Showing posts from category urbanization.
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Linking Water, Sanitation, and Biodiversity Conservation in Sub-Saharan Africa
›July 25, 2012 // By Kate DiamondWater, poverty, and the environment are “intrinsically connected,” and the development programs targeting them should be as well, writes David Bonnardeaux in Linking Biodiversity Conservation and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene: Experiences From sub-Saharan Africa, a new Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group briefing. In a review of 43 programs across sub-Saharan Africa, including four in-depth case studies, Bonnardeaux finds that natural synergies between water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programming and conservation work provide opportunities for greater effectiveness in addressing both.
Integrating WASH and Conservation: A Natural Match
“WASH interventions are generally reliant on natural resources and processes, whether indirectly or directly,” he writes, and “WASH services produce outputs that are potentially detrimental to the environment if not managed properly.” At the same time, poor ecosystem management can “threaten biodiversity and jeopardize the vital services that these ecosystems in turn provide to humanity, in the form of regulation of stream flow, erosion prevention, water filtration, aquifer recharge, carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation, and flood abatement.”
Given the connections between the two, WASH and conservation efforts would benefit from programmatic integration, according to Bonnardeaux. To bring the two closer together, he recommends three tools for policymakers and development programmers: integrated river basin management and basin planning; payments for watershed services (also known as payments for environmental services); and population, health, and environment (PHE) programming.
A Whole-of-Basin Perspective
“The causal link between WASH and ecosystem health and integrity is most accentuated when
dealing with freshwater ecosystems,” writes Bonnardeaux.
In Tanzania’s Pangani River Basin, one of his in-depth case studies, a growing reliance on hydropower, urbanization, and increased agricultural demand is altering a valuable ecosystem marked by endemism and iconic landscapes, including Mount Kilimanjaro.
In response, the government and international organizations are partnering through the Pangani River Basin Management Project to developing a greater understanding of the basin’s hydrology and ecosystem, how local populations interact with that ecosystem, and how potential development scenarios could impact the basin in the future. That knowledge, paired with an intensive training program for local water officials, is enabling stronger integrated resource management, which in turn could lay the groundwork for integrating WASH and conservation interventions, writes Bonnardeaux.
Economic incentives – in this case, payments for watershed services – offer another valuable tool for building support for conservation efforts, especially when upstream communities bear a disproportionate burden of safeguarding watersheds.
In South Africa, another case study country, “increased economic development and urbanization have taken its toll on” the country’s wetlands, while unemployment and poverty have remained a persistent problem in slum areas, writes Bonnardeaux. Through the government-run Working for Wetlands program, both the environmental and socioeconomic problems of development are being targeted for improvement. The program hires “the most marginalized from society” to clear wetlands of invasive plants in order to improve its natural filtration capabilities and, in turn, improves the quality of water feeding the burgeoning urban areas.
Although Working for Wetlands, now 17 years old, has been “hugely successful,” Bonnardeaux warns that such economic incentive programs are, more often than not, extremely difficult to carry out effectively. “While there is great potential for this incentive-based conservation approach,” Bonnardeaux notes, “the reality is there are many barriers to its effective implementation.”
Building Long-Term Support for Conservation With Near-Term PHE Successes
Building support for conservation can be a difficult task. The impacts of conservation programming are “often undervalued,” Bonnardeaux writes, in part because results tend to become apparent only over the longer term. By pairing conservation efforts with nearer-term programming, like PHE efforts targeting immediate health needs, development workers can foster the kind of local support that is essential for pursuing long term goals.
The Jane Goodall Institute’s Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education Project (TACARE), in northwest Tanzania, offers a case in point. Established in 1994, TACARE began as a conservation program meant to protect the areas around Gombe National Park, where Goodall first began her chimpanzee research in the 1960s. Local communities, however, were more interested in better health, “with an emphasis on clear water and reduction in water-borne diseases like cholera,” writes Bonnardeaux.
By adopting local health and poverty priorities, he writes, TACARE was able to establish trust and goodwill with the communities it served, which in turn enabled it to pursue longer-term conservation goals aimed at protecting the region’s natural biodiversity.
Bonnardeaux’s work shows that regardless of how policymakers choose to combine WASH and conservation goals, well-implemented integration can yield immense benefits for practitioners, funders, and local communities.
