What’s the most effective way to protect the planet and fight the climate crisis? Fair Start reproductive justice policies, which have ten to twenty times the impact of less fundamental changes. We are only in this ecological mess because world leaders failed to make sure family planning policies worked.

Smaller families working together to give every child a Fair Start in life = being effective.

Learn more:

• Several studies show that small changes in average fertility rates will have massive impacts on population growth, and that smaller families are the best way to confront climate change and other related environmental crises.
• Several new studies have confirmed the dire threat posed by climate change, including its impact on the increasing threat of pestilence and crop losses, the severity of hurricanes and other weather threats and the degradation of every ecosystem on earth
• By 2100, world population could vary by billions of people depending on whether the average woman in the world has one child more or one child fewer.
• Simply stated, the current family planning model used by United Nations was developed prior to awareness of climate change, the disproportionate impact of early childhood development on human well being, how birth conditions and early development  exacerbate inequality and other factors. This old model makes our future less secure, healthy and equitable. 

TAKE ACTION: And take action to ensure Fair Start becomes the universal standard for family planning.

The BBC recently reported on who might be held responsible for the climate crisis and why that matters. Writer Jocelyn Timperley acknowledges that human activity causes climate change and argues that identifying the prime sources is essential to proposing solutions. She examines the blame that might be assigned to fossil fuel companies, rich people, or wealthy countries.

But the article never mentions family planning and population, even though that is a fundamental driver of the climate crisis, with larger families in wealthy countries creating 20 times the impact on the climate by having children than they do with their other choices or behaviors such as energy consumption. Every one of the causes the article cites depends on population and related factors such as consumer demand. And population, or who we are and who we will be, ultimately flows from universal norms we create. In other words, we exist before we consume, and who we are flows from the norms that surround procreation. So who is fundamentally responsible?

In the mid- to late 20th-century, world leaders including environmental organizations gambled that rising population would bring economic benefits without unacceptable ecological costs and evaded family-planning interventions like a human-rights approach to family planning. Whether someone has one child or five is the personal business of the parents, they said. It’s private, they said. They chose to ignore the increasing impact on equity and our ecologies, the impact that all along was leading to the interrelated crises we face today, such as the impact of the climate crisis on pregnancies, especially those of Black and Hispanic expectant mothers.

They were wrong, having failed to account for greenhouse gas emissions. rising inequality, and the decline of democracy.

We are paying the price of that mistake, and our kids will have it worse.

Why does it matter to know this? World leaders and many nonprofit organizations are making the same mistake today and are exacerbating the situation. If we want to protect our kids, we will do what is most effective and change the way we plan families. What most matters in a degraded future is the quantity, social qualities, and relative positioning of the people who occupy the world.

TAKE ACTION: Contact the head of the BBC, or find and engage him in person, and urge comprehensive reporting regarding a threat as serious as the climate crisis.

I love and want to protect my child, so I don’t want her to have to live in a crowded and polluted future filled with billions more people, many of whom never got what they needed to really grow up and work well with others. When can I say that out loud?  As a mother of one child, I think about the future a lot. What will her environment be like? What will the people with whom she shares the world be like? Will she be safe?  Our society isn’t equipped to provide each child a fair start from the very first days of life, and we know that whether a child gets the education love, care, and attention he or she needs in the first three years of life can determine how they interact with others for the rest of their lives.  And the truth is, her future most depends on one factor, more than any other: family planning. A family choosing today to have one additional child can exacerbate the climate crisis by 20 times that of other choices, such as those around diet or transportation. Beyond that, overpopulation is one of the key drivers of pandemics.  Several studies show that small changes in average fertility rates will have massive impacts on population growth and that smaller families are the best way to confront climate change and other related environmental crises. By 2100, world population could vary by billions of people depending on whether the average woman in the world has one child more or fewer in the near future.  Nothing will matter as much for my kid’s future as the people with whom he will share this world. Who we are matters most of all.  Yes, immediate threats are distracting, but success comes in focusing on what’s important and what’s urgent and from being more proactive than reactive. I can try everything possible  within the bubble of our family to ready my child – and all those efforts will go to waste, depending upon what other parents do.  Yet I have to write this post under the pen-name Kelly, because calling for family planning laws that ensure parents are ready before they have kids geared toward alleviating the societal ills bred by income inequality or that support smaller and more sustainable families, is taboo. I actually fear I would be condemned by friends and family, and that my business would be threatened. This is the taboo we need to break. My child deserves a better future than the one she is on track to get, and the way to break off that track starts with a family planning system whereby we take the resources from the rich to level the playing field for the children of the poor, incentivizing smaller and sustainable families for everyone along the way. That is truly fundamental change.

Scientists and environmentalists commonly offer a few steps that everyday people can take to help mitigate the climate crisis: reduce your carbon footprint via travel, eat less meat, switch to clean energy.

But that list typically omits the single most impactful decision we can make: having fewer kids.

Carter Dillard details why solving our population and environmental problems starts with having fewer kids and embracing a human-rights approach to family planning here at AlterNet.