The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching, negative impacts on health and well-being, particularly in population mental health. Mental health is strongly related to people’s social environment, and the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this greatly. Many countries instituted shutdowns early in the pandemic restricting people’s movement both within and between countries. Shutdowns socially isolated people from one another and often led to poor mental health. The highest rates of mental distress occurred during time periods when COVID-19 mitigation measures were strictest and the number of COVID-19 related deaths was highest.

On November 15, the world population is projected to reach 8 billion people. As we approach that milestone, there’s no denying that our rapidly growing human population also places extraordinary pressure on the environment. The human population has doubled in the last 50 years, while wildlife populations have been cut in half.

We should be outraged by sexuality education’s colonialist connections. As a researcher and trainer based in the UK, I see how deeply blatant colonialist influences run in the field of sex education. The British empire was obsessed with the sexualities of their subjects and imagined their societies to be exotic licentious places where upper class British men could live out illicit fantasies. Yet, at the same time, these societies were deemed to be wells of immorality that needed Victorian moral education. These dual imaginaries were used to justify colonialism itself as a force to civilize non-western bodies and sexualities, and remain as ideas which echo in more contemporary discourses around controlling population and HIV.

“Globally women and girls continue to face barriers to access healthcare services—whether it be transport costs, financial costs, or even language barriers,” said Shakira Choonara, Technical Specialist with the World Health Organization (WHO) at a recent launch event of the Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) and Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Learning by Sharing Portal (LSP).

Of COVID-19’s many lessons, one is most critical to our collective next steps:

Business as usual in global health is no longer possible.

The pandemic exposed weaknesses in health systems across the world, and particularly in the delivery of equitable, high-quality reproductive, maternal, newborn, adolescent, and child health (RMNCAH) services. It also reinforced that effectively addressing these challenges requires rapid, responsive approaches driven and owned by countries and local institutions.

While the world’s population now approaches 8 billion people, global fertility rates have been declining for decades. The overall drivers of this decline include increased access to contraception and reproductive health care, an increase in women seeking higher education, women’s empowerment in the workforce, lower rates of child mortality globally, increased cost of raising children, and overall greater gender equality.

“Half. This is the proportion of all pregnancies that are unintended. That is 121 million pregnancies every year,” said Sarah Craven, Director of the Washington D.C. Office at UNFPA during a recent U.S. launch event for the 2022 UNFPA State of World Population (SWOP) report. “For these women, the most life altering reproductive choice, whether to become pregnant or not, is no choice at all. This is an unseen crisis unfolding right before our eyes.”

July 11 is World Population Day—a day designated annually by the United Nations that should prompt us, in the words of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, to “focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues.”

Examining population trends helps describe where we’ve been and suggests where we’re headed. Yet these facts about human existence on our planet also offer insights into how we got here—including a window into places where inequities exist and rights have been denied.