“Linking various sectors such as WASH, forestry, agriculture, population, and community development,” he writes, “can result in cost and effort sharing which in turn can increase the effectiveness of the project including improved conservation and improved livelihoods and health.”
Sources: Bonnardeaux 2012.
Photo Credit: “Intaka Island towards Table Mountain,” courtesy of flickr user Ian Junor. -
In Mongolia, Climate Change and Mining Boom Threaten National Identity
›July 23, 2012 // By Kate DiamondMongolia, a vast, sparsely populated country almost as large as Western Europe, is at once strikingly poor and strikingly rich. Its GDP per capita falls just below that of war-torn Iraq, and Ulan Bator has some of the worst air pollution ever recorded in a capital city. At the same time, Mongolia sits atop some of the world’s largest mineral reserves, worth trillions of dollars, and its economy, already one of the world’s fastest growing, could expand by a factor of six by the end of the decade as those reserves are developed.
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Urban Resilience: What Is It and How Can We Promote It?
›A new study on the intersection of violence and economic development in cities breaks new ground by examining how communities respond to and cope with extant violence, rather than focusing on the root causes of violence in a given area. Authors Diane Davis, Harvard professor of urbanism and development, and John Tirman, executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, spoke at length about the origins, methodology, and findings of the report, Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Conflict, at the Wilson Center on July 12. The report was supported by USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation.
“We made the decision that we weren’t going to produce yet another research project or study on the root causes of violence, because there is a lot of incredibly good work on that [already],” said Davis. “We wanted to take a totally different angle…to try to think about taking a more pragmatic approach that builds on how everyday people, who live with violence, respond.”
To do this, Davis and Tirman focused their research on seven cities around the world with histories of chronic violence, creating a case study for each and then comparing results. (An eighth city, Karachi, was jettisoned because it was deemed too unsafe for research.) The comparative process allowed Davis and Tirman to develop a basic theoretical framework for how different factors increase or decrease a community’s resilience to violence.
Defining Resilience
The term “resilience” lies at the heart of the new study. “The idea of ‘bouncing back,’ or returning to normalcy, is [generally] the measurement standard for looking at resilience,” Davis said.
However, she was quick to point out the problems with such a simplistic definition. “[In] cities of the developing world…things are in flux. So it’s really hard to know what a ‘bouncing back’ is if things are constantly changing.”“Also,” she added, “in many of the environments we were looking at, violence is a consequence of the way things were under normal conditions. So you don’t necessarily want to bounce back to those conditions that were producing the violence in the first place.”
Davis and Tirman sidestepped these problems by letting their research define successful resilience, rather than trying to fit their results to a prefabricated definition of the word. In doing so, they were able to identify several important commonalities in the cities and communities that displayed the most positive resilience to violence.
“Our findings suggest that resilience appears at the interface of civilian and state action,” Davis writes in the report. She underscored the significance of civilians as facilitators in both developing and implementing better security policies: “People who live in violence know more than academics or policymakers about what they can and can’t do to deal with the problem of violence,” she said.
Focus on Community
Davis and Tirman pointed out that the most successfully resilient cities they studied – Mexico City, Managua, and especially Medellín – seemed to have a number of civilian/state relationships defined “from below,” rather than the more problematic “top down” approach. This means that civilians and communities were participating on their own terms, collaborating with city planners and with law enforcement agencies to get their needs met rather than simply being what Davis called “yes men” to higher authorities.
Physical space – what Davis referred to as “the weight of the spatial” – also played a very significant role in Urban Resilience. She and Tirman made the conscious decision to incorporate physical planning and design into their research, eschewing the more typical sectoral approach to violence and security.
This methodological break from the existing literature was particularly useful in demonstrating that violence-plagued communities are often themselves the most important agents of resilience. “Citizens have to be able to make real decisions on their own,” Davis stressed in the Q&A; session that followed her and Tirman’s presentation. “[They] have to feel that ownership, that autonomy of the decisions in their neighborhood, even if they’re bad [decisions], because that’s what ties them to each other.”
“We think the starting point for generating resilience is really supporting and enabling communities to make dense horizontal relationships with others in their neighborhood, across sectors, that allow them to push back against perpetrators of violence.”
In other words, while the state can play a significant role in helping communities to mitigate violence, successful resilience ultimately requires the commitment and participation of the communities in question.
