The 2009 edition of The State of World Population has been released just before the 15th Session of United Nations Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP15) to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark during 7-18 December, 2009. It shows that climate change is more than an issue of energy efficiency or industrial carbon emissions; it is also an issue of population dynamics, poverty and gender equity. In Bangladesh, the UNFPA Representative, Mr Arthur Erken launched the report, the focus of which is women, population and climate change.

To link population, climate change and women is a bit tricky in the context of developing countries, because according to our experiences since Earth Summit of 1992, every time wealthy nations are reminded of their contribution to the degradation of our environment, they tend to point fingers at poorer countries and talk about population.

Since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development held in Egypt, women are linked more towards the solution of the problems of poverty, environmental degradation, climate change and other social issues. In an over simplistic way, they propose that women can solve the problem by having less children, thereby, reducing the number of people being affected by climate-change related disasters.

In December 2009, the world leaders from 192 countries are supposed to come to an agreement to keep global temperatures below catastrophic levels. The Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in 1992 as the basis for a global response to the problem. The ultimate objective of the Convention is to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system.

It is a well acknowledged fact that developed countries and major emerging economy nations lead in total carbon dioxide emissions. Developed nations typically have high carbon dioxide emissions per capita and total carbon emissions, such as United States, Canada, UK, and Germany and so on, therefore it is expected by the developing countries that these wealthy industrialised nations must take the main responsibility of cutting carbon emissions.

But at the closing session of the Ad hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) held in Barcelona in early November, many developing countries, including Bangladesh, expressed their deep frustration in arriving at the developed countries’ greenhouse gas emission reductions for the second commitment period under the Protocol.

According to the Third World Network Barcelona News Update (#12, November 9, 2009) the announcements for emission reduction targets by developed countries in aggregate range between 13-26 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, as calculated by the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and 12-19 per cent by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) if the US (non-Kyoto Protocol Party) is included. It is unlikely that developed countries will meet these figures. Climate scientists say that the world must stop the growth in greenhouse gas emissions and start making them fall by about 2015 to 2020. By 2050 they estimate the world must cut its emissions by 80 per cent compared with 1990 levels to limit global warming to a 2C average rise.

While developed countries are failing to meet their commitments by coming to an agreement for reduction in carbon emissions, they are now adding a new dimension to the issue and that is "population". In the State of World Population Report, 2009 it says:

A growing body of evidence shows that recent climate change is primarily the result of human activity. The influence of human activity on climate change is complex. It is about what we consume, the types of energy we produce and use, whether we live in a city or on a farm, whether we live in a rich or poor country, whether we are young or old, what we eat, and even the extent to which women and men enjoy equal rights and opportunities. It is also about our growing numbers - approaching 7 billion. As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the earth’s capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme - and conceivably catastrophic.

Very surprisingly the report gives a new figure for world population as approaching 7 billion (from present level of 6 billion plus) without any population census being held in any country. It is simply based on estimates of birth rates. Don't we need Population Census anymore?

Second, although the report clearly admits that population growth has been a smaller contributor to growth in energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, yet they want the debate to be raised. The report says:

Indeed, fear of appearing supportive of population control has until recently held back any mention of “population” in the climate debate. Nonetheless, some participants in the debate are tentatively suggesting the need at least to consider the impacts of population growth.

The population debate is associated with the debate about consumption. There is no doubt that it is the wealthier countries and the wealthy people in particular, who are responsible for high levels of consumption and in turn carbon dioxide emissions. The Population report, 2009 quotes environmental journalist Fred Pearce (2009): “[T]he world’s richest half-billion people - that’s about 7 per cent of the global population - are responsible for 50 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions and the poorest 50 per cent are responsible for just 7 per cent of emissions.”

Therefore, even with a large population in the developing countries, they are only responsible for carbon emissions of 7 per cent: one-seventh of what the wealthy nations are contributing. The blame on population growth as an influence on climate change has also been refuted by environmental activists from Bangladesh by saying “Climate change is far more sensitive to consumption patterns than to demographic considerations”.

According to the Human Development Report 1998 Overview (PDF 2.6MB), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the inequalities in consumption are stark. Globally, the 20 per cent of the world’s people in the highest-income countries account for 86 per cent of total private consumption expenditures - the poorest 20 per cent a minuscule 1.3 per cent.

