This financing is a meager effort to stabilize population and help poor countries build prosperous, democratic societies.
Where a stabilizing population can offer economic succor to one country, it may wreak fiscal turmoil in the next.
The key to stabilizing population is giving women control over their own fertility.
This article is adapted from Chapter 11, Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Population, and Rescuing Failing States, in Lester R Brown (2011), World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (New York: W W Norton & Company), available online.
The world needs to open up educational, economic, social and political opportunities for women, she said, to "ensure progress in stabilizing population growth, protecting the environment and improving health, starting with the health of young children".
The components of Mr. Brown's plan: cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020; stabilize population at no more than eight billion; eradicate poverty; and restore the earth's ecosystems.
Attention to urban ecology -- prompted in part by the effects of global warming -- is undeniably important, but it should not be used as an excuse to abandon efforts to preserve those wildlands and roadless areas that remain or to stabilize population.
In fact, if more girls had access to quality education, it would help raise GDP, stabilize population growth, increase agricultural output and improve health outcomes -- for entire countries.
In Europe and North America and in much of Latin America and East Asia, mortality rates have fallen dramatically and fertility rates have fallen to, or below, the "replacement rate" needed to stabilize population.
