UN Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
with support from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA)
|
| UN Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, with support from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) |
|
The following position paper has 78 signatories from around
the world, and it is now available in Spanish and French. please
call Sidonie Chiapetta at 1-202-797-6639 for a Spanish or French
copy. Our goal is to build up a network of NGOs around the
positions paper, for future action alerts and for lobbying at the
PrepComs and at Cairo. Additional southern NGO signatories are
especially welcome.
POPULATION, DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT
AN NGO POSITION PAPER FOR THE
1994 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT
(DRAFT) 10/28/93
Population, development and environment are inextricably linked
and are critical to determining quality of life on Earth, now and
for generations to come. The 1994 International Conference on
Population and Development (ICPD) must address these paramount
issues together, with foresight well into the next century.
Increasing poverty, overconsumption of resources in the North,
low status of women, inappropriate economic policies, rapid
population growth and unsustainable use of natural resources are
all interconnected. One quarter of the world's population -
predominantly in the industrialized nations - consumes over 70%
of the earth's resources and is responsible for most of the
global environmental degradation. In addition, the implications
of adding 95 to 100 million people annually to the world's
current population of 5.4 billion people are staggering and will
place tremendous stress on the earth's ability to provide for
basic human needs.
Clearly, current patterns of consumption and distribution of
people, wealth and natural resources are as much to blame for
widespread environmental degradation as is the sheer number of
people. Efforts to address population should focus on the root
causes of poverty, migration and high fertility rates, such as
low status of women and girls, early ages of marriage, lack of
education and health care, high child mortality rates, lack of
access to family planning information and services for women, men
and teenagers, etc. Addressing the consumption lifestyles of
peoples and societies is equally important.
Alleviating poverty, empowering women, increasing access to
family planning and health care, ensuring human rights,
developing more sustainable lifestyles in the North and improving
international development policies are all critical to providing
a decent quality of life for future generations, without causing
irreversible damage to the environment.
RECOMMENDATIONS
A. Improve the status of women. Women's empowerment/ability to
control their own lives is the foundation for all action linking
population, environment and development. Women are agents for
environmental and economic change worldwide, and should be
recognized for their role in managing resources and families. As
the status of women improves, they become empowered to make
independent decisions concerning their lives, fertility, and
contributions to development processes.
ACTIONS:
1. All governments should strive for universal access
of women to primary health care that includes reproductive
health, maternal and child health and family planning information
and services through programs that are women-managed and women-
centered. In the effort to meet these goals, governments should
follow the United Nations Development Program's recommendation to
dedicate 20% of total spending to the satisfaction of basic human
needs.
2. Governments and aid agencies should increase total
funding to U.S. $3.5 billion per year for closing the gender gap
in primary and secondary school education and for raising
literacy rates of women. Efforts should also be made to train
and hire more female teachers, build more small schools for
greater accessibility to rural populations, especially girls, and
set up literacy and tutoring campaigns at the community level.
3. Governments should provide legal framework for
increasing women's access, especially rural women, to financial
services (credit and savings), land tenure rights, new
agricultural technologies and vocational training skills.
4. All nations should ratify and actively support
implementation of the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms
of Discrimination Against Women and Girls and the United Nations
Treaty on Human Rights.
5. Governments, multilateral and bilateral aid-giving
agencies, and NGOs should increase the staff representation of
women in all areas of policy-making, program and project
evaluation and implementation.
6. Governments should promote public education campaigns
to improve social perceptions of women's roles in society and to
raise awareness of the value of women's work and welfare to
families and societies.
7. ICPD should recognize the fundamental role of women
in regulating the relationship between humans and their
environment, and should call for increased targeting of
development projects toward a better quality of life for women
and their children.
B. Increase and improve international family planning and
health assistance programs. Current international population
assistance is far from sufficient to meet the demand for
voluntary family planning and comprehensive health care. Some of
the most effective population programs are those which integrate
family planning with comprehensive health care and education, and
that encourage men to take responsibility for their own fertility
and recognize they have a role in their partners' health and
well-being.
ACTIONS:
1. ICPD should endorse the 1989 Amsterdam Forum, with
its goal of at least $9 billion annually in global population
assistance by the year 2000.
2. Signers of the Amsterdam Declaration should recommit
to those policy recommendations, and countries with the resources
and responsibility to act should increase international
population aid to 4% of their official development assistance
budget.