More specifically, the richest 20 per cent of population: consume 45 per cent of all meat and fish, 58 per cent of total energy, 84 per cent of all paper and own 87 per cent of the world’s vehicle fleet, while the poorest 20 per cent consume 5 per cent all meat and fish, 4 per cent of total energy, 1.1 per cent of all paper, and own less than 1 per cent of the world’s vehicle fleet. The overwhelming growth in consumption in the past 50 years is putting heavy strains on the environment.

Despite these statistics, the efforts to blame population growth for climate change does not stop. The arguments to prove that the population living in developing countries, and particularly in the poorest countries, contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, have been very weak. Even if we reduce population growth in the poorest countries their contribution to the reduction will be not be significant, because they are not the big consumers.

Although population “control” is not yet the suggestion, family planning towards a reduced population growth is given as a solution by the World Population Report, 2009. They quote the United States National Academy of Sciences report of 1992, which emphasises family planning rather than population control. It says:

… family planning impacts on greenhouse-gas emissions are important at all levels of development. The family planning effects indicate that, as of 2020, carbon emissions will be about 15 per cent lower for the lower, middle and upper-middle income countries than they would be without family planning. Strong family planning programs are in the interests of all countries for greenhouse-gas concerns as well as for broader welfare concerns.

It suggests that family planning will contribute to carbon dioxide reductions. According to Betsy Hartmann, "Population control isn't the solution to global warming. In much of the world, birth rates are coming down toward replacement level. In places where they remain relatively high, e.g. sub-Saharan Africa, per-capita emissions are quite low".

She further says, “Focusing on population growth not only diverts us from the real problems and solutions at hand, but it could undermine the achievements made at the 1994 U.N. International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo”.

In countries like Bangladesh, where a good health care facilities are still absent and people are deprived of basic primary health care, a contraceptive-driven family planning program will simply aggravate the problems rather than solve it. The actual implementation of family planning is going to be nothing more than population control of the poor.

Once the Copenhagen conference brings population into the climate change equation, fingers will be pointed at the poorer countries and in particular at poorer people. This will allow rich countries to turn attention away from their responsibilities of reducing carbon dioxide emissions towards easy ways of funding family planning programs to reduce the population.

The shift to the population debate also indicates that more and more people in the poorer regions will be affected by climate-related natural disasters. This is a serious problem. The World Population Report, 2009 estimates that the total number of people suffering the impacts of these natural disasters has tripled over the past decade, with an average of 211 million people directly affected each year. The annual average “humanitarian toll” of climate-related disasters was an estimated 165 million people in the 30 years between 1973 and 2003, amounting to a staggering 98 per cent of all persons killed or affected by natural disasters within that period. There are also indications that this figure is on the rise: from 1998 to 2007, 2.2 billion people were affected by climate disasters compared to 1.8 billion in the 10 previous years.

In Bangladesh, when launching the report, UNFPA Representative in Bangladesh Arthur Erken said that poor women in poor countries like Bangladesh were among the hardest hit by climate change, even though they contributed least to it. He said, "The poor are more likely to depend on agriculture for a living and therefore risk going hungry or losing their livelihoods when droughts strike, rains become unpredictable and hurricanes move with unprecedented force".

Frequent cyclones, drought and floods have become almost regular phenomena. It is true that the poor are hardest hit by such climate-change related disasters. But then how are family planning programs going to help people in this regard? Having less people and therefore a lower death toll is an over-simplification. How will family planning help those facing disaster because of the emissions of the developed nations??

Bangladesh has expressed her concern in Barcelona that the developed countries’ pledges are insufficient for global mitigation based on what is needed according to the science. Let's not divert attention from the real commitments needed by developed countries to reduce carbon emissions by blaming the poor countries and let’s not make women the target for contraceptives in the name of solving climate change.

Farida Akhter (Bangladesh) is the Executive Director of UBINIG a policy and action research organisation in Bangladesh working with the farming, weaving and rural and urban communities in Bangladesh. She also runs Narigrantha Prabartana, the first and only feminist bookstore and feminist publishing house in Bangladesh.