Women and their kids in Kunderpara, Bangladesh.The women of Kunderpara village are used to having water all around them. They live on an island in the middle of one of Bangladesh’s many large rivers. The women are even used to the occasional seasonal flood.

But lately when the river floods, it takes on new, terrifying meaning. The women do all they can to prepare, but more and more often the water comes without warning.

When it comes, there is little to do but gather their children and climb up on raised beds, out of its reach. The water brings stress. It brings sickness. Children cannot go to school, and pregnant women cannot access health care.

When the water comes, they must wait, sometimes for weeks, until it subsides again.

As the climate changes, floods in the northwest corner of Bangladesh are becoming more unpredictable, and lasting longer than they did in the past. And the women of Kunderpara are doing their best to adapt to this changing reality.

With the help of a local organization, Ganna Unnayan Kendra (GUK), the residents of Kunderpara are learning how to prepare for the unpredictability of flooding. They have formed a disaster preparedness committee, and constructed a flood shelter on the highest ground in the area. Since the community recognizes that women are heavily affected by floods, women occupy important roles in the committee. They take the lead in activities like early-warning communication plans, support for pregnant or nursing mothers, and longer-term strategies like growing and selling vegetables to set aside cash for emergencies.

But the program doesn’t include one aspect of these women’s lives, an aspect that could be just as important to the livelihoods of their families as disaster preparedness and income generation: the ability to plan their families.

Most people working on climate change do not automatically think about reproductive health, but the women they’re working with probably do. Nearly 20 percent of married women in Bangladesh want to avoid pregnancy, but don’t have contraception.

Hearing their stories, it’s clear the women of Kunderpara have enough uncertainty and stress in their lives without having to worry about an unplanned pregnancy. In their roles as providers of food, water, and fuel, these women are crucial to their families’ abilities to survive and effectively cope with the impacts of climate change. When they are empowered to manage the timing of their own childbearing and the size of their families, they can better respond to unpredictable impacts of climate change.

Women with access to family planning are healthier and have healthier children. They also have greater opportunities to complete their own education and earn money in new ways, which can be critical in areas where climate change undermines traditional farming or fishing.

On a larger scale, slowing population growth would ease pressure on ecosystems that are already vulnerable to climate stresses, and result in fewer people exposed to climate risk. People in Bangladesh live on these islands, which occasionally disappear under a river’s floodwaters, because there is nowhere else for them to go. Its population density — more than 1,000 residents per square kilometer — is twice that of New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the U.S.

For the past 10 years, United States foreign assistance has supported integrated programs addressing the linked challenges of population, health, and environment. These programs meet the health and development needs of underserved communities while sustaining natural resources, environmental services, and biodiversity. They get results, but are chronically under-funded.

It’s time to ask why. Climate change impacts are difficult to predict. Pregnancy doesn’t have to be. Helping a woman to gain access to family planning means a healthier life for her, and a healthier planet for all of us. Mothers around the world — including Mother Earth — deserve nothing less.

Country delegations and NGOs have put forth numerous proposals to increase living standards in the developing world without following the fossil fuel-intensive example set by the industrialized world. Other proposals outline how transfers of technology and greater support for development activities among vulnerable communities will better enable them to adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change.

However, demographic change has not come up in the context of these discussions. This is strange, because demographic change is likely to shape our world in significant ways over the next several decades.

In its latest round of projections, the UN Population Division indicates that the world’s population will grow from today’s 6.7 billion to somewhere between 8.0 and 10.5 billion by 2050.

During informal conversations with country delegates and colleagues at other civil society organizations, I have found near universal agreement that population growth will affect greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2050. And for those who are thinking critically about how vulnerable communities will adapt to increasing water scarcity or diminishing agricultural production, they know that rapid population growth will further threaten human survival. Researchers at Population Action International have highlighted the importance of population trends for climate change mitigation and adaptation in a new working paper and fact sheet.

