With the arrival of the latest royal baby, we issued this statement from director Robin Maynard to the press.

“We welcome the Cambridges’ baby boy to the world and wish him a long and happy life. But sadly, not every child born today will have such good life chances – and our growing human population and its impacts on our planet are making life for everyone more challenging.

“Only last November, over 20,000 scientists from across the world issued a 'warning to humanity', bluntly stating that unless we change our ways, we face environmental catastrophe. The scientists didn’t hesitate to identify rising human population as a principal driver…’" 

A recent article denounces President Trump's push for larger families as key accelerator of climate change and other environmental disasters. The evidence that shows how the Trump administration encourages women, in the US and globally, to have more children, includes:

- reversing policies for reporting the state of human rights abroad

- burying reports that are critical of other countries denying women their reproductive rights

- doubling child tax credits

- defunding teen pregnancy programs

- promoting pro-natal abstinence programs

- cutting financial support for family planning abroad

- and finally granting over $3 million in funding to Crisis Pregnancy Centers, which pose as abortion clinics in order to persuade women to give birth.

According to the article, these decisions will contribute to climate change and inequaltiy and damage child wefare.

Population Matters Patron Sir David Attenborough has urged the public to recognise the impact of the plastic age and population growth on the natural world. His concerns are backed up by a recent report from Australian scientists identifying population as a key factor in biodiversity loss.

In an article in the New Scientist, Sir David Attenborough discusses his concern for rising population. With more than three times the number of people living on the globe as in the 1950s, he notes that “they all need places to live and roads for their cars and hospitals and schools and places to grow food…In the most part, it is going to come from the natural world, so the natural world is steadily being impoverished.”

Factfulness, the new book by the late Hans Rosling and his family is rightly receiving a great deal of attention. We agree with the Roslings that understanding facts and data is essential to solving the challenges we face.

In that spirit, we offered ten facts that run counter to Prof Rosling’s popular but shakily founded position that population isn’t a problem and future population growth will effectively sort itself out. 

We maintain that making a better life for everyone – a goal we share with the Roslings – requires concerted action on population, not assurances that it isn’t really a problem.

A year ago, the Dutch government initiated the SheDecides project to generate funds to replace those being withdrawn by the US government, following the reinstatement of the Global Gag Rule, and lobby other governments to provide additional funding. A number of governments have pledged money to the initiative, France being the latest, pledging 10 million euros.

You can help by asking your elected representative to push their governments to provide additional aid for family planning by supporting SheDecides. SheDecides has provided a template letter to send to your MP. Please use it to tell them how important SheDecides is as an organisation and how much it needs UK government funding.