always build on the theoretical and programming expertise of generations past. The PHE framework is growing in popularity and has recently been launched as a government initiative in Ethiopia, part of the wider East African PHE movement to increase coordination and dialogue amongst sectors working in both the population/ health and environmental fields.

    7.2  "Ethiopia is home to two of the world's biodiversity hotspots, each of which comprises at least 1,500 species living in a rapidly shrinking habitat. Land is needed to grow food, yet agricultural yields have dropped and traditional farming practices are proving unsustainable. With more than 77 million citizens—and with the population growing by more than two million annually—Ethiopia must strike a better balance between human survival and preservation of natural resources." (Ethiopian PHE network brochure).

      7.3  There are valuable lessons to be learnt here for the British Government's response to climate change. With increased coordination across department teams there would be greater opportunity for harmonizing a collective response to climate change, which in turn would improve the quality of adaptation policies and address key underlying vulnerabilities. With climate change presenting one of the key development challenges of the 21st century every team at the Department for International Development should prepare for the unexpected challenges that lie ahead and mitigate against the potentially gravely damaging impacts.

    8.  CONCLUSION

      8.1  This paper has explored and illustrated the ways that population growth currently interfaces with climate change and is likely to do so in the future hence arguing it is vital to address these issues in an open debate, encompassing actors across sectors. There is huge scope to develop an approach that addresses underlying causes and vulnerabilities, and one that no longer shies from the topic of population, as is so often the case with climate change policy dialogue.

    8.2  Policy planning and budgetary allocation must account for the fact that family planning services are in decline (see earlier section on family planning) and also reconcile this with the significant leveraging benefits it can bring at the individual, household, societal and global level, not only in the context of climate change but across the board. Whilst heeding concerns about the possible wrong way to link population growth and climate change and respecting the gravity of the mistakes made in the past, it is perhaps significant to revisit the language of the 1994 Program of Action, to which 180 countries signed:

    "|recognizing that the ultimate goal is the improvement of the quality of life of present and future generations, the objective is to facilitate the demographic transition as soon as possible in countries where there is an imbalance between demographic rates and social, economic and environmental goals, while respecting human rights." Emphasis added

  8.3  It is fundamental to openly bring population back into the debate since it will underwrite every other difficulty that climate change triggers. This is not meant to be seen as an effort to divert attention or urgency away from the other necessary climate change policies which address reducing GHG emissions from energy intensive consumption activities, but to present a synergistic, reinforcing intervention developed within a win/win framework.

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The Women's Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO), with ABANTU for Development in Ghana, ActionAid, Bangladesh and ENDA in Senegal. 2008 Gender, Climate Change and Human Security. Lessons from Bangladesh, Ghana and Senegal. WEDO, New York





 
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