Population and Climate Change: Gender Impact Assessment

The Challenge

Global population has doubled in the past 50 years to top 8 billion in 2022. Human population is a key driver of both climate change and biodiversity loss.

A sizeable amount of atmospheric carbon could be avoided by reducing unwanted births. An estimated 10 percent of all live births are unwanted. These are not unintended pregnancies; they are unwanted, as self-reported by the mothers. These births have different impacts in different parts of the world: wealthy nations contribute disproportionately to the global carbon burden, but poorer nations suffer more from a lack of access to contraception and legal abortion.

The Challenge

Global population has doubled in the past 50 years to top 8 billion in 2022. Human population is a key driver of both climate change and biodiversity loss. Every year, 36 gigatons of anthropogenic carbon enter the air, mainly as a result of burning fossil fuels.

A sizeable amount of atmospheric carbon could be avoided by reducing unwanted births. An estimated 10 percent of live births are “unwanted.” These are not unintended pregnancies; they are unwanted, as self-reported by the mothers (Sedgh et. al., 2014) and result from the lack of access to contraception, the prohibitive cost of contraception, failed contraception, sexual assault and violence, child and forced marriage, partner opposition, religious opposition, laws banning abortion, absence of sex education, concerns about side effects of chemical contraception, state-sanctioned pro-natalism, and other forms of “coercive conception” (Guillebaud, 2016). One hundred forty million babies are born every year, following an estimated 220 million pregnancies. According to the Guttmacher Institute, as many as 120 million of these 220 million pregnancies are unintended; and, of these, about 39 million end in live births (Bearak et. al, 2020).

Gendered Innovation 1: Preventing Unwanted Births

Preventing unwanted births—by making contraception and legal abortion freely available—would reduce global carbon emissions by about 10 percent, or 3.6 gigatons per year, which is more than the total combined emissions of Germany, Japan, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, and Australia (Statista, 2021).

The main cause of unwanted births is limited access to contraception and/or abortion. Some 270 million women of childbearing age (15 to 49) have an unmet need for modern contraception (Kantorová et. al, 2020), and 63 percent of women live in countries where abortion is not available upon request. In Africa, an estimated 92 percent of potential mothers live under severely restrictive abortion laws; in Latin America the proportion is close to 97 percent. And many nations ban abortion entirely. Abortion is currently illegal in Aruba, Congo, Curaçao, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Jamaica, Laos, Madagascar, Malta, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Philippines, San Marino, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Suriname, Tonga, and West Bank & Gaza Strip. Many of the laws governing abortion in these regions are holdovers from a colonial era, imposed by European countries that long ago abandoned such restrictive laws for themselves (Cohen, 2009). Abortion is also severely restricted in some states in the U.S.

The solution is to fund voluntary family planning worldwide to make contraception and legal abortion freely available (Project Drawdown, n.d.). Voluntary family planning is the practice of controlling fertility by ensuring all people access to their preferred contraceptive methods (WHO, 2020). In most European countries, for example, contraception is included as part of ordinary health delivery and abortion is readily available.

Gendered Innovation 2: Expanding Climate Change Analysis to Include Family Planning

A high unmet need for reproductive health services coupled with high CO2 emissions per capita creates an opportunity for family planning. We find no mention of the potential of contraception and abortion to lower CO2 emissions in the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC, 2022). The 3,949-page report for the IPCC Working Group I considers “the role of human influence” on the climate but ignores human reproductive behavior. The 3,675-page report for Working Group II (on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”) refers briefly to “reproductive health and family planning” but only in the context of improving the health and well-being of women and their children, not climate change. Population is treated as a driver of total emissions but ignored as a possible solution for limiting human-induced climate change.

Nor do the United Nation’s original 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change or the subsequent Conferences of the Parties (COPs) highlight population growth or family planning. At the COP26 in Glasgow, for example, voluntary family planning was only trivially referenced, despite explicit UN Sustainable Development Goals that call for incorporating “universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services” into national strategies by 2030 (United Nations, 2019).

Historical context is crucial to understanding why. In Europe, race-based population control was a pillar of Nazi policy and propaganda; and in America, too, eugenicists pushed “positive” and “negative” eugenics, rewarding the breeding of certain populations judged superior and the sterilization of people judged inferior (Proctor, 1988; Stern, 2020).

