PopOffsets News
Optimum Population Trust Carbon Offset Project
Statement of Support by OPT Patrons and Supporters
Endorsed by: Sir David Attenborough; Professor Paul Ehrlich; Professor John Guillebaud; Susan Hampshire; Professor Aubrey Manning; Sara Parkin; Jonathon Porritt; Professor Chris Rapley; Sir Crispin Tickell.
We, Patrons and Supporters of the Optimum Population Trust, commend this OPT initiative. It is the world’s first voluntary Carbon Offset scheme enabling all those who understand the intimate link between population growth and climate change to channel their offset funds directly into improving family planning services in needy countries. It will thus give practical help: both to the poorest women in the world to enable them to control their own fertility; and to humanity, now and in future generations, by tackling the threat posed by human-induced climate change to supplies of food, water and to social stability world-wide.
As we said in our statement in July, all environmental and developmental problems become more challenging with ever more people on the planet. Thus population restraint in all countries is a key, but often un-acknowledged, component of any world initiative to limit global warming. The OPT report “Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost” vindicates our position, not only on environmental but
economic grounds; while the humanitarian and developmental case for meeting the need of all women for access to family planning services is irrefutable.
We ask our negotiators at the Copenhagen Summit in December to recognise the fact that world population growth increases the number both of carbon emitters (especially, indeed, in rich countries with large carbon footprints) and of future victims of climate change, thus exacerbating all problems of both “mitigation”and “adaptation”; and we ask that they consider the implications, and find solutions.
We wish to highlight that this project will, for the first time, enable all those who recognise and accept the population/climate change link to make a practical contribution towards resolving the problems it causes, while contributing greatly to poverty-reduction in the poorest countries.
“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.
30/11/2009