By Kristine Berzins and Patricia Becus

Moses Mpali-Taire lives in a society where you don't talk about sex.

Yet during the past year, he and other members of the Teenage Education Health Centre Uganda have been busy training other young people to lead sexual and reproductive health clubs in their communities.

A few weeks ago, I opened my inbox to find threats of damnation and dire consequences. It was one of those emails, making the rounds in Kenya these days, filled with warnings about abortion, moral decay and a Muslim takeover that would surely result if Kenyans approve a new constitution for our country.

 

For several decades, Kenyans have been involved in the search for a new constitution. After a long and uncertain process, a draft constitution was finalized in May 2010 and a referendum on the same was held today. Several surveys and opinion polls have shown that an overwhelming majority of Kenyans, more than 60 percent, approve of the new constitution.

Pregnancy-related deaths are the leading cause of mortality for girls aged 15 to 19 worldwide.

Cross-posted with OtherWords.

A few weeks ago, a tiny resort community on the tip of Cape Cod found itself at the center of a national firestorm. Media descended in droves. People called the town "absurd" and "disgusting." Even the governor of Massachusetts got involved.

I recently attended a 30th anniversary celebration in Beijing for the China Population and Development Research Center, which hosted an international seminar on demographic research.   Those were the same 30 years that China has restricted its citizens to having what now amounts to around 1.5 children.  While the label "one-child policy," has always been a misnomer since there are exceptions, including for couples in some areas whose first child is a daughter, there is no mistaking that China has had a stringent fertility policy.  With a three decade perspective, we can now see what has unfolded in people's lives as a result of the policy.  After it was announced in 1979, the policy was questioned for  a range of reasons.  In addition to the human rights issues inherent in the policy, demographers and sociologists also highlighted the potential social and gender implications of sharply constraining fertility. 

Originally published on Grist

by Suzanne Ehlers , Negash Teklu, Rosemarie Muganda-Onyando,Wasim Zaman

We have a critical opportunity right now to make sure the next U.N. climate chief will serve the needs of the global community of women, and we need to seize it.

With Yvo de Boer stepping down as executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be appointing a replacement.  The role of the executive secretary is critical to achieving a fair, ambitious, and binding climate agreement, and a strong successor to de Boer is absolutely essential for Cancun and beyond.

Originally published on the Huffington Post.

Canada did its best this week to act like George W. Bush. The government excluded family planning from a new maternal health initiative for developing countries it planned to launch at the G8 meeting in June. Like a minority in our country, their Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon claimed that access to contraception is irrelevant to his goal of saving mothers and infants. After a quick public backlash, he edited his talking points, but still refused to acknowledge that family planning saves lives.

By Suzanne Ehlers and Elizabeth Becker

Originally published on Grist.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced an important new climate change financing group last week, but out of the 19 people named, no women were included. This is unfortunate because women will bear the brunt of the effects of climate change and are key to any climate solutions. 

Originally posted on the Huffington Post

A colleague on maternity leave recently sent an e-mail saying what an incredible experience pregnancy is and how she can't help thinking of the millions of women who go through it without the support we take for granted in the U.S. "Here I am focusing on tummy time and music groups; talk about perspective when you consider that more than half a million women die every year during pregnancy and childbirth because they don't have access to the simplest of health services and supplies."

Originally published on the New Security Beat

The second week of negotiations here in Copenhagen has been marked by dramatic events, as the deadline for a new global agreement to address climate change approaches.

Blocs of negotiators from developing countries have walked out, and returned. Thousands of NGO representatives who have been denied access to the proceedings are shivering in the cold. Observers inside the Bella Center have staged sit-ins. And yet slivers of hope remain for some form of a global deal that is fair, ambitious, and binding as negotiators prepare for the arrival of more than 100 heads of state on Friday.

As the Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) convenes in Copenhagen for its 15th  meeting, all eyes are  on targets to reduce carbon emissions.  At the same time, the irony of climate change is that people in countries that have had the least to do with growing emissions are likely to experience the greatest difficulties in adapting to the impacts of climate change.  Discussions and agreements in Copenhagen will include how best to plan for and fund long term adaptation strategies for countries affected by changes in climate.

As countries negotiate climate change solutions in Copenhagen, family planning and reproductive health should be among the adaption strategies on the table. At the same time, the world should not shy away from addressing population as a factor related to carbon emissions. Over 200 million women around the world are having more children than they say they want to have, partly because they do not have access to contraception. Giving women the means to have the number of children they prefer will help them and their families prosper, which is good for women, for the environment and for climate change.

Originally published on RH Reality Check

The old adage, think globally and act locally, should be heeded in discussing solutions to climate change.  While changes in industrialized country consumption patterns and technological solutions are needed to help stop the flow of dangerous greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and rendering the planet hotter and hotter, they will be insufficient to address the other side of climate change - helping the most vulnerable people adapt to its effects.  Adaptation requires community-based and integrated approaches to help people cope.   Involving communities and devising solutions based on local environmental and social conditions is the only sustainable approach.