Forced population control continued after the collapse of Nazism and the eugenics movement. Forced vasectomies in 1970s India, for example, contributed to a backlash that brought down Indira Gandhi’s government. An important turning point was the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, which effectively treated any attempts to limit population growth as efforts to suppress populations of the global South.

To reduce population in a manner consistent with human rights and liberties, we must reframe “population control” to “voluntary family planning” in a way that helps to prevent unwanted births, i.e., to reduce or eliminate births that are clearly unwanted by the mothers involved. Reducing population in this manner is consistent with the enlargement of human liberties by putting into the mothers’ own hands the power to determine their birthing regimes.

Currently, in opposition to the global need for reduced population, state-sponsored pro-natalism is promoting births. More than 50 countries, including Australia, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Japan, Poland, Russia, Singapore, and South Korea, have policies to increase birth rates via tax incentives and “baby bonuses.” According to a recent study by the UN, the proportion of nations with pro-natal policies has risen from 10 percent in 1976 to 28 percent in 2015 (Scigliano, 2021; Population Matters, 2021). This, at the same time many of these states advocate for climate mitigation.

Of course, not all births are equal when it comes to carbon footprint. According to the World Bank, the average inhabitant of a high-income nation contributes 10 tons of carbon per year, while the average person living in a low-income nation contributes only 0.2 tons. This means that births averted in rich countries will result in higher carbon savings than births averted in poorer parts of the world. By one calculation, each new baby born in the UK will generate 35 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a baby born in Bangladesh (Guillebaud, 2016).

Reproductive technologies (here we refer to contraception and legal abortion) are rarely considered a form of technology in calculations of climate impacts. In the early 1970s, when ecologists first started equating “Impact of human activity on the planet” to Population x Affluence x Technology (IPAT), technology was conceived as “impact per unit of consumption” (Holdren, 2018). Even in the Kaya formulation, which replaces affluence with GDP per capita, human population is most often treated as a passive input, with opportunities for mitigation conceived principally in the realm of energy intensity per unit of GDP, and carbon intensity defined in terms of emissions per unit of energy consumed (Kaya et. al, 1997). These models should be reconceptualized to consider, contraceptive techniques as part of “technology.” These are technologies that can be used to lower greenhouse gases.

Gendered Innovation 3: Expanding Family Planning Analysis to Include Climate Change

At the same time that governmental and intergovernmental agencies fail to consider family planning part of the solution to climate change, the most powerful family planning agencies—the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, or U.S. Agency for International Development—fail to acknowledge the potential climate benefit of their programs. A 2019 “Data Booklet” from the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs titled “Family Planning and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (funded partly by the Gates Foundation), points out that ten percent of women globally have “an unmet need for family planning” but fails to acknowledge a climate benefit from ending unwanted births (UN, 2019).

Global funds for family planning have declined since the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. What is needed now is international funding for safe, effective, and voluntary reproductive health care.

Method: Gender Impact Assessment

Climate analysis has overlooked the benefits of family planning, while at the same time family planning organizations tend to overlook the benefits of contraception and legal abortion for climate mitigation. Bringing together these currently separate spheres of research and policy could help reduce global warming while enlarging human liberties. By redefining the concepts and objectives of research design to take into account gender analysis surrounding reproductive health, these two spheres of action—climate analysis and family planning—could work together to realize the benefits of preventing unwanted births.

Conclusions

Globally, we need to think about climate mitigation more broadly, to include reproductive technologies. And the benefits of family planning must be broadened to include the climate benefits of effective family planning. From a civil liberties and an environmental point of view, it’s a win-win: saving the planet while enlarging human liberties. Ending unwanted births could prevent substantial climate damage while enlarging human liberties by putting into the mothers’ own hands the power to control their own fertility.

Avoiding unwanted pregnancies (and births) should not, however, be imagined as an alternative to humanity’s need to decarbonize the global economy. The ultimate solution to climate change is to prevent fossil carbon from entering the atmosphere; all other policies must be subordinate to this goal. Decarbonization will take time, however, which means that an “all hands on deck” approach is required, recognizing that some solutions take a bigger bite out of the problem than others.