Sustainability from the Ground Up - Working on Reproductive Health and the Environment in Communities

March 1, 2007

Robert Engelman

In recent years many governments have been turning their attention years away from population and reproductive health issues to such pressing concerns as HIV treatment and the urgent need to alleviate poverty. Worries about human-induced climate change and its future impacts will also increasingly preoccupy governments in years to come. Easily forgotten is the evidence from decades of programmatic operations and research that provision of reproductive health services and associated lower fertility and mortality contribute powerfully to progress in each of these areas of immediate concern.

A recent study by a committee of the British House of Commons concluded that slowing population growth contributes in measurable ways to achievement of each of the seven United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) designed to cut in half rates of poverty, hunger and ill health by the year 2015.

“Except for a few oil rich states, no country has pulled itself out of poverty while maintaining high fertility,” the report, The Return of the Population Growth Factor: Its Impact on the Millennium Development Goals, concluded. “Birth rates have been shown to decline when the option of family planning is made easily available. Urgent action must be taken to ensure family planning provision becomes an integral part of all efforts to reduce poverty, improve mothers’ and children’s survival and health, and to forestall further damage to the natural environment. . . . Universal access to family planning, as called for in 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development is crucial to achieving the MDGs. Helping couples to achieve their fertility goals is a fundamental and internationally recognized human right and will at the same time help to ensure a safer, more peaceful and healthier environment for tomorrow’s children.”

Wider linkages to aspects of people’s lives beyond reproduction and the environment are indeed possible and may often be advisable. More research — and, just as important, more on-the-ground experimentation — is needed to identify when, where and under what circumstances specific kinds of sectoral linkages produce the most value in development and development assistance. Reproductive health will have to prove its added value in this context, but there is every reason to expect that it can and will.

PHE and PAI

PAI believes that family planning and natural resource conservation remain an especially catalytic combination that can bring communities quickly closer to broad-based economic development, improved health and environmental sustainability. At a minimum, PAI will continue to urge that reproductive health always be included among the components in any integrated development projects in developing countries. Reproductive health services should be as comprehensive as feasible, presenting as few barriers as possible to all who seek to use them. And they should always include a variety of choices of contraceptive methods to meet the needs and wishes of women, men and young people.

Such integration of reproductive health services not only makes more feasible the achievement of the ambitious Millennium Development Goals. It also brings closer the world envisioned by the world’s nations at the 1994 United Conference on Population and Development, one in which the means to have healthy sexuality and reproduction and to choose the timing of pregnancy and childbearing are available to all. The women, men and young people of the most remote and the most marginalized communities on the planet should expect nothing less from the well-meaning strangers who arrive at their doorsteps in the name of development, environmental sustainability and improved human well-being.