Originally published in The New Security Beat

In a meeting with business leaders in Lahore in late October, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pointedly warned of the potential economic impacts of Pakistan's rapidly growing population: "There has to be...in any plan for your own economic future, a hard look at where you're going to get the resources to meet these needs. You do have somewhere between 170 and 180 million people. Your population is projected to be about 300 million as the current birth rates, which are among the highest in the world, continue," she said.

by Suzanne Ehlers

The 5th Asia and Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights (APCRSHR) is currently underway in Beijing, China. Today, I am moderating a session co-hosted by the Asia Pacific Alliance (APA) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The session, titled Meet the Donors, explored resource mobilization and Millennium Development Goal 5 (improving maternal health) through the lens of a theme raised in the day's opening sessions: In a climate of continuing financial gloom, how is it that an intervention as cost effective as family planning and reproductive health is still having difficulty mobilizing adequate resources?

by Clive Mutunga

In spite of all of the uncertainty leading up to the Copenhagen climate talks in December, one thing is clear: Adaptation needs are the most urgent in the least developed countries. These countries are expected to feel the brunt of climate change impacts: drought, floods, extreme weather, changing disease vectors, declining agricultural production - despite having contributed the least to it. For people in countries most affected by climate change, finding and supporting adaptation strategies that strengthen people's resilience and ability to cope with the effects of changes in climate is critical. My colleague Karen Hardee and I explored these issues and how population fits in our recent study, Population and Reproductive Health in National Adaptation Programs of Action for Climate Change.

Female Genital Mutilation: Three Generations Later has won an honorable mention in Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn's Half the Sky Contest! The blog was selected from more than 700 entries and will be published on the New York Times website.

Esraa Bani is the Advocacy Assistant in the International Advocacy and U.S. Government Relations departments of Population Action International.

A little four year old lay in bed wrapped in blankets. Her teeth were chattering and her body was warm with fever because she lost too much blood. She laid still in her bed as tears rolled down her face. Days passed by without her sleeping or eating because the pain was too much for her frail body to bear.

Originally posted on feministing.

When I graduated from high school in San Antonio, Texas, I can remember at least two dozen girls (out of a class of 600) pregnant or already with babies. It may seem astonishing now, but it was fairly normal in 1991: so normal, in fact, that our high school had responded with an academic track geared toward expectant and young mothers.

Based on this history, I wasn't totally shocked to learn that President Bush's abstinence-only program led to a 57 percent rise in student pregnancy in the Lone Star state.

by Kathleen Mogelgaard and Karen Hardee

This is a big week in the march towards the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, where world leaders are expected to hammer out a new global treaty to address the problem. Today, President Obama and other heads of state will meet in New York with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to discuss climate change; the subject is also likely to be high on the agenda at the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh later this week.

Much of the focus this week and leading up to the meeting in Copenhagen in December is on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change: who should have to cut, by how much, and in what time frame. We hear a lot about cap and trade, clean energy, promoting energy efficiency, and other technological solutions. For years, reducing emissions has been the focus of efforts to address climate change. But we know now that reducing emissions is not enough: millions of lives are being upended by the effects of changes in climate - food scarcity, water scarcity, vulnerability to natural disasters and infectious diseases, and population displacement.  Women and children are the most vulnerable groups to climate change. 

Kirana Bammarito is PAI's Communications Intern. She is a recent graduate of American University.

August 12 will mark the tenth International Youth Day as commemorated by the United Nations. In the United States, youth triumphs and tragedies alike have occurred during the past year. November saw the exciting, social-media-driven election of President Barack Obama with July revealing the dismaying, but not surprising, report that declining teen pregnancy and STI rates either stalled or reversed during the Bush years. Rates in the South, where authorities tout abstinence and religion as perfect sex education, are of course, the highest.

Kame Westerman is PAI's Climate Change Intern. She is a current graduate student in Sustainable Development & Conservation Biology at the University of Maryland.

As an environment volunteer with the Peace Corps, I was given the task of visiting outlying villages and promoting sustainable agricultural techniques - the hope being that with increased agricultural efficiency and sustainability, there would be less need to harvest from the surrounding forests.  Yet as I quickly came to understand, sustainable agricultural techniques are a moot point if the regions' unsustainable fertility rate of just over five children per woman continues.

Gabrielle Stopper, Resource Development Intern. She is a recent graduate of George Washington University.

Today marks World Youth Day and a time to celebrate the promise that comes with new generations.  Youth bring new ideas, new understanding, and new methods to achieve what was once thought impossible.  Walking around Washington DC during the summer, the streets swarming with interns, it is clear how truly exciting the future will be.  As a woman in my twenties, having attended college in DC, I have been privileged to watch and become part of the reproductive health movement, though this unique city was not what led me there.   My own youthful drive and need to question during high school fueled my first exposure to the field. 

Originally published in Grist

"The main driving forces of future greenhouse gas trajectories will continue to be demographic change, social and economic development, and the rate and direction of technological change," according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Emissions Scenarios. Two of these drivers - development and technology - have been the focus of a great deal of discussion among the international community as they continue to work toward a new international climate change agreement in Bonn this week. The third, demographic change, has been conspicuously absent.

Published in Grist

It's the fourth day of climate negotiations here in Bonn, and at 4:30 in the afternoon, there is a lull in the action before the start of early evening "contact groups" - official meetings of negotiators that are sometimes open to observers. Looking for a quiet place to sit down with my laptop, I have landed in the main plenary hall, sitting in the seat with a placard that reads "GEF" (Global Environment Facility, the agency charged with managing a portion of funds for international adaptation efforts). Hopefully no one will mind my brief trespass.

Originally published on Grist

This is the second dispatch by Population Action International from global climate change talks in Bonn, Germany.  Read the first.

One of the under-reported issues about climate change is its dramatic affect on women.  A side event I attended this afternoon, organized by the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA), included speakers from all around the world, representing men, women, government agencies, NGOs, North and South. But their messages were unified: women's historic disadvantages--limited access to resources, restricted rights, under-representation in decision making--has made them disproportionately vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Originally published on Grist

Kathleen Mogelgaard is Senior Program Manager of the Population and Climate Change Program at Population Action International.

At the opening of the international climate change talks in Bonn, Germany, today, representatives from governments around the world shared their opinions on a newly released draft of a global climate treaty that will be debated and (perhaps) finalized when they meet again in Copenhagen in December.