3. Donor nations should increase funding for programs
which are committed to comprehensive health care, that include
reproductive health care and provide for pre and post-natal care,
safe and legal voluntary contraceptives, prevention and treatment
of reproductive tract infections, AIDS/HIV and other sexually
transmitted diseases, and sex education and information for girls
and boys.
4. Donor nations should support programs that ensure
access to a wide range of contraceptive methods where supplies
are reliable, and where caregivers are trained to educate clients
adequately about choices available and enable them to make
competent and well-informed decisions.
5. Governments should provide financial and technical
mechanisms which support local reproductive health care
initiatives with modest amounts of money to work within their own
cultural and economic framework. Priority should be given to
programs that ensure outreach to the very poor, migrants,
refugees, unmarried women and adolescents.
6. Governments should encourage programs that educate men
on male methods of contraception and their parental
responsibilities.
7. All nations should formulate and enforce policies
which ensure human rights in order to prohibit involuntary or
coercive family planning programs.
8. Donor nations should provide increased funds for
research on safer contraceptives, including women-controlled
methods that protect against sexually transmitted infections as
well as pregnancy.
C. Reduce overconsumption and poverty. As population and/or
consumption in any given area increases, more demands are placed
on natural resources. In the industrialized countries of the
North, these demands are excessive and overconsumption has led to
inequities in resource use. One fifth of the world's population
is consuming a majority of the world's resources, leading to
global climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity,
perpetuation of poverty, and local and national environmental
degradation. In many regions of the South, a vicious cycle of
poverty combined with inappropriate development policies,
inequitable land distribution, lack of education and choices, and
increasing concentrations of populations drives people to exhaust
the very resources on which their livelihood depends, and thereby
leads to environmental degradation.
ACTIONS:
1. All governments, especially in the North, should
adopt natural resource and population policies that take into
consideration population growth, demographic patterns (such as
migration), access to and availability of resources.
2. Northern governments should take action to reduce
CO2 emissions in their countries by at least 25% from 1990 levels
by the year 2005; to take appropriate measures to reduce
substantially emissions of other greenhouse gases; and to take
steps to ultimately reduce greenhouse gases by 60%.
3. Northern governments should urge the development and
implementation of programs and policies promoting energy
efficiency, the use of renewable energy sources, and the transfer
of environmentally sound technologies to developing countries.
4. Governments, especially Northern, should encourage
community efforts to implement educational programs on the social
and environmental impacts of overconsumption and production and
to build awareness of consumer responsibility to global
environmental well-being.
5. Governments should promote conversion to equitable and
ecologically sustainable economies and take responsibility for
the needs of those whose livelihoods are negatively affected.
6. Governments should support fair trade, land
redistribution, debt alleviation, equitable tax systems,
regulation of transnational corporations, an end to structural
adjustment policies and the integration of social and
environmental costs into product prices.
7. Governments should support and enforce legislation to
strengthen consumer rights, especially to ensure environmentally
sustainable, safe and healthy products, and establish the "right
to know" laws which enable people to make informed consumption
choices.
8. Northern governments should ensure access to safe
and effective means of family planning for both men and women
citizens in their own countries.
9. Governments should contribute 20% of their overseas
development assistance to meeting basic human needs, as called
for at the 1990 U.N. World Summit for Children.
D. Increase participation of local organizations and indigenous
people in the design and implementation of programs. As is the
case with all programs for sustainable development, health and
family planning programs must be built with, not for, local
people. Consulting with and working through local organizations
assures appropriate design of programs, and the quality and
effectiveness of service delivery.
ACTIONS:
1. Countries should commit to increasing the decision-
making role of local groups and communities in the design and
implementation of population assistance projects. This may be
aided by increasing representation of women in the highest
administrative levels of governments and multilateral aid
organizations.
2. Governments should establish or strengthen
procedures for regular consultations with non-governmental
organizations representing local, national and global interests
in designing, implementing and evaluating development plans,
programs and projects.
3. Donor nations should direct support to non-
governmental organizations that design and implement community
programs.
E. Preparation of ICPD national reports. All nations
participating in ICPD should assess interlinkages among
population, development and environment in their countries and
should strive to coordinate national population policies with
their environment and development strategies.
ACTIONS:
1. Each national report should delineate the ways in
which rapid growth, population migration and resource consumption
are affecting development plans and poverty and make projections
for the future. Such assessments should include relationships to
availability of basic human needs, including health care,
education, food and employment.
