Climate change will exacerbate gaps between rich and poor: UNFPA state of world population 2009

Kalinga Times: Family planning, reproductive health care and gender relations could influence the future course of climate change and affect how humanity adapts to rising seas, worsening storms and severe droughts, according to The State of World Population 2009 , published today by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

International climate-change agreements and national policies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they take into account population dynamics, the relations between the sexes, and women's well-being and access to services and opportunities, the report concludes. Slower population growth, for example, would help build social resilience to climate change's impacts and would contribute to a reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions in the future, The State of World Population 2009 found.

According to a summary of the report released by UNFPA in the city on Thursday, most of the debate about climate change today has revolved around countries' relative responsibilities for limiting the growth of greenhousegas emissions and for funding efforts to shift to low-carbon energy and other technologies. What's the best approach for reducing carbon emissions? Who should shoulder the financial responsibility for addressing current and future climate change? “These questions are critically important,” UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid writes in the foreword to the report. “But also important are fundamental questions about how climate change will affect women, men, boys and girls differently around the world, and indeed within nations, and how individual behaviour can undermine or contribute to the global effort to cool our warming world.”

The climate debate of the future must take into account the human and gender dimensions of every aspect of the problem. Any treaty emerging out of the December 2009 Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change “that helps people adapt to climate change and that harnesses women's and men's power to reverse the warming of the earth's atmosphere would launch a genuinely effective long-term global strategy to deal with climate change,” Ms. Obaid adds….