Birth control can combat climate change, says UN report

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said in a report on 18 November that women must be empowered to combat climate change through better availability of contraception to slowdown population growth.
The 94-page State of the World Population Report 2009, launched in London, urged world leaders to take into account improved access to family planning services in future discussions such as next month’s UN climate change summit in Copenhagen. “There is still time ... to think creatively about population, reproductive health and gender equality and how these might contribute to a just and environmentally sustainable world,” said the report.
UNFPA executive director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid said at the launch that future international agreements on climate change should take into account individuals’ power to reverse global warming. “Any treaty emerging from the December conference in Copenhagen that helps people adapt to climate change and that harnesses women’s and men’s power to reverse the warming of the earth’s atmosphere would launch a genuinely effective long-term global strategy to deal with climate change,” she said.
Climate change negotiators meeting in Copenhagen would be setting a course that would move governments “either forward or merely sideways” on the key issue of how to manage an individual’s influence on climate change. A Copenhagen agreement that would help people to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by “harnessing the insight and creativity of women and men” would launch a genuinely effective long-term global strategy to deal with climate change, said Obaid, who is from Saudi Arabia. “This report shows that women have the power to mobilize against climate change, but this potential can be realized only through policies that empower them,” she added.
Climate change was more than an issue of energy efficiency or carbon emissions. “It is also an issue of population dynamics, poverty and gender equity,” she said. Therefore, it future discussions should go beyond financial and technical aspects to “include the human dimensions, including gender, suffuse every facet of the problem.” While climate change would affect women, men, boys and girls differently around the world, “individual behavior can undermine and contribute to the global effort to cool our warming world,” Obaid said. However, the report also acknowledged that UNFPA had no proof of the effectiveness of population control with regards to climate change. “The linkages between population and climate change are in most cases complex and indirect,” it said. The report stated that, overall, women in developing countries were likely to be most vulnerable to the effects of climate change as they were trapped in a “cycle of deprivation” dictated by natural disasters, lack of mobility and a lack of earning opportunities.