The desire among development professionals to link the population and environment sectors grew out of several factors.

For reproductive health practitioners, a driving force was the desire to reach remote, underserved communities where women expressed a need for family planning and related services. One method for cost-effectively reaching these populations was partnering with environmental organizations that already had relationships and infrastructure within these communities.

For their part, environmentalists have been motivated by several assumptions about the value of linking these sectors. On one level voluntary family planning services offer the promise of easing population pressures on local ecosystems. When combined with sound migration policies and sustainable environmental management practices, such services can contribute to greater balance between people and their environments. On another, more immediate level, providing family planning and related services can help environmental organizations build goodwill in communities by responding to their needs in a more holistic fashion.

Professionals from both sectors have been further encouraged by the natural synergy in their messages. The parallels between the fertility of human beings and the fertility of nature have been used to explain a
variety of concepts relevant to both sectors. By comparing birth spacing, for example, to the need to let land lie fallow to recover its productivity, health workers have successfully conveyed its importance to male agriculturists unfamiliar with the role of birth spacing in women's health. Furthermore, there is hope that empowerment in one area of a person's life -- whether environmental management or childbearing -- can foster empowerment in other, related areas.

For more information on the assumptions underlying population-environment work, please see our Population-Environment Fellows Newsletters on our publications page.

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