The UN presents a wide range for population in 2050 because population growth is sensitive to the conditions of the world around us. For example, more education for girls and economic opportunities for women lead to lower birth rates. Expanding access to reproductive health care and family planning services can have an even more direct and immediate impact.

Currently, more than 200 million women around the world say they would like to avoid a pregnancy, but don’t have access to modern contraception-something those of us in the US take for granted. Reversing downward trends in funding for reproductive health and family planning programs could help to remedy that, and would be a good start in shooting for the lower end of the UN’s population projections.

The world already agreed on a goal of universal access to these services at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994, where the US and 178 other nations signed onto this consensus. Universal access to reproductive health is also one of the Millennium Development Goals (see Target 5b). This goal from the health sector should be integrated into the world’s response to climate change and its human impacts. While talking about reproductive health might be new and a little uncomfortable for climate diplomats, they should get over it – it is a universally accepted goal that has great potential to strengthen climate change solutions.

To my left sit a man and a woman at the Samoa table – two of the four negotiators from this small island whose very existence is threatened by climate change. Immediately in front of me is a huddle of five people from the World Bank. To my right is a small gathering of a dozen or so from the U.S. team, which is made up of no less than 50 government representatives who have traveled here.

Over the past few days, the issue of inequity has come up in many different contexts. We have heard it in the official proceedings, as developing countries call on industrialized nations to deeply cut their emissions and to provide assistance to enable the poorest, most vulnerable, and least polluting nations adapt to climatic changes. We have heard it in the context of gender, in terms of the differentiated impacts of climate change on women and the need to incorporate women into all aspects of climate change solutions.

Today, I am thinking about the ways that inequity rears its head in more mundane but powerful ways.

During the second day of negotiations, delegates from Cameroon and other Francophone African nations spoke passionately about their limited ability to take part in the negotiations, since the 50-page negotiating text had not yet been translated into French. There are more than 30 francophone countries in Africa. The English version was released over two weeks ago, allowing delegates and civil society groups from Anglophone countries to fully analyze the text, consult stakeholders, and develop thoughtful and strategic comments and revisions. The full suite of translations for the six official languages of the UN was not completed until yesterday – three full days into the 10-day negotiation.

And as my current view of informal groupings in the plenary hall illustrates, there are stark differences in sheer human resources that countries bring to these complex proceedings. According to the printed participant list, no less than 64 countries have only one or two members in their official delegation. One or two! The US has 50, France 36; even Canada has 31.

There are four major tracks taking place simultaneously at this gathering in Bonn: one focused on the Kyoto Protocol, one on a new agreement for long-term cooperative action, one on scientific issues, and a fourth on implementation of the climate convention. Each of these tracks demands input from country delegates on complex and multifaceted issues that affect a country’s relationship with its citizens and with other countries. Keeping up with a single issue-say, the debates around Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD)-can keep one person working doggedly around the clock, which is why delegations like the US have so many people. How can we expect Mauritius, with one delegate, to meaningfully participate and strategically promote its interests in everything that is happening here? Sure, it can join with the G77 and China block to wield some degree of power in these negotiations, but that, in essence, requires putting one’s national autonomy on the shelf.

I’m no expert in the intricacies of international diplomacy, but it seems like this allows for some pretty overt strong-arming from countries with differing interests and greater on-the-ground-in-Bonn staffing.

As I ponder these aspects of inequity, I think about how colleagues in my organization, Population Action International, provide capacity-building and technical and financial support to southern NGOs so they can participate in international forums on reproductive health, AIDS, and other issues. In Bonn, it is obvious that far more resources need to be allotted by the international community to do this in the climate arena. As the climate negotiations march toward a global deal in Copenhagen this December, we need to ensure that those with the most to lose, don’t have the least ability to participate.

