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Additional Benefits of Family Planning
The OPT report with LSE, "Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost", in September 2009 showed that it would be nearly five times more cost-effective per carbon tonne abated to invest a modest proportion of climate change funding in meeting unmet need for family planning than in conventional technology. But the approach recommended would, by directing more resources to the improvement of family planning services in the poorer countries, achieve a large number of indirect benefits which, even though unquantifiable, are clearly extremely significant. These include:
a) taking a major step towards stabilising human numbers at, and/or reducing them to, a level our only planet can sustain in the long-term;
b) fully mitigating the carbon and other environmental impacts not only of the additional people whose unwanted conception or birth will be prevented, but of all their non-existent descendants in perpetuity;
c) empowering the poor women of the world to take control of their own fertility, as a necessary pre-condition for any wider empowerment;
d) alleviating poverty through improvements in health, nutrition and education for women and children;
e) reducing the scale of all environmental problems, including: the effects of peak oil; deforestation; freshwater shortages; soil erosion and desertification; the mounting food crisis; declining fisheries; loss of biodiversity; rising waste and pollution; ocean acidification; and depletion of all finite resources - all of which would be easier to solve with fewer people, and ultimately impossible to solve with ever more;
f) reducing the pressures contributing to: growing conflicts over land and ever more scarce resources; mass migration; under- or unemployment; urban stress; crime; mental health problems;
g) reducing the number of future victims of climate change, and the costs of adaptation for them;
h) freeing more capital from investment in renewable energy generation to invest in energy conservation technology, marine and other research, social adaptation to lower energy consumption, and all other adaptation programmes.
i) encouraging OECD countries, with their vastly higher per capita emissions, to introduce (clearly non-coercive) population restraint policies too, as an additional cost-effective way of abating their own carbon tonnage in their own long-term interests.
In any case, on a finite planet human numbers must stop growing at some point, either earlier through fewer births (contraception backed by sound policy), or later by more deaths (the natural controls of famine, disease, and predation/war). Indefinite growth is not an option.
"Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race..." UNICEF Report 1992
Optimum Population Trust - 15 September 2009