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State of the World 2002 Chapter 6: "Rethinking Population, Improving Lives" Introduction: The rapid growth of the world’s human population is one of the trends underlying persistent poverty and the degradation of the natural environment. Although the global rate of population growth peaked at 2.1 percent a year in the 1960s and has declined to under 1.3 percent today, the planet still adds about 77 million people each year, the equivalent of 10 New York Cities. Reversing this trend depends on building and maintaining the political will to support family planning and related health services that allow couples and individuals to make their own decisions about the timing of pregnancy and children's health. Recent research shows a strong correlation between the status of women in a society and that society’s environmental problems. As the largest generation of young people in human history—1.7 billion people aged 10-24—reach reproductive age, recasting population policy as a venture in social development and greater gender equality will be essential. From Chapter 6: The failure to recognize the importance of women’s needs and concerns, or gender myopia, can be especially damaging in natural resource policy—for example, when development agencies offer technical and agricultural assistance mostly to men in areas where women are the ones toting the fuelwood and water and tilling the soil. In the past decade, the international development community has made strides in focusing its efforts on women’s stewardship of natural resources. "Since rights to natural resources are so heavily biased against women," reasons Agnes Quisumbing of the International Food Policy Research Institute, "equalizing these rights will lead to more efficient and equitable resource use." Indeed, when government officials or community leaders fail to recognize the different ways women use natural resources—in the spaces between male-managed cash crops, for example—the resources are easily destroyed. When women gain rights to land or other resources, they also gain power that reaches well beyond forests or watersheds. By commanding a concrete resource, notes Indian economist Bina Agarwal, women can take more control in existing relations by improving their self-sufficiency, reducing their dependence on men, and boosting their bargaining position within the marriage, including their ability to negotiate contraceptive use with their husbands. All these produce benefits that ripple out into the broader community. The strong role women play in environmental stewardship points to the opportunity for integrating reproductive health and family planning components into conservation programs. In the 1970s, some western NGOs concerned with improving rural environments and reducing poverty in the Philippines and Nepal began to offer improved access to family planning services. As interest in family planning expanded, other organizations partnered with national and regional family planning organizations to respond to women’s requests for help with avoiding pregnancy. These initiatives demonstrated that incorporating improved access to contraception and other reproductive health services can increase women’s participation in natural resource conservation or functional literacy programs and vice versa—a real-life demonstration that health and family planning cannot be separated from other aspects of people’s lives. More recently, in Madagascar’s Spiny Forest Ecoregion—home to the greatest concentration of baobab trees in the world—the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) produced maps showing that where female literacy levels were the lowest, both population growth rates and deforestation were the highest. Based on this, WWF fieldworkers and local stakeholders formed a partnership with Madagascar’s regional public health organization to deliver literacy programs, reproductive health information, and family planning services to communities with both the highest population growth and the greatest levels of biodiversity. As the connections between conservation and population projects become clearer, the environmental community and environment ministers can become an important new constituency for discussions of reproductive health and women’s rights. Investments to slow the rate of population growth will significantly reinforce efforts to address many environmental challenges, and considerably lower the price of such efforts. Global Population and Environment Program Fact Sheet A Sneak Preview:
According to the United Nations, water could be the natural resource that defines the limits of sustainable development. The balance between our demands and the quantity available is becoming increasingly precarious. Freshwater resources are limited throughout many parts of the world, while burgeoning water shortages threaten human health, economies, and the environment. Our global water crisis crosses borders, transcends race and culture and impacts the quality of life of all living beings. Back to Winter 2002 Population Report Photo courtesy JHU/CCP D. Hinrichsen Up to Top HOME | Email Signup | About Us | Contact Us | Terms of Use | © 2008 Sierra Club |
Water is essential to all life on Earth. There simply is no substitute for this finite resource that links human society to nature and serves as our lifeline to the planet’s ecosystems. At the most basic level, water’s cycle maintains a balance within Earth’s ecological systems. From the origins of headwaters, water travels through streams, lakes, rivers, and marshes, sustaining life in the most populous urban landscapes and in the most remote regions of the globe. Pollution from ill-planned industry and agricultural development are heightened by increased consumption from growing human numbers. All of these factors affect the quality and accessibility of water at each stage of its cycle.