Iran has experienced one of the most successful family planning programs in the developing world, with 64 percent decline in total fertility rate (TFR) between 1986 and 2000. This paper focuses on Iranians’ unique experience with implementation of a national family planning program. Recognition of sensitive moral and ethical aspects of population issues resulted in successful collaboration of technical experts and religious leaders. Involvement of local health workers, women health volunteers and rural midwives led to great community participation. Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data...
This revised and updated Atlas provides a comprehensive guide to modern contraceptive practice. The book is heavily illustrated with color photographs and line drawings that guide the reader through the various options available and provide a valuable educational resource. The supporting text offers a concise description of family planning in today’s world.
Family planning is needed, simple and inexpensive. This book provides an invaluable resource for the wide range of physicians and allied health workers who advise and deliver contraceptive care.
Speech to a meeting of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee of the British Parliament reprinted in Science in Parliament: The Journal of the Parliamentary And Scientific Committee
Published in Science in Parliament, Spring 2008, Vol 65, (1) 1-19
The silence about population growth in recent decades has hindered the ability of those concerned with ecological change, resource scarcity, health and educational systems, national security, and other global challenges to look with maximum objectivity at the problems they confront. Two central questions about population—(i) is population growth a problem? and (2) what causes fertility decline?—are often intertwined; if people think the second question implies possible coercion, or fear of upsetting cultures, they can be reluctant to talk about the first. The classic and economic theories...
An international group of 42 scientists met at the University of California, Berkeley on 23–24 January 2009 to discuss The World in 2050, and how global changes in the human population might change our future.
The papers prepared for the Forum are published as a theme issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Published in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2009 364, 2975-2976
In the 1970s, policy-makers in both India and China, convinced that reducing population growth was critical for ending poverty, instituted coercive population policies. Yet fertility had already been declining in both countries before the population policies were instituted. In China, the total fertility rate (TFR) had already fallen to 2.9 before the institution of the One-Child Policy. In India, fertility continued to decline at roughly the same rate before, during and after ‘The Emergency’. Regardless of government mandates, couples in both countries before the policies and since have...
The human contribution to climate change is driven primarily by high per capita consumption in the North. The poorest 1 billion people living on a dollar or two a day contribute only 3 per cent of the world’s total carbon footprint, yet the loss of healthy life-years resulting from global warming could be as much as 500 times greater in Africa than in Europe (McMichael et al., 2008). It is also true that 99 per cent of the projected 1-4 billion increase in global population that will occur between now and 2050 will take place in the least developed countries with the smallest carbon...
Last year a member of the World Bank professional staff gave a lecture on development in Africa on the UC Berkeley campus. His audience asked him about rapid population growth in that continent. He immediately dismissed the question, saying that population growth did not need any special attention. It would look after itself. He was voicing an uncritical interpretation of the demographic transition, a “theory” which has as much evidence to support it as the fictitious Da Vinci Code, and like the Da Vinci Code it remains perennially popular.
The following report documents how, over the next 30 to 40 years in parts of sub- Saharan Africa, between 100 million and 200 million people are likely to be without sustainable food supplies. This was the conclusion of a multidisciplinary group of experts from Africa and North America, who asked what will happen in the Sahel when new projections of global warming are combined with rapid population growth. The meeting was not the first on the Sahel, but the breadth of expertise in agriculture, climatology, demography, family planning, the status of women, terrorism, and national security...
Parts of Africa have the most rapid population growth in the world. Recent studies by climatologists suggest that, in coming decades, ecologically vulnerable areas of Africa, including the Sahel will be exposed to the harshest adverse effects of global warming. The threat hanging over parts of sub-Saharan Africa is extreme. Fortunately, there are evidence-based achievable policies which can greatly ameliorate what would otherwise be a slowly unfolding catastrophe of stunning magnitude. But to succeed such measures must be taken immediately and on a large scale....
