To steal Ervin Drake’s Christmas song made famous by Frank Sinatra, ‘It was a very good year’ for Population Matters, as the Annual Report shows. For me, key events and activities were our increased focus and developing partnerships with fellow campaigners in Africa.  Exemplified by our event in Lagos for World Population Day, co-hosted with the Nigerian Conservation Foundation – notable for unequivocal statements from the government ministers and public officials present as to the pressing need to reduce population growth if Nigeria is to avoid societal, economic and ecological breakdown.

Travelling to Kenya later in the year to attend the UN International Conference on Population and Development, I took the opportunity to meet young women in Nairobi’s slums denied choice or access to safe, modern family planning as well as visiting subsistence farmers in rural communities directly affected by climate change. Those trips bore out the value of PM’s Empower to Plan initiative in supporting grassroots groups like Dandelion Africa and closer to home, Northamptonshire-based, You Before Two in delivering vital healthcare and associated conservation work.

But it wasn’t ‘a very good year’ for our planet; with wild fires raging across the Arctic, through California, on the Yorkshire Moors, and currently turning parts of Australia into an uninhabitable inferno. So is PM some morbid ‘ambulance-chaser’, benefitting from ‘better media coverage’ as the world burns, using other people’s tragedies to crow, ‘we told you so’? Absolutely not. Those tragic events do add credibility to the concerns PM has sought to raise over the past three decades, but more so that has been due to the growing body of science affirming our agenda.  As the science states, time and space for action is tight but, as we know from Project Drawdown and Empower to Plan, positive solutions and effective technologies exist.  

To sum up the year with another piece of plagiarism, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ – the counter-intuitive, but most conducive conditions for any campaigning organisation. Not a traditional ‘Happy New Year’ sign-off, heavy with hope, light on reality – rather one seasoned with a strong sprinkle of the challenges and opportunities ahead!

- Robin Maynard, Director, Population Matters

Our public conference in London this year left attendees feeling enlightened and inspired. Following a successful first conference in 2018 on human population and climate change, this year’s theme was the crucial link between population growth and biodiversity loss. With an incredibly knowledgeable international panel of speakers from diverse backgrounds, it was a fantastic event that highlighted the interconnectedness of environmental and social issues and the urgent need for the conservation community to address this.

This World Population Day, 11 July 2019, Population Matters went global by running events in three continents. Thanks to our supporters and allies, we had a very successful day in Lagos, Nigeria, London, UK and New York, USA, developing new partnerships, raising awareness of population issues, and pushing them up the international agenda. We received more media coverage than ever before, with articles published in influential outlets around the world

We were grateful to attend the key Nairobi Summit on ICPD25 in November, a follow-up from the International Conference on Population and Development which took place in Cairo 25 years ago and pledged to put reproductive health and rights at the heart of development efforts. Unfortunately, progress has been much too slow. Read Robin's summary of the event, as well as his experience of talking to young women and their families in Kibera, Africa's largest slum, and surrounding rural communities.

January saw the publication of the EAT-Lancet Commission's report on diet and food systems, which concluded that profound changes could allow a global human population of 10 billion to be fed without causing devastating damage to the environment. Crucially, it warned that if population exceeds 10 bn people, this is “increasingly unlikely”. The most recent UN projections show our numbers surpassing 10 bn early in the second half of the century.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a major report on the state of the world's biodiversity in May this year, concluding that 1 million species are now threatened with extinction due to human activity. The report explicitly identifies human population growth as an "indirect driver", fuelling the direct causes, and clearly states that it must be tackled to halt the ongoing decline of wild species.

November marked the publication of the Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency – a paper signed by more than 11,000 scientists from around the world warning of “untold human suffering” unless governments take urgent action to tackle the climate crisis, including ending and reversing population growth through women's empowerment, education and removing barriers to family planning.