The equation seems fairly simple: The more the world's population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the impact on the environment.
The solution? Well, that's a little trickier to talk about.
Public-health discussions will regularly include mentions of voluntary family planning as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies and births. But, said Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau, those policies can also pay dividends for the environment.
"And yet the climate-change benefits of family planning have been largely absent from any climate-change or family-planning policy discussions," he said.
Bremner was speaking Tuesday at an event hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center, which has formed a working group of scientists and officials working on climate change and family planning to try to cross the gap between the two. Even as the population passes 7.2 billion and is projected by the United Nations to reach 10.9 billion by the end of the century, policymakers have been unable—or unwilling—to discuss population in tandem with climate change.
But there's been little or no funding for such programs, and the discussions tend to stall before getting into meaty policy. And despite the United Nations holding a special session on population and development a day before its September climate-change summit, academics lamented a lack of cross talk.