Every year, the world's population increases by 80 million people -- with most of the growth in developing nations. As the number of children a woman bears and raises has an inverse relationshipto her -- and her children's -- life expectancy and social mobility, improving the availability of family planning options is crucial to improving both public and economic health in these nations.
It has a direct relationship to improving global environmental conditions, as well: according to The Sierra Club's online primer on the links between global population, family planning, and climate change, as the human population grew roughly four fold over the 20th century -- from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion -- the growing energy demand led carbon-dioxide emissions to increase twelve fold.
Heather D'Agnes believes it. She's head of the US Agency for International Development's (USAID) population, health, and environment program, and is promoting policies that would expand access to family planning. D'Agnes feels strongly that the more information women and families have not just about contraception, but about the negative impacts of large family size, the more likely they'll be to opt for smaller families as a result -- and her conclusions are supported by the Cairo Consensus adopted by the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, which was the first international document to recognize the connections between reproductive health, the environment, and economic development.
D'Agnes takes an integrated approach to population management and environmental protection. She recently did research in coastal fishing villages in the Philippines where family sizes were growing even as fishing stocks declined—a crisis in the making, finding that when provided with information about the linkage between overpopulation and overfishing, the village residents were eager for information about and access to family-planning services.
According to D'Agnes (quoted in an interview on Radio Australia), the economic and environmental benefits of having a smaller, healthier family "really resonate..."
In the Philippines, our experience has been that you can train community members who may have an elementary education...to be peer educators. What that means is that they go and talk to their peers, their neighbors, their friends, the people that they fish with, for example, and you can train them to deliver information about the benefits of family planning. The same time they're there in the fishing boat delivering information about why smaller families are better, or may help out their condition in life, they're also talking about the importance of not fishing in a certain area, let's say a marine protected area. So you see, they're talking about their lives.
Interestingly, D'Agnes found that even in a deeply Catholic country like the Philippines, men and women were eager to learn about and use birth control, defying the notion that villagers would blindly follow religious edicts at the peril of their families and livelihoods.
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