2. Each national report should assess population within
the context of sustainability, including where and how
demographic pressures are interacting most with natural resources
and ecologically sensitive areas, i.e., including population-
environment dynamics such as:
Soil erosion and desertification; deforestation; water
scarcity; urbanization; production of greenhouse gases;
extinction of species from habitat destruction; and coastal
resource depletion due to increased demands for water, conversion
of wetlands for agriculture and housing, and unsustainable
fishing.
Special focus should be on the so-called "ecologically
endangered zones": coastal agricultural areas, upland forests,
urban squatter settlements, arid and semi-arid grazing areas,
etc.
F. Institution-building for integrating population into
environmental decision-making. The institutional framework
needed to assess the implications of population growth and
distribution, especially their potential impact on natural
resources and sustainable development, must be strengthened in
all countries.
The institutions available for policy analysis and project
implementation have been useful to those governments which have
invested in long-term planning.
ACTIONS:
1. Governments and multilateral institutions should
require an analysis of the effects of population growth and rate
of consumption of natural resources in all planning documents and
Environmental Impact Assessments.
2. All nations should develop their population impact
assessment capability.
3. Those countries with advanced demographic skills and
technology should collaborate with countries in the process of
strengthening their own resources. Bilateral and multilateral
development program funding should include institution building
mechanisms with the ultimate objective of enhancing individual
country ability to accumulate, analyze and project demographic
and natural resource data.
SIGNATORIES:
ALEPPO UNIVERSITY -- SYRIA
ACTION FOR DEVELOPMENT -- UGANDA
ALLIANCE FOR CHILD SURVIVAL -- U.S.A.
APPUI A LA FORMATION ET AUX TECHNOLOGIES (AFOTEC) -- SENEGAL
ARADIKES -- COSTA RICA
ASOCIACION CONSERVACIONISTA DE WILLIAM VILLEGAS FONSECA --
COSTA RICA
ASOCIACION DEMOGRAFICA COSTARRICENSE -- COSTA RICA
ASOCIACION PARA EL APOYO DE LA NUEVA FAMILIA EN NICARAGUA
IXCHEN/ANFAM -- NICARAGUA
ASOCIACION SALUD CON PREVENCION -- COLOMBIA
ASOCIACION SALVADORENA PRO-SALUD RURAL -- EL SALVADOR
ASSOCIATION SENEGALESE POUR LE BIEN-ETRE DE LA FAMILLE -- SENEGAL
ASSOCIATION OF DEVELOPMENT AGENCIES IN JAMAICA -- JAMAICA
ASSOCIATION FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT -- EGYPT
ASSOCIATION FOR VOLUNTARY SURGICAL CONTRACEPTION -- U.S.A.
CARE INTERNATIONAL
CENTER FOR DEVELOPMENT AND POPULATION ACTIVITIES
CENTRO DE CAPACITACION Y ASESORIA PARA EL DESARROLLO COMUNITARIO
-- MEXICO
CENTRO DERECHO AMBIENTAL Y DE LOS RECURSOS NATURALES (CEDARENA)
-- COSTA RICA
CENTRO DE DESARROLLO JOCOTEPEC, A.C. -- MEXICO
CENTRO SALVADORENO DE TECNOLOGIA APROPIADA-- EL SALVADOR
CHILD WELFARE LEAGUE OF NIGERIA -- NIGERIA
CHRISTIAN DEVELOPMENT GROUP OF SIERRA LEONE -- SIERRA LEONE
COLORADO POPULATION COALITION -- U.S.A.
DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES FOR FRAGILE LANDS -- U.S.A.
DIANNE DILLON-RIDGLEY, YOUNG WOMEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION (YWCA)
* -- U.S.A.
ECOLOGY AND HEALTH FOUNDATION -- POLAND
ENVIRONMENT AND POPULATION CENTRE -- ZAMBIA
ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND -- U.S.A.
FAMILY LIFE PROMOTION AND SERVICES -- KENYA
FAMILY PLANNING ASSOCIATION OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
FEDERACION MEXICANA DE ASOCIACIONES PRIVADAS DE SALUD Y
DESARROLLO COMUNITARIO -- MEXICO
FUNDACION ECOLOGISTA HECTOR RODRIGO PASTOR FASQUELLE-- HONDURAS
FUNDACION NATURA -- ECUADOR
FUNDACION PARA EL ECODESARROLLO Y LA CONSERVACION -- GUATEMALA
FUNDACION PRO-SIERRA NEVADA DE SANTA MARTA -- COLOMBIA
FUNDACION DE DEFENSE DEL MEDIO AMBIENTE DE BAJA VERAPAZ
(FUNDEMABV) -- GUATEMALA
GABINETE DE ENFERMERAS Y CENTRO DE INFORMACION-- MEXICO
GENERAL FEDERATION OF WOMEN'S CLUBS -- U.S.A.