“The state might have a security program, it might have a planning program, but every decision has to be made with an understanding of what’s good for that particular neighborhood,” Davis said.
Places People Want to Protect
Davis was very succinct in offering recommendations based on the study. For policymakers and urban planners, she said resilience is formed by “a combination of good governance, security reform, and…inclusive urban planning.” Citing examples from Mexico City, Medellín, and elsewhere, Davis pointed to planning policies like mixed land use, greater pedestrian accessibility, and more parks and public spaces as ways that authorities could engender the kind of community pride so crucial to the development of positive urban resilience.
“[Focus on] generating vibrant public areas where people feel invested in protecting [them] and making them better,” she advised.
While many scholars have tended to look either at the state or local communities in isolation when considering violence and resilience, Davis argued that reducing violence was “a shared objective.” She thus stressed the importance of “co-production of security,” reiterating the overall notion that state and community actors need to work side-by-side in a form of what Davis and Tirman called “cooperative autonomy.”
In addition to Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence, Davis also authored the supplementary Toolkit for Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence. Both documents can be found on the MIT’s website. Davis and Tirman hope to add the seven individual case studies to the site soon.
Event Resources:Photo Credit: “Bogota at night,” courtesy of flickr user WanderingtheWorld (Christopher Schoenbohm); charts courtesy of Davis and Tirman. -
Book Review: ‘World Population Policies’ Offers Sweeping Overview of a Complex Field
›July 2, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenWith much attention in the international family planning community directed to the impending anniversary of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development and the closing date of the Millennium Development Goals, the fact that 2012 is the 60th anniversary of two other milestones in population programming may have escaped notice. In 1952, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was created, and India became the first country to formulate a national policy to reduce population growth.
These and many other landmarks are highlighted in World Population Policies: Their Origin, Evolution and Impact, a new book by demographer John May that reviews several decades of policies, advocacy, and program interventions addressing the full range of diverse demographic trends seen globally.May, who spent more than two decades working on population issues at the World Bank and other international institutions before recently assuming a fellowship at the Center for Global Development, is well-positioned to provide such an ambitious overview. Although the breadth of material included in the book means that some topics receive less coverage than a specialist might wish, it serves as a sound introduction to this diverse field, and offers some particularly interesting case studies.
The book’s main chapters begin with a summary of current population trends, including a comprehensive array of figures and statistics about population size, distribution, and projections. Some important concepts, such as the demographic transition and dividend, are perhaps covered too quickly, and in such cases the book would have benefited from more than a handful of figures, charts, and graphs. May classifies regions and countries as demographic “hotspots,” where the number of people outstrips available resources, and “coldspots,” which have too few residents. He makes an ambitious suggestion that high-density countries facing resource challenges, such as Bangladesh, should consider promoting rapid fertility decline below replacement level to stop population growth, then reverse course and increase to a rate that promotes a stable population – but such a reversal from low fertility is a feat that has stymied several countries in Europe and East Asia.
Evolution of the “Population Movement”
In addition to summarizing the ways that demographic issues have been framed in the past several decades, May briefly describes the long-running debate between demographers and economists about the ways in which population is theorized to affect economic development.
Three points in this chapter were particularly striking: First, the concept of family planning as a human right dates from well before the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. In 1968, the Tehran International Conference on Human Rights defined the ability to choose family size and spacing as a fundamental right; still, some programs, such as India’s under the Emergency-era government of the late 1970s, adopted coercive practices. Second, population policies are not limited to official initiatives targeting fertility, mortality, and migration, but also encompass implicit or “passive” policy measures that arise without advance planning or that have an unintended effect on demographic trends. Related to this, May suggests that “contextual variables” such as education, health, gender, culture, and religion can have a greater impact on population policies’ effectiveness and demographic outcomes than government structures or funding.
Although population policies are most often designed at the national level, May’s discussion of the “population movement” highlights the influence of international networks and donors on such policies. By the late 1960s, the U.S. Agency for International Development had begun funding family planning programs overseas, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) was active. Although the United States has become less dominant over time, population programming remains a Northern-driven movement.
Beginning with a meeting in Belgrade in 1965, a series of international population conferences successfully raised the prominence of population issues on the global development agenda and built consensus around international goals, while also becoming increasingly political.
