The cover of the UNFPA's latest report on the state of world population 2009. The publication is being launched today under the theme, 'Facing a changing world: women, population and climate'. - Contributed

AHEAD OF next month's United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) crosses new frontiers with the launch of its state of world population 2009 report today. The report focuses on women, population and climate.

According to the report, "family planning, reproductive health care and gender relations could influence the future course of climate change and affect how humanity adapts to rising seas, worsening storms and severe drought," and are therefore critical components of the climate change agenda.

Underscoring this new thrust at a pre-launch workshop in Mexico City on the findings of the report, executive director of UNFPA, Thorya Ahmed Obiad told journalists from Latin America and the Caribbean that halting climate change requires a fresh approach to development and economic growth, which must include population dynamics and gender relations.

"The only lasting solution (to climate change impacts) will be the one that puts people at its centre. This report shows that women have the power to mobilise against climate change, but this potential can only be realised through policies that empower them," she said.

Individual behaviour

While most of the debate around climate change has focused on who is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and who should pay, the UNFPA executive director said "equally important are questions about how climate change will affect women, men, boys and girls differently around the world and within nations, and how individual behaviour can undermine or contribute to the global effort to cool or warming the world."

She said the next steps in the climate change debate must take into account the human and gender dimensions of every aspect of the problem. She added, "any treaty emerging from the December 2009 15th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that helps people adapt to climate change would launch a genuinely effective global strategy to deal with climate change."

It is expected that the international conference will endorse a new treaty to limit global warming, while at the same time placing emphasis on the poor people, helping them to adapt to the current climate change impacts, taking into considering the roles played by women, men and children.

Creatively designed with a photograph of a poor Asian woman gathering firewood and walking across a bare, parched earth - facing the brunt of climate change - the report highlights in various ways the individual human impact on the changing world. It details climate change and migration; the disproportionate burden on women; reproductive health, and suggests strategies by governments for reining in climate change.

Other findings

Among other findings, the report found that "slower population growth will help to build social resilience to climate change impacts and would contribute to a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the future".

It also describes what can be done to halt or slow down climate change and what needs to be done to help the poor adapt to the many changes that are now taking place.

"There is no doubt that human beings have changed the composition of the atmosphere," author of the report, Robert Engleman of the World Watch Institute, said in his presentation at the workshop. "Most of the observed warming (of the atmosphere) in the last 50 years is attributed to human activities," he added.

UNFPA is an international development agency that promotes human rights and supports the policies and programmes of countries to reduce poverty. It does so primarily through the use of population data.

lovelette.brooks@gleanerjm.com

See The Sunday Gleaner for more reports on the UNFPA state of the world population 2009.