GILBERTE VANSINTEJAN -- U.S.A.
GREENBELT MOVEMENT--LESOTHO
HELSINKI CITIZENS' ASSEMBLY -- CZECH REPUBLIC
INDONESIAN PLANNED PARENTHOOD ASSOCIATION -- INDONESIA
INSTITUTE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT STUDIES --INDONESIA
INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF SOCIAL WORKERS -- NORWAY
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S HEALTH COALITION
JANICE MIANO, AUDUBON INTERNATIONAL NETWORK * -- U.S.A.
KATHRYN CAMERON PORTER, CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL * -- U.S.A.
KENYA VOLUNTEER DEVELOPMENT SERVICES -- KENYA
KIRSTEN B. MOORE, THE POPULATION COUNCIL * -- U.S.A
MALUDEBO TA WANAWOKE -- KENYA
MIRIAM ABRAMOVAY, UICN/ORCA * -- COSTA RICA
NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY -- U.S.A.
NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW CENTER -- U.S.A.
NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION -- U.S.A.
NIGERIAN AGENCY FOR VOLUNTARY DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATIONS --
NIGERIA
NIGERIAN GIRL GUIDES ASSOCIATION -- NIGERIA
PAMI -- GUATEMALA
PANOS INSTITUTE -- U.S.A.
PLANNED PARENTHOOD ASSOCIATION OF ZAMBIA -- ZAMBIA
POLISH FEMINIST ASSOCIATION -- POLAND
POPULATION COMMUNICATIONS -- U.S.A.
POPULATION ACTION INTERNATIONAL -- U.S.A.
PRABHA PRABHAKAR BHARDWAJ -- KENYA
PRERANA -- INDIA
RAINFOREST ALLIANCE -- U.S.A.
RANTHAMBHORE FOUNDATION -- INDIA
SANCTUARY MAGAZINE -- INDIA
SIERRA CLUB -- U.S.A.
SOCIEDADE CIVIL BEM-ESTAR FAMILIAR NO BRASIL (BEMFAM) -- CHILE
UNNITI FOUNDATION -- INDIA
WAHIDA PATWA-SHAH, KENYA ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS *
-- KENYA
WEEDEN FOUNDATION -- U.S.A.
WILARSA BUDIHARGA, INDONESIAN PLANNED PARENTHOOD ASSOCIATION
* -- INDONESIA
WOMEN OF COLOR -- NASSAU NOW (NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF WOMEN)
-- U.S.A.
WORLD POPULATION FOUNDATION -- NETHERLANDS
WORLD POPULATION FOUNDATION -- SWEDEN
YOUTH FOR POPULATION INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION -- GHANA
YWC -- KENYA
YWCA OF GHANA -- GHANA
YOUTH FOR UNITY AND VOLUNTARY ACTION -- INDIA
ZAMBIA ALLIANCE OF WOMEN -- ZAMBIA
ZERO POPULATION GROWTH -- U.S.A.
* Organization listed for identification purposes only
NGO POSITION PAPER FOR INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT
FORM FOR SIGNATORIES
All Southern and Northern NGOs and individuals who support these
recommendations are invited to be signatories. Please indicate
if your organization supports these recommendations or if you
list your organization for identification purposes only.
( ) My organization supports the recommendations
( ) I list my organization for identification/affiliation
purposes only.
Name ________________________________________________________
Address ________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________
Country ________________________________________________________
Telephone ___________________ Fax ________________________
Organizational signatories: Please write one or two sentences
about
your organization:
_________________________________________________________________
_
_________________________________________________________________
__
_________________________________________________________________
__
PLEASE RETURN THIS FORM TO:
NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION
POPULATION PROGRAM
1400 16TH STREET, NW
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20036
FAX: 202-797-5486 TEL: 202-939-3311
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:
Karen Rindge, National Wildlife Federation
1400 16th St. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036, U.S.A.
Tel: 1-202-939-3311 Fax: 1-202-797-5486
Econet: NWFIP
Wanga Mumba, Environment and Population
Centre
PO Box 35614
Lusaka, Zambia
Tel/Fax: 260-1-289298