Recommendations

This publication makes three principal recommendations:

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should include a comprehensive study of population-climate interactions in its Third Assessment Report, to be published around the year 2000.
• Negotiators of future protocols to the Framework Convention on Climate Change should examine the Programme of Action agreed to at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. Climate protocols should make specific reference to this agreement's social investment strategies as supporting and amplifying other measures to slow the pace of human-induced climate change.
• Future climate negotiations should focus more explicitly on the different per capita levels that characterize fossil fuel carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Protocols should include provisions and foster implementing institutions that recognize the principle of the equal human right to use the atmosphere to dispose of greenhouse gases. A clear statement of this principle would make more understandable the greater obligation of industrialized nations to cut back on their greenhouse gas emissions before requiring that developing countries do the same. The principle of equal atmospheric access, equitable on its merits and the only likely basis for full and long-term international cooperation on climate, also would help to illuminate the importance of population dynamics to the future of the world's climate.