People’s Rights, Planet’s Rights: Holistic Approaches to A Sustainable Population

Suzanne York, the talented blogger at Six Degrees of Population and associate at HowMany.org has recently produced a notable report titled:

People’s Rights, Planet’s Rights: Holistic Approaches to A Sustainable Population

You can download the PDF here: http://howmany.org/Articles/PeopleAndPlanetRights-IPS.pdf

Suzanne introduces her work as follows:

As the title reflects, I believe that the best approaches to the serious issues facing our world must be inclusive and grounded in fairness, equality, and respect for all life.

In a nutshell, Peoples’ Rights, Planet’s Rights recommends focusing on the following issues to create a path to a sustainable population:

• Women’s Rights – providing voluntary family planning services to the 222 million women in developing countries who want family planning services but do not have access to contraceptives;
• Youth Rights – providing comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education to empower the 3 billion young adults under the age of 25 (of which about 1.2 billion are adolescents just entering their reproductive years);
• Rights of Nature – shifting from treating nature as property by recognizing the legal right of ecosystems to exist and flourish;
• Rethinking the Economy – accepting that endless economic growth is unsustainable and more efficient global indicators of human and environmental well-being should be adopted.