May’s cautions about such conferences are timely given this month’s London Family Planning Summit: “Consensus-building through international conferences and their preparatory meetings is often inefficient as a process, whereas such events could be used to promote learning among policymakers and experts…The gap between the conferences’ resolutions and the actual policies implemented at country level is important to remember” (110).
Growth and Aging Distinguish the Demographic Divide
In his chapter focusing on the developing world, May notes that population policies have become broader in the nearly 20 years since the Cairo conference, incorporating a reproductive rights framework while also addressing new issues such as the environment, HIV/AIDS, and poverty. But under this more holistic approach, national policies are susceptible to becoming overly diffuse, with an ambitious agenda not matched by concrete action plans.
The challenges expand to policy implementation as well. Kenya is profiled as emblematic of the difficulties facing population programs in fast-growing sub-Saharan Africa, particularly political disinterest, mismanagement, opposition from some religious groups, and commodity shortages. But when implemented well, such policies can be very successful. The book offers a thorough summary of research findings on the common features of effective family planning programs (such as leadership, monitoring performance data, and opening access to contraceptive methods at lower levels of the health system), as well as their demographic impact. Several country examples are cited to show that family planning programs reduce lifetime fertility rates by 0.5 to 1.5 children per woman, while also benefiting individual and social health, income, and well-being.
While population policies have been often effective at shaping demographic trends in high-fertility settings, even in changing cultural norms about family size, May notes that their impact has been notably weaker in reversing the trajectory of declining fertility in developed countries. While countries such as France have maintained a fertility rate close to, albeit still below, replacement level thanks to generous paid parental leave, housing initiatives and public child care facilities, policies that try to boost low fertility through financial compensation have been particularly ineffective.
Developed countries are less likely to have formal population policies and tend to address demographic issues through incentives and disincentives implemented by multiple agencies. Aging and immigration are receiving greater attention in such countries, along with low fertility rates. Population aging raises policy concerns that are both economic and social, and May focuses largely on the benefit of reducing incentives for early retirement. He notes that thanks to improvements in health and life expectancy, “today’s 65-year-old persons are young compared to their counterparts” of previous generations (180). Despite their economic soundness, government efforts to raise retirement ages are widely unpopular, and France’s newly elected president has promised to cut the retirement age from 62 to 60 for some workers.
What Comes Next
Some observations are intriguing and could have been further detailed. For example, May notes a recent “fragmentation” of organizations working on population issues, and suggests that “too many institutions and NGOs appear to support their own limited mandates as they also struggle for resources that are less abundant” (5). Decentralization and integration within health systems is a growing trend that could have been discussed in more detail, along with the legacy of pronatalist laws and attitudes by colonial powers in Africa, the effect of recent European efforts to tighten immigration policies, and the achievements of forums designed for collaboration on population policy issues (for example, the United Nations Commission on Population and Development or the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition).
Looking towards the future, May foresees continued integration of demography with related development issues, such as poverty reduction and equitable growth, gender and youth perspectives, environmental issues, and conflict prevention. He notes a few challenges, including sub-Saharan Africa’s lag in fertility decline and the overall ineffectiveness of policies aimed at addressing the pressures of urbanization on infrastructure and resources.
In high-fertility settings, May recommends that instead of framing reproductive health writ large, policies should more specifically target family planning and women’s empowerment, including education and income-generation opportunities as well as legal rights. Bangladesh is presented as a model for other countries, as a setting where cultural change and economic development laid the groundwork for successful family planning outreach efforts. Most of all, May entreats government leaders to maintain a policy focus on population issues, regardless of where they stand in the demographic divide.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group.
Photo Credit: “Crowded Shopping District,” courtesy of flickr user EnvironmentBlog. -
Gwen Hopkins, Aspen Institute Global Health and Development
Aspen Ideas Festival Takes on “The Population Challenge”
›The original version of this article, by Gwen Hopkins, appeared on the Aspen Ideas Festival blog.
The pictures flash quickly: lush sea vegetation replaced by empty grey-blue seabed as carbon bubbles out of undersea vents. Reservoirs depleted too quickly, never to refill. Forests and mountains leveled for coal, deep sea oil rigs ablaze, the arctic ice cap visibly retreating. Dennis Dimick is answering the question posed to him with a litany of evidence collected by National Geographic: Does population matter?
