New Green Scheme Fights Carbon Emissions With Condoms

LONDON -- At next week's U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, world leaders will discuss a range of strategies to cut carbon emissions, such as boosting funding for clean energy projects and providing greater protection for rain forests. But a British charity claims that a cheaper, more effective way to halt global warming has been left off the agenda: birth control.

"Every human being has a carbon footprint," says David Burton, an environmental strategist and member of Optimum Population Trust (OPT), whose supporters include famed wildlife documentary maker Sir David Attenborough. "So logic then says that a non-person has no carbon footprint."

The OPT argues that the planet's rapidly swelling population -- which is expected to climb from 6.8 billion to 9 billion by 2050 -- is exacerbating climate change. This dangerous baby boom, it says, is being fed by a chronic shortage of contraception in the developing world, where about 200 million married women have no access to birth control.

To help cut unwanted births and bring the Earth's population down to what the OPT believes is a sustainable level of 2 billion to 5 billion people, the organization this week launched a radical carbon offsetting scheme called PopOffsets. While typical offsetting schemes allow people to cancel out the environmental impact of, say, a long-haul flight by financing tree planting or renewable energy projects, PopOffsets will instead provide contraceptives (but not abortions) to developing world communities. "Nobody will be coerced into using contraception," Burton says. "We will only be providing choice to people who want to decide the number of children they have."

In pure economic terms, Burton says, "funding contraception is an attractive option." According to his organization's research, every $7 spent on condoms, contraceptive pills and sex education saves roughly 1 ton of CO2 emissions. It would cost $24 to get the same reduction from wind power, $51 from solar technology and $131 from electric vehicles. "And there's another added benefit to investing in contraception: It doesn't have any environmental downsides," he says. "Whereas a hydroelectric dam, for example, may generate few emissions but will have a devastating impact on the local ecology and community."

Despite those claims, many environmentalists see the OPT's initiative as a distraction from the real cause of climate change: Western greed. "The idea of paying for birth control in developing countries to offset carbon-intensive lifestyles in rich countries is repugnant," says Mike Childs, head of climate campaigns at Friends of the Earth. "G8 countries make up 13 percent of the world's population yet account for 45 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The problem lies with high consumer lifestyles in the rich world, not with growing populations in poorer countries."

That argument is backed by a recent study by David Satterthwaite of London's International Institute for Environment and Development, which also pins the blame for climate change on Western consumption, not population growth. Satterthwaite's research -- published in the peer-reviewed journal Environment and Urbanization in September -- showed that from 1980 to 2005, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5 percent of the world's population growth but just 2.4 percent of the growth in CO2. North America, meanwhile, generated only 4 percent of the planet's population growth but pumped out 14 percent of the extra carbon.

However, the OPT argues that the need to reduce the global population goes beyond carbon emissions. In overcrowded countries such as Bangladesh -- which is roughly the size of Colorado, but inhabited by 160 million people -- many citizens are forced to live in areas regularly ravaged by storms and flooding, simply because there's nowhere else to go. Cut the population, Burton says, and people would be able to find safer places to live. "Family planning not only decreases carbon emissions," he says, "but also decreases the number of victims who are going to suffer from climate change."

Ultimately, though, Burton accepts that shrinking the number of people on the planet will have little effect if residents of the West keep gobbling up the earth's limited resources. "This is only part of the solution," he says. "Those who consume an unfair share will also have to reduce their rate of consumption. If they don't, that reduction will be forced on them by nature."