Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 - One comment

When governments meet in Copenhagen, where will the grown-ups be?

Sometimes you wonder. In December the world’s leaders will meet in Copenhagen to discuss urgent action in the next decade to protect the planet. Yet commentators are busy scaling down expectations. No great decisions are expected out of Copenhagen. That’s it. Life will go on.

Except that it won’t. It isn’t. Atmospheric carbon is already over safe limits; Arctic sea ice is disappearing; tropical coral reefs are turning into dead stumps. The Maldive Islands, where the highest point in the country is the capital’s garbage dump, are awash. So are coastal areas, home to 40 per cent of the world’s people. Rich countries like the Netherlands can build coastal defences. Poor ones like Bangladesh can’t.

And the band played on. Well, not quite. Many governments, individuals and groups are taking action on their own. Some corporations are finally getting the message that destroying the environment hurts the bottom line. Lifestyles are changing, even in the United States, parent and protector of the world’s greatest single personal global warming device, the motor car.

Poor people are changing their lifestyles too. That’s nothing new for the poor – they adapt all the time, because they have to. If you’re poor, adapting can be the difference between life and death. Poor women are especially ingenious, finding new ways to make do with what they have. It’s not just their own lives they’re saving – they’re responsible for their families too.

Women get very little support for all they do, quite the opposite. They run into obstacles in all directions. Some of the barriers are ancient, others seem to have been invented on the spur of the moment. Take family planning – 200 million women would use contraception now, if they could. But there’s a persistent myth that they don’t want it. Why wouldn’t they? Pregnancy and childbirth is difficult and dangerous when there’s no antenatal care and there’s no way to reach hospital when something goes wrong.  While you were reading this, a woman died. A woman dies every minute of every day, for the same reason. About a third of them didn’t want to be pregnant in the first place.

Virtually no-one dies from maternal causes in richer countries. Nor in some poor ones, for example Cuba, where women with complications have the standard minimum of medical assistance. It’s not rocket science, it’s a question of priorities. Someone has to care whether these women live or die.

It’s the same with the planet as a whole. Someone has to care more for our common future than for their bottom line or their relative prosperity.

And not incidentally, caring about women translates into caring about the planet. The only way to slower population growth – eventually limiting our collective footprint – is to make it possible for women to have only the pregnancies they want. That done, fertility would decline to near-replacement level, and human populations would peak out at maybe 9 billion people, compared with nearly 7 billion today.

Sometimes you wonder.

The views expressed in this blog-post are solely those of the author.