Yes, he says – a lot.
Kicking off the Our Planet: The World at Seven Billion track, on a panel called “The Population Challenge,” Washington Post staff writer Joel Achenbach moderated a conversation between Dimick and Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE USA, following Dimick’s presentation about how the earth’s human population has made its presence known.
Dimick explains that this new geologic era has been dubbed Anthropocene, the age of man, as we “transform the planet to perpetuate our lifestyle.” That’s a lifestyle powered first and foremost by what he calls “the new sun” – coal, oil, and gas, or in Dimick’s words, “ancient plant goo.” These transformations are deep and widespread – and according to Dimick, growing worrisome in their magnitude. While there is searing inequity – “few have a lot, and a lot have few” – those that lead the consumption have, for example, caught 90 percent of the big fish in the sea already, and burn in one year a quantity of fuel that took a million years to coalesce underground. “If everyone in the world lived like Americans do, we’d need four planets.”
Continue reading on the Aspen Ideas Festival blog.
Photo Credit: Aspen Institute. -
IFPRI Launches First ‘Global Food Policy Report’
›June 27, 2012 // By Carolyn Lamere“The Global Food Policy Report is the first publication that represents the major, major food policy developments in the past year and the outlook for 2012,” said Director of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Shenggen Fan in a video to promote the launch of the institute’s most comprehensive policy publication yet. The report is focused on regional developments, new research, debates, and legislation regarding food security both within individual states and at the international level.
A Guidebook for Policy
The 2008 global food crisis launched food security back onto the global agenda. A rapid rise in food prices contributed to instability around the world, and policymakers began to realize that access to food is an important security issue (high food prices have been linked to riots, for example).
“For 2012, food prices will remain very high and volatile, and some of the long-term trends like climate change, population growth, and demographic shifts towards more urbanized and higher income [populations] will continue to put pressure on global food security,” predicted Fan.
But the report notes that much of the fluctuation in global food prices is due to a lack of knowledge, not necessarily scarcity. The authors point to issues of preparedness and regulation as exacerbating factors and suggest that more detailed information, like that provided in the report, can help provide better solutions to policymakers.
Fan said that, by design, the report is “nontechnical, so the nontechnical person such as politicians, policymakers, practitioners, or anybody else who is interested in food security can use it as a comprehensive handbook.”
Making Connections Between Disciplines
The report draws on the expertise of dozens of authors who discuss topics ranging from biofuels to climate change. Rajul Pandya-Lorch, head of IFPRI’s 2020 Vision Initiative, spoke about the utility of collaboration among different disciplines in an interview with IFPRI: “I think for me 2011 was the time when we began to realize that we cannot think of agriculture simply for agriculture; we need to think of agriculture as a way in which we can impact on other development outcomes, especially nutrition and health,” she said.
Kathy Spahn, president and CEO of Helen Keller International, a speaker at the launch event, agreed. “The development community is beginning to realize that achieving food security is about more than just growing more food. It is also about growing more nutritious foods and making sure these foods are available and accessible to the families in need,” she wrote for Helen Keller International.
Fan emphasized that although agriculture has become more prominently featured in discussions of development, it is important to continue to link it to other outcomes. “We must find new ways to exploit the links between agriculture and other sectors, including health, nutrition, water, and energy,” he wrote in the overview of the report.
Past Developments and Future Outlook
Several key developments are highlighted that shaped food security in 2011. Food prices were particularly volatile – rising for the first half of the year then dropping – which caused a renewed global emphasis on food from policymakers.
New players ranging from emerging economies to the private sector “are increasingly reshaping the structure and nature of the global food landscape,” write the authors. The G-20 is “claiming a growing role” to help manage economic issues, and states like China, Brazil, and India are becoming more vocal regarding global food policy. Partnerships between governments and private companies have also become more common.
These and other developments described in the report will have an impact into 2012 and beyond. The report points out that “food emergencies” caused by natural disasters like the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa will likely occur in 2012 as well, but also emphasizes that these cannot overshadow more long-term drivers of food insecurity, like land degradation.