A Bangladeshi woman searches for drinking water after a cyclone.Photo: Abir Abdullah/OxfamOne of the under-reported issues about climate change is its dramatic affect on women.  A side event I attended this afternoon, organized by the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA), included speakers from all around the world, representing men, women, government agencies, NGOs, North and South. But their messages were unified: women’s historic disadvantages — limited access to resources, restricted rights, under-representation in decision making — have made them disproportionately vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Women make up 70 percent of the world’s poorest people, pointed out Sirkka Haunia, Finland’s chief negotiator. More women die in weather-related natural disasters.

“Seventy percent of subsistence farmers in my country are women,” said William Kojo Agyemang-Bonsu, Ghana’s chief negotiator. “When climate changes rainfall patterns, they will be the ones who will be most negatively affected.”  

There is no quick fix to overcoming climate change’s sexist tendencies. As several in the meeting pointed out, it is akin to a running a marathon or climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. “It’s a sad state of affairs when only 16 percent of the scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are women,” said a female member of the IPCC, the body charged with assessing the state of climate change science for policymakers. 

But they are not just victims, the panelists pointed out. “Women everywhere in the world possess unique knowledge and skill, and are active agents of change,” said Lorena Aguilar of the World Conservation Union.  According to Khamarunga Banda, of ENERGIA in South Africa, “Women make the majority of choices about individual lifestyles and are the ones who change ‘business as usual’ — so they will need to be central figures in reducing energy use and switching to cleaner sources of fuel.”  Building on these ideas, the GGCA’s strategy is to ensure that gender dimensions of climate challenges and solutions find a place in the text of the next climate agreement.

My organization, Population Action International, embraces the idea of greater gender equity leading to better and more lasting climate change solutions. By meeting women’s needs — including needs for adequate reproductive-health and family-planning services — we can improve the health and well-being of women and families, increasing resilience in the face of climate change and putting the breaks on population growth that is associated with rising greenhouse-gas emissions.

Children herd goats in drought-ridden Ethiopia, on land that was once rich pasture.Photo: Nick Danziger/OxfamWhile representatives of the industrialized world somewhat sheepishly offered up their countries’ meager progress in slowing the pace of their rampant growth in emissions, representatives from the developing world did their best to sound the alarm.

“We need to act urgently, as the most vulnerable among us are suffering daily,” said the representative of the G77 and China. “Climate change is the defining challenge of our times.”

“Climate change is one of humanity’s greatest injustices; addressing it aggressively will determine our survival,” said the representative from the Alliance of Small Island States. “We are concerned about efforts to downplay the science for political expediency.”

“We should not forget that we are all in this together,” said the representative of Togo, “and a sinking boat is a catastrophe for all of us.”

Over the next two weeks, these delegates, who make up the climate convention’s “Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action,” will debate, expand, and refine the draft text of an agreement. They will endeavor to agree on who must cut emissions, by how much, and on what timescale. And they will discuss how the industrialized countries will help the developing world adapt to the climatic changes that are already here and are destined to get much worse before they get better.

While the official country delegations hammer out these details, those of us with NGO observer status sit in the back of the room listening to simultaneous translation through headsets, furiously typing notes, and exchanging knowing glances when Australia says something disastrous but predictable.

Throughout these two weeks, we will come together in various strategic working groups and alliances, determining strategies for injecting, protecting, or jettisoning specific language in the text that relates to our various missions and goals. The hallways outside meeting rooms resonate with animated conversations. Reports and fact sheets fly off tables in the exhibit area. A full schedule of fascinating side events clamors for our attention.

And we’ll use the opportunity of this gathering to network and communicate new or under-reported issues. My organization, Population Action International, is here because we believe population issues are critical in the climate change equation. And we believe that there are some great population-related policies — like expanding access to reproductive health and family-planning programs to the millions of women around the world who want it but don’t have it — that can and should be part of a comprehensive solution to climate change. Not many people are talking about this. We’re working to change that — in Bonn, Copenhagen, and beyond.

Read a second dispatch from Kathleen Mogelgaard of Population Action International.