Earlier this week in New Delhi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised an “enlightening” roundtable discussion with India’s minister of environment for opening her eyes to climate change’s links to population and family planning.

“One of the participants pointed out that it’s rather odd to talk about climate change and what we must do to stop and prevent the ill effects without talking about population and family planning. That was an incredibly important point. And yet, we talk about these things in very separate and often unconnected ways,” said Clinton.

Congress is taking steps to tackle this issue. The version of the bill approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee last week links family planning and reproductive health to climate change.

On page 153, $628 million is alloted for “family planning/reproductive health, including in areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species or exacerbates human vulnerability to the effects of climate change.”

In addition, in the report accompanying the bill, the Senate committee “directs USAID to review the relationships between population growth and climate change to determine how experience in implementing population-environment activities applies to climate change adaptation and to efforts to increase the resilience of local communities to climate change.”

These comments certainly increase the volume on this overlooked link. Some background resources that might help those new to the discussion:

• In the latest ECSP Report, Suzanne Petroni of the Summit Foundation proposes some ethical ground rules, calling for “a thoughtful and deliberative dialogue around voluntary family planning’s contribution to mitigating climate change.”
  A recent PAI factsheet points out that “areas of high population growth and high vulnerability to climate change impacts overlap.”
• Another handy factsheet includes a brief description of how community-based programs that integrate population-environment activities can strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to the effects of climate change.
• PAI’s working paper “Projecting Population, Projecting Climate Change” warns that “population growth is not adequately accounted for in the emissions scenarios” used by the IPCC.
• The Center for Global Development’s David Wheeler recently argued that family planning could be a relatively inexpensive part of solving the climate crisis.
• A paper in Global Environmental Change estimates the extra emissions of fossil carbon dioxide that an average individual in the United States causes when he or she chooses to have children.