Fight climate change with free condoms, says UN

LONDON – The battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available, the UN Population Fund said yesterday.

The agency did not recommend countries set limits on how many children people should have, but said: ‘Women with access to reproductive health services … have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions.’’As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the Earth’s capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme and conceivably catastrophic,’ the report said.The world’s population will likely rise from the current 6,7 billion to 9,2 billion in 2050, with most of the growth in less developed regions, according to a 2006 report by the United Nations.The UN Population Fund acknowledged it had no proof of the effect that population control would have on climate change. ‘The linkages between population and climate change are in most cases complex and indirect,’ the report said.It also said that while there is no doubt that ‘people cause climate change’, the developing world has been responsible for a much smaller share of world’s greenhouse gas emissions than developed countries.Still, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, the UN Population Fund’s executive director, told a news conference in London yesterday that global warming could be catastrophic for people in poor countries, particularly women.’We have now reached a point where humanity is approaching the brink of disaster,’ she said.In three weeks, a global conference will be held in Copenhagen aimed at reaching a deal to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required 37 industrial countries to cut heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.Yesterday, one analyst criticised the UN Population Fund’s pronouncements as alarmist and unhelpful.’It requires a major leap of imagination to believe that free condoms will cool down the climate,’ said Caroline Boin, a policy analyst at International Policy Network, a London-based think tank. – Nampa-AP