Educating and empowering women, by having them take control of their own fertility, is one of the best ways to stabilize human population growth. Family planning when incorporated with reducing consumption and improving technology can positively affect climate change. “Meeting the huge and growing unmet need of over 200 million women with no access to reproductive healthcare and family planning would be four times more cost-effective per tonne of carbon abated than the conventional approach,” explained Martin.

 

 

Another bad news for Africa: UN warns climate change will hit Africa's poorest. 

 

Climate change can significantly reverse progress in Africa over food security and poverty reduction, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations said Tuesday.

The main consequence of higher temperatures and more unpredictable weather was a likely reduction in crop yields, down 6.9 percent in the case of maize, an important staple, the FAO said in a statement.

The FAO cited a paper presented at its conference on Africa, held in Angola this week, which urged African governments to "prioritize and implement measures to develop agriculture and sustainable natural resource management".

The paper said a third of the continent's population lived in drought-prone areas and six of its 10 largest cities are coastal.

Both of those areas are susceptible to climate change, it warned, which will affect poorer African countries disproportionately. Subsistence farmers are among the most vulnerable.

Adaptation to climate change through sustainable practices, including the promotion and protection of traditional and local foods and agricultural knowledge should be a priority, the paper highlighted by the FAO said. 

 

 

The other climate news which is more political is this one: EU head urges Canada to act on climate change.  

 

Canada shouldn't keep waiting for the rest of the world to act on climate change before making its own changes, the president of the European Union Commission said Wednesday as he prepared to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Brussels.

"We should not lose momentum regarding climate change negotiations," José Manuel Barroso told Canadian reporters during an hour-long briefing.

"With Canada, I'm not going to give lessons to one of our partners. What we want is for everybody to move.