Global Policy Forum

By Mia MacDonald and Danielle Nierenberg

The prospect of war with Iraq looms, along with tight budgets, recession and waning support for foreign aid. In such times, the environment and Third World development have fallen well down the list of global priorities.

That is a tragedy, because these may be some of the greatest public-spending bargains around. Women's status, population growth and the health of the natural world are all closely linked, and well-designed investment in one area can benefit all three.

World population is about 6.2 billion and is headed for at least 9 billion by 2050. Much of the greatest population growth will occur where women are impoverished and uneducated, and where health care is often hard to get - the same places where biodiversity is high and environmental decline is already widespread.

Consequently, more and more conservation and development professionals, international agencies, non-government organizations, and governments are focusing on the three issues as one, with gender relations and the status of women as an entry point.

Their cues come from a series of global agreements hammered out in the 1990s. The accords recognize that improved women's status and gender equity - balancing relations between women and men - are essential both to lower fertility and for sound management of natural resources.

Women today have half as many children as their mothers did, largely because of better access to reproductive health services (including family planning) and better schooling. Another critical factor: Women are gaining more power to determine the direction of their lives.

But this process remains incomplete. Of the world's 113 million children who are not attending primary school, 60 percent are girls. Two-thirds of people who cannot read or do simple math are women. And at least 350 million women still do not have access to a full range of contraceptive services.

By some estimates, women own less than 2 percent of private lands worldwide. Yet rural women in the developing world depend heavily on the land's bounty - trees, grasses, medicinal plants, and clean water - for fuel, cooking, fodder, family health and income.

Women often lead moves to reverse ecological stress. An example is the 50,000 women members of Kenya's Green Belt Movement, who have planted over 20 million trees to counter the spread of desert. But women generally still have little say in how resources are used or conserved. This is the case even though both government and aid field staff report that forests, wildlife and water are all better managed if women and men share responsibility.

As a result, conservation and development groups and some governments, often in partnership with communities, have started grassroots efforts in areas of the world that have rich biodiversity. Programs in Ecuador, Nepal and Tanzania, among others, are successfully combining delivery of reproductive health care with support for soil conservation, reforestation, and the start of eco-friendly local businesses, particularly for women.

In many such programs, promoting gender equity and women's power to make decisions about fertility or resource use are important objectives. Most of the programs are still small and reach only several thousand people at most, a fraction of the millions who could benefit. But they provide the seeds for nurturing larger, more robust programs.

Scaling up efforts that encompass the links between population, gender and biodiversity may be the most cost effective and humane way of bringing about a world that is more secure, equitable and biologically rich - for people and the rest of nature.

In areas of high biodiversity, governments, international agencies, donors and non-government organizations should begin large-scale programs to advance reproductive health care, education and the right of women to participate in decisions about natural-resource use and protection.

Policy-makers, donors and conservation and development groups should factor population and gender realities into environmental planning, and vice versa.

Governments should also adopt stronger policies and collaborate on public education programs that promote sustainable consumption by individuals and institutions, especially in the industrialized world (gender also appears to have a role in consumer choices.)

In the developing world, widely available alternatives are needed, such as fuel-efficient stoves that use less wood and protein options that reduce reliance on bushmeat, which is devastating primates and other animals in Central Africa.

With sufficient political will and funds, the Earth's resources can be better protected and shared, while unleashing the full potential of women.

The writers are the co-authors of "Linking Population, Women and Biodiversity" in State of the World 2003, a survey published recently by the Worldwatch Institute in Washington.

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