In the timid world of environmental advocacy, one must be grateful that Project Drawdown has chosen to include actions to lessen population growth, and dares to discuss it. Population interventions are again included, but this time under the single entry ‘Health & Education’, attributed 85.4 Gt CO 2-eq emissions reductions. Recently, Project Drawdown has released a new book, ‘ The Drawdown Review 2020: Climate Solutions for a New Decade’. By focusing most of the commentary on empowering girls, they might deflect the push-back against family planning programs, which many readers still wrongly associate with neo-colonial, victim-blaming, rights-abusing ‘population control’.
Drawdown simply split the resulting emissions equally between ‘education for girls’ and ‘family planning access’, on an entirely arbitrary basis. Note that the UN’s low-fertility projection is an outcome-based projection (achieving half a child per woman fewer births globally), not based on the policies or actions required to achieve that outcome. To his credit, Paul Hawken drew attention to this fact in talks on the project, particularly in his appearance on Damon Gameau’s uplifting climate-solutions movie ‘ 2040’. And they do go together, since they represent the emissions saved by reducing global population growth from the UN’s ‘medium fertility’ projection to its ‘low fertility’ projection. Less obvious was that, when taken together, these two constituted the greatest single contribution of all, at 119 Gt. Listed at numbers 6 and 7 were ‘Educating Girls’ and ‘Family Planning’, each attributed 59.6 Gt CO 2-eq. It stripped away the complexity of how to respond to climate change, by cataloguing the hundred most impactful actions that could be taken, using existing technologies, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Three years ago, he published a best-selling book, ‘ Drawdown: the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming’.
Hats off to Paul Hawken, the environmentalist behind Project Drawdown.
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