EPF, together with the Danish All Party Group on Reproductive Health and Rights, the Danish Family Planning Association Sex and Samfund and the Population and Climate Change Alliance organised a Parliamentarian’s working lunch as a side event to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP 15), in December 2009.

The working lunch aimed to draw Parliamentarian’s attention to the linkages between Population and Climate Change as an important but often neglected component in climate change discussions. More than 60 MPs from over 25 countries around the world took part in the lunch.

Meeting the basic human needs of growing populations depends on a healthy and sustainable environment. Demographic factors, such as rapid population growth combined with poverty and lack of access to resources in some areas and unsustainable consumption and wasteful production patterns in others, cause problems of environmental degradation, resource depletion, and climate change. Over 200 million women want, but currently lack access to modern contraceptives. As a result, 76 million unintended pregnancies occur every year. Meeting this demand for voluntary family planning could slow high rates of population growth, thereby reducing demographic pressure on limited resources.

The UN Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change provided an important opportunity to draw attention to the centrality of women in this policy field. The urgent need for increased rights-based family planning development assistance – including through integrated sexual and reproductive health, malaria and HIV/AIDS programmes – as an important addition to international efforts to assist least-developed countries to adapt to climate change was discussed as a core topic during the event.
The event was kindly supported by Countdown 2015 Europe.