Introduction: The global human population is still growing such that our collective enterprise is driving environmental catastrophe. Despite a decline in average population growth rate, we are still experiencing the highest annual increase of global human population size in the history of our species—averaging an additional 84 million people per year since 1990. No review to date has accumulated the available evidence describing the associations between increasing population and environmental decline, nor solutions for mitigating the problems...
This analysis, written in 1993, explores the relationships; among competing schools of thought in the international population policy arena. It offers the following observations: (1) Five interest groups are influential: the population-concerned community, a market-oriented group, people focusing on equitable distribution of resources, women’s advocates, and the Vatican; (2) Only one of the five groups wants to draw attention to population growth; the other four all have other priorities and prefer to reduce attention to demography, seeing attention to population growth as interfering with...
Whether loved or unwanted, the birth of the six billionth child will be of great importance to his or her family. In a world that adds one million more births than deaths every 110 hours, however, the aggregate of human numbers is also important. Unfortunately, in such an emotional area, interest groups have often promoted their own priorities at the expense of the bigger picture.
This letter to the lancet discusses the need to meet the increasing demand for access to modern family planning and family as a strategy for global security
Abstract: In the past 50 years global population grew by 3.7 billion. There is a large unmet need for family planning and wherever women have been given the means and the information to decide if or when to have the next child, then family size has fallen, often rapidly. However, since the UN 1994 Cairo conference on population and development, support for international family has collapsed and fertility declines in many of the poorest countries have stalled. Amongst some of the most vulnerable groups family size has risen. The investment made in voluntary family planning will largely...
In the summer of 2006, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Population, Development and Reproductive Health held a series of Monday hearings at Westminster, London, UK, on population growth and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). For a joyous moment, good science and sound politics came together.
Published in The Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, April 2007, 33(2):75-6
This Policy Forum explains how the Millenium Development Goals set by the United Nations cannot be achieved unless family planning is made easily available in the lowest-income countries.
Abstract: Community-based distribution (CBD) programs present an alternative way of effectively reaching people in rural areas of developing countries where conventional methods of delivery do not exist or fail. This paper reviews the experience and findings from the Jane Goodall Institute’s (JGI) TACARE program in the Kigoma region of Tanzania. It focuses on the family planning CBD program and its integration within the TACARE program to meet the broader mission of JGI’s conservation efforts. Both qualitative and survey data suggest that the CBD program meets the needs for contraception...
