To stop climate change, we need family planning, too!

Researchers have been talking about climate change for decades, but we start to feel its effects only now. It is right here, whether we accept it or not. We have to change our habits radically. Not in order to save the Earth; it will heal the scars incurred by our civilization in a matter of a few million years. (A period of a few million years is only a blink in the history of the Earth. The last of the five great extinctions that already took place was 65 millions years ago. Life always flourished shortly after.) It is "only" the future of humanity what is at stake; will the planet Earth remain a habitable place for humans.

So where does family planning connect in? The ones with no broad knowledge beyond their own specialty rarely discover the correlation between climate change and overpopulation, although the degree of effect made on the climate is highly dependent on the density of population.

To illustrate this, here is an example. The CO2 emission per capita (red columns on the graph) is 5.7 tons/year in Hungary; five times that of India's (1.1) and double that of China's (2.9). Still, Hungary burdens the climate less (237 tons of CO2 emission / global km2) than India (272 tons of CO2 / global km2) or China (360 tons of CO2 / global km2), if you take the area, or to be more precise, the bio-capacity into consideration (blue columns on the graph).

The ecological system doesn't understand arguments saying that twice as many people have the right to emit twice the amount of CO2. The only thing that matters is the amount of emission that falls to a given area, bio-capacity, CO2 occlusion ability.

The following becomes clear from the attached graph:

* Japan and Europe (including Hungary) is largely overpopulated (for centuries already).
* The sparsely populated countries (left on the graph) do less damage to the climate
* Only family planning can save the overpopulated countries.
* Family planning is the most urgent and most important in the USA, as it not only has the highest emission per capita but it also has a rapidly growing population.

While in relation to climate issues people usually talk only about CO2 (due to industrialization, transportation, etc.), an other gas, methane (emitted to the atmosphere due to livestock-raising, rice growing and chemical fertilizers; so it is even more closely connected to population size and alimentation) has about a twenty times stronger effect, and its concentrations already impact the climate in a similar order of magnitude as CO2.

Therefore reproductive health, women rights, girl education and family planning are of crucial importance also from a climate change viewpoint.

Compare the Chinese one-child policy with Taiwan (what also inhabited by Chinese people): population growth rate in Taiwan (0.3%) is only half that of China's (0.61%), and there 100 women has only 112 children as opposed to 175 in China. This is an example of the effectivity of the human rights approach.

Preventing the hundred million conceptions per year that happen against the will of the couples, by making family planning available for everyone, belongs to the 5th of the Millennium Development Goals. There are 1.7 billion women in fertile age (15-49) on the planet (twice the number as in 1970), and more then 700 million of them have to live in constant fear of conceiving, because they don't have the right, the knowledge, the tools or the money for contraception.

Climate doesn't care. If we don't act, it will effectively reduce human population (together with rich biodiversity in plants and animals) with rough solutions like water shortage and famine, drought and floods, insect and weed invasions, pandemics and heat-waves, storms and cunamis.

Today, family planning is a privilege of the rich everywhere in the world. It is the common interest of politics, private sphere, movements and all human individuals that this is changed quickly.

Szerző: Simonyi Gyula

Csoport, mozgalom, irányzat (ahonnan származik): Bocs Alap?tv?ny