When you read stories about thousands of scientists urging us to take action now to mitigate disastrous climate change, it’s hard to know exactly what to do. Here are some ideas:

• Start by focusing on promoting better family planning – meaning smaller and more equitable families – for everyone. It’s the first, and probably most effective, action to take. Not only does it have a huge impact on current emissions and other pollutants, but it will determine the quantity people alive in the future, which in turn will mostly determine our collective quality of life.
• Choose a smaller family where you can use the resources saved to help invest in your community or another family’s planning. Then please speak out about why you made that choice.
• Tell our President and Congress to start funding for Fair Start family planning, rather than using taxpayer money to pay people to have kids in the hopes of making more future workers, consumers, and taxpayers to fuel an unsustainable economic model.
• Tell your city or local government to include family planning in their climate action plan, and to start building more sustainable communities now.
• If you work with or are a member of an environmental, animal protection, child welfare, human rights /democracy or other comparable civil society nonprofit organization, ask them to include better family planning in their mission and strategic planning. We can’t care about the environment, animals, children, or our democracies without caring about improving how we choose to bring kids into the world.

Please take action now!

By Bdm25 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0