The report describes four “high-priority areas of action” for this year. First, the G-20 should try to reduce price volatility (although some have argued volatility is less a problem than consistently high prices). Second, policymakers should work to improve agricultural production specifically through strategies like soil nutrient management which provide high yields but are more sustainable than high use of fertilizers. States should also ensure that the infrastructure necessary to make these strategies successful is in place. The next target is based on the Rio+20 conference, namely that participants should “integrate economic, social, and environmental sustainability efforts” to improve outcomes like nutrition and health. There were in fact several seminars on cross-discipline partnerships at the conference, and the importance of integration was mentioned in the outcome text that emerged.
Finally, the report calls for further collaboration across disciplines, in emulation of the internal IFPRI effort for the report which included a wide variety of expertise. The authors emphasized that though progress has been made, the challenge of achieving global food security will remain a concern for the near future, and cooperation across communities will be critical.
“The idea and the impact of the report is to make people aware of the problems that we are facing and the concerns…clearly the problem is not resolved and it’s something that we need to take very seriously,” said contributor Maximo Torero in an interview with IFPRI. “There’s a lot of work to be done to try to do this.”
Sources: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CNN, Hellen Keller International, International Food Policy Research Institute, UN Conference on Sustainable Development.
Video Credit: IFPRI. -
Poor Planning, Population Boom Stress Abuja’s Water System, Says Pulitzer Center
›June 26, 2012 // By Graham NorwoodNigerian journalist Ameto Akpe, who recently spoke as part of the Wilson Center’s “Nigeria Beyond the Headlines” event, has published a new article on water scarcity in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s “Waiting for Water” series.
Abuja faces acute shortages due to insufficient government planning and a major population boom, she writes:The FCT [Federal Capital Territory] has seen an unprecedented population growth in the last 10 to 15 years. In 2006, population growth rate was pegged at 9.3 percent, the highest rate in the country and way above what the city’s planners envisaged. Recently, increased migration to the city has been spurred by terrorism attacks in the North, numerous incidences of kidnappings in the South, and the generally high unemployment rate in the country as millions of young graduates pour into the city in search of the very elusive promise of a “government job.”
Read the full article on the Pulitzer Center website.
Jibril Ibrahim, the Director of the FCT water board, the agency solely responsible for the production and supply of water in the territory, admits that the authorities did not see this coming. He says this unexpected population growth has overwhelmed existing water infrastructure and ruined the careful plans for water service delivery in the territory.
“This is what has made nonsense of the design we have in the city,” Ibrahim says. “Nobody believed that we were going to have this huge number of people and not even within this space of time.”
Patience Achakpa, executive secretary for the Women’s Environment Programme, believes that the government should have foreseen the potential attraction a city like Abuja presents to the urban migrant and should have put in place more efficient plans.
This lack of foresight means there is no pipe reticulation in many districts, particularly in peripheral areas. Even government housing projects are routinely built without being connected to the grid, simply lacking the crucial distribution network that would bring water to individual homes. Thus each household is forced to sink its own borehole, which in the long run has obvious implications on ground water.
Photo Credit: A water point in Gishiri, Abuja, courtesy of Ameto Akpe/Pulitzer Center. -
Sex and Sustainability on the Road to Rio+20
›When it comes to the public conversation about sustainable development, we can’t tell the story with only half the world’s population. Women’s voices are key – and women must have a seat at the table. Earlier this week I was honored to join Musimbi Kanyoro of the Global Fund for Women and Carmen Barroso of International Planned Parenthood Federation to brief bloggers and reporters about the linkages between sex and sustainability. The three of us are heading down to the landmark Rio+20 conference to track the inclusion of reproductive health and rights in the sustainable development agenda.
Some highlights from our call:- Musimbi noted that though the linkages between the environment – particularly climate change – and reproductive health issues can be contentious, we must remember that we are talking about real people with real needs – not abstract ideas.
- Carmen argued that women’s health and rights should be included in the upcoming Sustainable Development Goals, because health is intrinsic to sustainability, and reproductive rights are intrinsic to health.
- Musimbi remarked that climate change, urbanization, energy, and food security are all connected to population, our planet, and reproductive health. She highlighted the need for an open discussion about these linkages, especially for the 200 million women who want access to family planning.
- I pointed out that development projects that address population, health, and environmental issues are making a difference in remote communities around the world.
Follow me to Rio+20 here on the blog and the New Security Beat Twitter feed.
Image Credit: Adapted from UNSCD 2012 official logo.
