PM Goes Global! Last year, supported by the London PM group, we marked World Population Day by showing the dramatic fact of ongoing human population growth via a live, giant digital ‘population clock’ mounted on a van. The latter enabled us to bring home to people across London the reality of 158 additional humans coming onto our planet every minute, 9,500 per hour, 227,000 per day. In particular, we put those facts before politicians by driving past Parliament and College Green, where the political media gathers, and then heading south of the river to park outside Friends of the Earth UK and confront our environmental colleagues with the upstream ecological issue they are uncharacteristically silent on. This year our ambitions for World Population Day (11 July 2019) are greater and global. PM will be active on three continents: - Joining forces in New York with US population concern organisation Having Kids to call on the United Nations Secretary General to issue a statement supporting smaller families, and pointing out that the achievement of the UN’s admirable Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is made more difficult, if not impossible, by ongoing population growth; - Travelling to Lagos, Africa’s largest and fastest growing city, for an event hosted by Nigeria’s leading conservation organisation, the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, discussing the threats to biodiversity from human population growth globally and the available, positive, practical and policy solutions; - Here in the UK, again in London, we will be highlighting the role of population in the SDGs and the responsibility of our government to support international action as part of a long-term Sustainable Population Policy to address our own population pressures in the global context. Population is a global issue, requiring global awareness, cooperation and action – our global campaign starts here.
P.s.: Apologies for the numerical error in last month's Director's message regarding the decline in US abortion-related deaths. The number of abortion-related deaths fell from 40 deaths per one million live births in 1970 to eight deaths per one million in 1976 – an 80% decline within the first three years of the Roe v. Wade ruling. |