Open Letter to United Nations Population Fund: Between Earth Overshoot Day and COP 27 Make a Bold Statement on Just and Sustainable Family Planning 

We are calling on the President and Delegates of the COP27 to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning as the most effective solution to address the climate crisis, and rising global inequality, including gender inequity.

The global community has failed to inform and support a universal effort towards just and sustainable family planning, which:

• Is human-rights centered
• Ensures sustainable and equitable resources for greater investment in each child
• Enables communities and governments to protect children and future generations while upholding reproductive rights

On the contrary, pressures to increase births, or to obstruct family planning programs, are driving our biggest crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril. Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, is contributing to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation. Worsening inequality, in large part driven by our growing population, is also a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe.

Here are the facts: 

• The most effective way to address many of the impacts on our environment and other species, like climate change, is by choosing smaller families. It’s up to 20 times more effective than changing diet or forms of transportation. 
• By 2100 world population could vary by billions of people, depending on whether the average woman in the world today has one child more or one child fewer in her lifetime. 
• Better family planning is the best way to reduce inequality. Other interventions alone are simply too late.

Read the full letter here.

Take action by adding your name to the list of signatories using the form below.