The UN human rights charter, affirmed in the Cairo Programme of Action on Population and Development, states that parents should be able to choose their family size ‘freely and responsibly’. Somehow, the rest of humanity bear the guilt if local destruction makes a misery of life for those children.
Yet the liveability of their community’s own local environment, under their own customary management, is directly diminished by increasing the size of each generation. Somehow, the use of the word ‘planet’ lifts the responsibility for each child to the entire human race, absolving parents of this responsibility. And those children should inherit a livable planet.’ But it does not explore the tension between these two rights. The Drawdown Review states, ‘ People’s choices about how many children to have should be theirs and theirs alone. To assure that what they are advocating has the approval of the global community, they stress, ‘ the United Nations notes that the international community has committed to ensuring that all people have access to family planning, should they wish to use it, and the ability to decide how many children to have and when.’ For example, it stresses that ‘ It’s critical to note the vast disparities in emissions from high-income countries compared to low …’ and asserts that ‘ The topic of population also raises the troubling, often racist, classist, and coercive history of population control.’ Like many current treatments of the topic, it ignores the profoundly humanitarian history of the voluntary family planning movement, instead elevating rare instances of ethnic targeting and coercion far beyond their importance. The text in this section is mainly an attempt to ward off criticisms for including such an item at all. There is no explanation for why the emissions reduction is lower than in round 1. In contrast, the link between girls’ education and fertility tends to be weak, once co-determinants (such as parents’ socioeconomic status and support for gender equity) are taken into account.ĭisappointingly, even less information is given about the calculation of this population contribution than in the original book ‘ Drawdown’. And yes, that includes China, where most fertility decline occurred under a voluntary program in the decade before the one-child policy was introduced. We know this to be untrue: all instances of rapid fertility decline since 1955 have been associated with direct promotion of small families within national voluntary family planning programs. The new presentation gives the impression that population growth is best minimised by indirect, rather than direct, interventions. Is political correctness causing population efforts to be misdirected? But it is disappointing to see voluntary family planning further demoted to the fine-print explaining the item ‘Health & Education’. In the timid world of environmental advocacy, one must be grateful that Project Drawdown has chosen to include actions to lessen population growth, and dares to discuss it. Population interventions are again included, but this time under the single entry ‘Health & Education’, attributed 85.4 Gt CO 2-eq emissions reductions. Recently, Project Drawdown has released a new book, ‘ The Drawdown Review 2020: Climate Solutions for a New Decade’. By focusing most of the commentary on empowering girls, they might deflect the push-back against family planning programs, which many readers still wrongly associate with neo-colonial, victim-blaming, rights-abusing ‘population control’. Drawdown simply split the resulting emissions equally between ‘education for girls’ and ‘family planning access’, on an entirely arbitrary basis. Note that the UN’s low-fertility projection is an outcome-based projection (achieving half a child per woman fewer births globally), not based on the policies or actions required to achieve that outcome.
#PAUL HAWKEN DRAWDOWN MOVIE#
To his credit, Paul Hawken drew attention to this fact in talks on the project, particularly in his appearance on Damon Gameau’s uplifting climate-solutions movie ‘ 2040’. And they do go together, since they represent the emissions saved by reducing global population growth from the UN’s ‘medium fertility’ projection to its ‘low fertility’ projection. Less obvious was that, when taken together, these two constituted the greatest single contribution of all, at 119 Gt. Listed at numbers 6 and 7 were ‘Educating Girls’ and ‘Family Planning’, each attributed 59.6 Gt CO 2-eq.
#PAUL HAWKEN DRAWDOWN HOW TO#
It stripped away the complexity of how to respond to climate change, by cataloguing the hundred most impactful actions that could be taken, using existing technologies, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Three years ago, he published a best-selling book, ‘ Drawdown: the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming’. Hats off to Paul Hawken, the environmentalist behind Project Drawdown.
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