Educating women – key to climate change?

It’s tough for a fourth child out of five to take seriously the idea that he should never have been born.

But the effect of society’s choices over family size is undoubtedly worth considering in terms of the effect on climate change.

Some close to the Copenhagen negotiations feel that its the elephant in the room.

Certainly population growth is a vital determinant of how much humanity consumes, but not on the official agenda for those urgent talks to limit global carbon emissions.

So a delicate issue, yet today, for the first time the United Nations issued a report linking demographic pressures to climate change.

Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the UN Population Fund told me today that ‘this is the first time we are clearly speaking about the link between population growth and climate change’.

In 1994 in Cairo the UN did say that population was linked to environment, but this is the first time the body has linked it specifically to climate change.

The report quotes an intriguing study which says that putting the world into a low population growth path, leading to 8 billion rather than 9 billion people on the planet by 2050, would save 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

But it’s not just that: there’s a huge wedge of the world’s population soon to come to child-bearing age … so is the answer for those rapidly growing countries to adopt coercive Chinese-style single child policies?

No, says the UN, this is not about forced population control, but enabling women to decide for themselves to have less children.

Education, empowerment of women, and contraception can all help mitigate climate change, says the report.

Of course almost all the likely growth in world population is happening in developing countries who emit far less Carbon than for example a child in Europe or America.

It’s the process of development that will see that population growth be increasingly carbon intensive.

The middle class in the world – earning at least $8000 a year stands at around 800 million now but is forecast to grow rapidly in the next two decades to 2 billion by 2030.

That’s two billion people who want to fly in planes, drive cars and eat lots of carbon intensive meat.

But that development will also naturally limit population growth as people become richer. so it’s a complex picture.

For now this is a new direction for the UN – the suggestion that condoms aswell as low carbon cars, can limit climate change. But it won’t be discussed in Copenhagen.