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Alternative Futures
More than any hydrologist or urban planner, it is women in the
developing world – the drawers, carriers and household
managers or water – who understand what water scarcity is
and what its implications are for families and communities.
What is needed is better opportunities for women to translate
their knowledge and their energies into action and personal
control – over natural resources such as water, and over
their own lives. Real opportunities for women – in
education, in economic and political life, and in family
decision-making – could vastly improve the management of
water and women’s own well-being. Women also need the
opportunity to make decisions about their own fertility and
the capacity to put those decisions into effect. Efforts to
improve the lives, health and status of women can be justified
on their own merits, and together they would act powerfully to
reduce fertility.
Over the last 30 years, a number of counties have demonstrated
that rapid declines in birth rates are possible through a
combination of relatively inexpensive measures, especially
widespread provision of high quality, voluntary family
planning services.
Because record numbers of people will be moving into their
childbearing years over the next two decades, the impact of
lower birthrates will not be fully felt until well into the
next century. But the momentum of population growth is such
that policies and programs contributing to eventual population
stabilization must be initiated today - at the same
time that improved water management technologies, programs and
projects are being developed to meet higher future levels of
water demand.
Substantial worldwide experience has demonstrated that making
high quality, voluntary family planning widely available to
men and women of reproductive age can bring down fertility
rates independently of other social and economic factors.
Recent research also suggests how powerfully family planning
programs work in concert with improved opportunities for women
– especially secondary-school education for girls. Efforts
in family planning and education may seem far from the
concerns of hydrologist and engineers, but they may matter
just as much – and over the long term even more – to the
future of water availability around the world.
If sustainable development is not a mere platitude, if the
nations of the world take seriously the Earth Summit’s
charge that natural resources must be used in ways that ensure
their availability to future generations, then early
stabilization of population size is vital to any strategy. We
need to develop water supplies in ways that assure every human
being abundant, renewable quantities of clean and healthful
water for life, prosperity and well-being. And we need to
stabilise our numbers at a level that respects not just the
quantities of water we can produce today, but that the earth
can provide forever.
Source: Sustaining water – Population and
the Future of renewable Water Supplies
By Robert Engelman and Pamela LeRoy
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