Le Monde, 19 November 2009

“Urgent: help women have fewer children so as to combat global warming.” According to the Le Monde, this is the gist of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) State of World Population 2009 report, which points to uncontrolled natality in developing countries as one of the main drivers, and risk factors, of global warming. Three weeks shy of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 15), and even as family planning is merely marking time in the poorest regions of the world, the UNFPA is bent on broaching in Copenhagen a demographic issue hitherto unbroached in international negotiations. On this head, notes Le Monde, “a recent study cited by the UNFPA finds that a dollar invested in family planning and girls’ education will reduce greenhouse gas emissions every bit as much as a dollar spent on generating wind energy.”