An article in today’s Washington Post explores the interconnected problems of poverty and rapid population growth in the Philippines. Many factors contribute to the country’s high poverty rate, including corruption and traditional land ownership laws, but a birth rate that is among the highest in Asia is also significant. Eighty percent of the Filipino population is Catholic, and both the influential Catholic Church and the current government—in power for the last five years—oppose modern family planning methods. Filipinos are permitted to buy contraception, but no national government funds may be used to purchase contraception for the millions who want it but cannot afford it.

The situation may be poised to worsen, notes the Post: “Distribution of donated contraceptives in the government’s nationwide network of clinics ends this year, as does a contraception-commodities program paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development. For years it has supplied most of the condoms, pills and intrauterine devices used by poor Filipinos.”

Yet the story is not entirely gloomy. A recent brief by Joan Castro and Leona D’Agnes of PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc. describes IPOPCORM, a development program that has successfully delivered family planning services to impoverished Filipino communities while simultaneously promoting environmental conservation and overall human health. Based on this success, some municipal governments in IPOPCORM’s service areas have set aside money in their budgets to purchase family planning commodities directly. A major conference in 2008 (building on an earlier conference in 2006) addressed population, health, and environment connections in the Philippines; featured speakers included former Congressman Nereus Acosta and Joan Castro.

The Population Reference Bureau recently published several new resources on global family planning, including a data sheet on worldwide family planning and an article by James Gribble examining trends and patterns in family planning in West Africa. Gribble also recently co-authored an article on the successes and failures of Peru’s family planning policy, particularly among the poor.

An article published in Human Dimensions of Wildlife (subscription required) found that crop destruction by wildlife in three villages in northeastern Tanzania significantly reduced both food security and household income. The article recommends implementing several incentives—including microcredit for non-agricultural activities—for conservation.

A report from the Center for International and Strategic Studies’ Global Strategy Institute examines the future of water and energy in an increasingly urbanized Asia, with a particular focus on China.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development released a summary of the proceedings at the first African Water Week, which took place March 26-28, 2008.

“Images of overpopulation tend to reinforce racist stereotypes of the world’s poorest people, demonizing those who are the least responsible for global warming” and obscuring important questions about how well family planning and other policies actually combat climate change, argued Hampshire College professor Betsy Hartmann in a lively roundtable discussion on population and climate change hosted by The Bulletin Online.

Because one-third of all pregnancies are unwanted, and because some 200 million women desire family planning services but lack access to them, contributor Frederick A.B. Meyerson, an ecologist at the University of Rhode Island, argued that policies to reduce unwanted pregnancy must be a chief global priority. He called for the international community to “restore the goal of universal access to family planning as a top-tier priority, to protect both the climate and human wellbeing.”

Joseph Chamie, research director for the Center for Migration Studies, called this a “delay tactic” that would do little to slow climate change, and said the international community should instead focus on decreasing consumption in the developed world, noting that the average American creates nearly 20 times as much carbon dioxide as the average Indian. He added that the 200 million women Meyerson mentioned live primarily in regions of Africa and Asia where per capita emissions are so low that changes in fertility will have negligible impact on climate. Increasing access to voluntary family planning services could have greater effects in India or China, he said, where economic development has resulted in continually increasing per capita emissions levels.

John Guillebaud, emeritus professor at University College London, and Martin Desvaux, trustee of the Optimum Population Trust, resisted Chamie’s assertion, writing, “It’s not difficult to understand that one less person born into poverty is one less person who needs to be helped out of poverty—a development process that cannot occur without increased energy consumption and (in the medium term) more carbon-dioxide emissions per person.” They wondered whether the international community would be better off focusing on reducing absolute emissions or providing for a more equitable distribution of emissions by reducing it in more-developed areas and allowing it to increase in less-developed areas as a result of improved standards of living.

Pointing out that some credit smaller landholdings (the result of a growing population) with higher investment in soil conservation and better-managed tree densities in Rwanda, Hartmann highlighted the complexity in forecasting the consequences of population growth. Seemingly counterintuitive findings like this one pepper the debate, encouraging us to carefully analyze the mathematical models and projections we rely on.

Effective development programs require multisectoral strategies, says Roger-Mark De Souza, and succeed by building local and regional partnerships and winning the trust and participation of individuals and communities. In the following podcast, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko discusses integrated development approaches in the Philippines with De Souza, who is the director of foundation and corporate relations at the Sierra Club and formerly the technical director of the Population Reference Bureau’s population, health and environment program. De Souza shares his experiences of how local communities have successfully integrated environmental conservation and population issues to alleviate poverty and improve their quality of life. Many of the issues regarding integrated population, health, and environment approaches discussed in this podcast also appear in an article by De Souza in ECSP Report 10.

A report by Filipino TV journalist Melclaire R. Sy-Delfin—recent Global Media Award winner and subject of an ECSP podcast—warns that a water crisis could threaten the 88 million residents of the Philippines as early as 2010. According to Delfin, 27 percent of Filipinos still lack access to drinking water, despite successful government programs to increase supply.

The Economist’s recent story “How to deal with a falling population” rightly states that a growing global population does not inevitably exhaust the earth’s resources, and that a shrinking population poses several serious threats to nations.

But the article downplays the impact of a large population. The total number of people on the planet has both global and local consequences. On the global level, each additional resident contributes to climate change, and this contribution is growing for citizens of developing countries making the transition to more western, carbon-consuming lifestyles. While 6.6 billion people have not yet run the oil derricks dry, large local populations have already had significant effects on local resources. In many parts of the world, women and children walk for hours to obtain water, firewood, and other basic needs.

The story seems to suggest that we should wait for governments to solve the problem of climate change. Yet many, including the author of one of the articles in The Economist’s September 2006 survey of climate change, are skeptical that politics can single-handedly and responsibly address this issue.

While governments work on large-scale policies, everyday people can influence natural resource consumption and climate change by focusing on population issues. One of the most effective ways to do this is by expanding access to family planning programs. Concerns about the possibility of coercion accompany all family planning efforts, but regulated, well-managed family planning programs tend to produce positive side effects, increasing women’s empowerment and education and expanding employment opportunities for both men and women.

It is important for governments and international institutions to craft prudent, long-term policies to address climate change. Yet we must also remember that the choices that ordinary individuals make can have significant positive impacts on health, economic development, and the environment.

Climate change, biodiversity, air pollution, deforestation, water scarcity, and other environmental issues share a common denominator that lies quietly beneath the higher priorities of the environmental movement: population pressure.

Next year, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population will live in cities. This urban growth is inevitable, says a new United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report. Although cities are sometimes thought of as synonymous with poverty and large ecological footprints, the report, entitled State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, describes the unprecedented urbanization as an opportunity. Lead author George Martine discusses the misconceptions surrounding urbanization and the ways in which policymakers can maximize the benefits of urban growth.