National organizations urge COP26 leaders to protect most vulnerable
San Francisco, CA – Dozens of leading NGOs are calling on the President and Delegates of the COP26 in this open letter 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.
Better family planning is the best way to reduce inequality. Other interventions alone are simply too late.
Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance says, “Our growth-driven policies are not only a cause of immense suffering for marginalized human and ecological communities, present and future, but they are premised upon oppressive power structures. Not only are reproductive, intergenerational, and ecological justice under attack, our current unsustainable growth-centred family planning policies are threatening all life on earth. We collectively need to acknowledge and address the urgency of this predicament.”
Fair Start Movement is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing growth-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model.
Population Balance is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that provides education and solutions to address the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals.
